I've inherited a barebones old Compaq tower from a friend for free. The mobo is Asus, socket 775 and currently contains a Pentium D 2.8Ghz CPU.
I think it's
this one.
It's got an old GeForce GFX card and no HDD. I will be ripping out the GFX and selling it off cheap.
The Pentium D in question is 95W TDP and I'd like to remove it and put in something a lot more power efficient, then add a cheap PCI-E RAID controller and a couple of 2.5" HDD to use with something like FreeNAS software.
The box looks crappy, but I don't mind as I plan to stick it under a table in a spare room where it won't be seen. Plus I'm getting it for nothing.
I'd also take out the PSU and run it on a PicoPSU or something equally low wattage.
My main aim is to use as little power as possible and not spend too much.
Will I be able to achieve low power consumption with a different LGA775 CPU?
Is the mobo and chipset so outdated that I would be better off binning the hardware and getting a cheap mini-ATX/CPU combo board?
I'd like something that consumes less than 30W when idling/streaming video over LAN, so that it doesn't crank up my electricity bill. Is this possible?