Hi,

Has anybody actually bought one of these yet?

Thanks!

--Richard

They've been listed for a while but who wants to pay that much?

I do.

But I can't find it anywhere in Europe. A few stores have it listed but not in stock.

very frustrating, it was announced many months ago.

Are you in a rush?
I've bought stuff which was not in stock many times. It usually takes a little longer. Not always because some shops will claim they have stuff in stock while they don't and you get to wait anyway. You must know a shop you can trust in your aera... give them a call and see if they can order it for you. I'm assuming the reason no one is stocking it is the lack of demand but give a decent retailer a call and you'll find out.

Alternatively you could get a more common Xeon, many of which must burn a good bit less power than their rating. If needed, you can underclock (that's effective).

I've checked with a few retailler and basically they will never have this product in stock.
they have to order it. bummer, this will take 3 to 5 weeks!

one of the vendor even confessed that they're giving up any low voltage CPU as there is no demand from business customers and little demand from consumers.
None of their customers seem to care about low power consumption for custom system.

... when they cost $200-$300, you mean. Because the cheap ones are in stock and people are buying them.
Unfortunately, so far as I know Intel makes no cheap CPU that supports ECC anymore. AMD does.

with low power, I meant below or equal to 45W.
the Core i5-2500T also qualifies and it is also not available in Europe, unless with a special order.

the cheap Core i3-2100T is indeed in stock but I need 4 cores for transcoding.

I never liked AMD to be honest. I can't explain why, I must have been hypnotized by Intel.

I guess I'll just pass an order and wait.

i5-2500T in stock @scan.co.uk for 165.3£.

Yeah, that I5 2500T looks a lot like the Xeon E3-1260L (and both with a TDP of 45W)
The Xeon has hyperthreading, ECC and 8 Mb of cache, though.

I just found a German etailer that has can get the Xeon (€260) in 3 days plus a couple of days to my home.
so I'll treat myself and get the xeon

Got the CPU today.
indeed, most if not all retailer won't have this CPU in stock due to near-inexistant demand. they can get it order for you pretty quickly, thought.

What motherboard did you use? I'm looking forwart to build 6x HDD NAS enclosure with this CPU.
TYAN S5510 (S5510GM3NR) is nice no ?

Can undervolt this to take less power if needed?

I don't want to lecture you if you're not interested but that CPU is a singularly poor choice for a NAS.

I'm new to this, but since when Xeons are bad for NAS?

Xeons aren't bad as such but they're too expensive and their motherboards consume too mcuh power for a small NAS. And even if you really wanted to use a Xeon, you could get a less powerful model more appropriate for a small NAS.

You ask about underclocking (which would jeopardize stability) on a board which might not even support underclocking. This kind of gear is not made with your needs in mind but the needs of organizations which don't care about a few watts of idle power consumption.

Well the so called budge motherboards have cheap components, since I'm novice in electronics I know how much fot example cheap resitor costs and tight spec. resistor costs.

So it's hard imagine when people build their NAS with cheap motherboards (perhaps their data is not important) with no ECC RAM, like atom, all intel lineup except xeon boards. AMD is another talk they utilize ECC within the chip, that is why cheap HP microserver uses AMD CPU.
But again I know HP microserver is selling for 124USD to its workers, 267USD if you find it cheaper and then for 314USD on newegg. I don't know how much it cost to make, but nobody can convince me you can buy reliable Motherboard for 60$ and get HP microserver made for sub 124$. Heck microserver has got cheap electrolytic caps.

I will not store movies, those can be burned to DVD's and perhaps BD's when I will get to that. But data that needs frequent access or changes fast like software, my documents needs to be stored on HDD's AFAIK. This data must be safe. I rather have one reliable server then 2 cheap.

I agree that when you can use cheaper WD Green for power savings but I disagree you can't run cheap MB, CPU, RAM. Only server equipment can run 24/7, and I can replace failed hard drives but if my MB, starts dying 2 years later that is not acceptable.

NAS is not your typical gaming rig it never needs to be upgraded ever except if new gear can save 2x power or hard drives become incompatible (highly doubtful at best).

BTW Intel makes E3 20W TDP XEON CPU if power saving is optimal goal and they even speak about 10W after a year or so.

Supermicro X9SCM-F
I don't know if it can undervolt but this Xeon is already a low power CPU.

If the objective is to store data, maybe the Xeon is overkill.

If someone has a very comfortable budget, s/he should not waste time with consumer components. I want power, stability and reliability.
the box will be have 19 disks, will do a lot of transcoding (real time and Blu-ray rip)
The low power rating of this CPU is just to feel more environmentally friendly and to encourage Intel to persevere in that direction.

You didn't describe a NAS, much less a small NAS.

Beware: you may be only encouraging low ratings and greenwashing. Real power consumption can be significantly different. And to pretent that manufacturing large CPUs which are marginally more efficient than most is environmentally friendly is... well, I'd better not say. But you can figure it out.

Hmmm not quite... Sorry - but I work with these on a daily basis. I think you're probably thinking of the dual socket Xeon's which for a home NAS would indeed be overkill. But a nice single socket Xeon E3 wouldn't be such a bad choice if you wanted some processing overhead. Not everybody is happy with an Atom
True, there is one lower power Xeon E3 available, the dual core E3-1220L at 20W - but this has no processor graphics so you would have to add this. Not sure h ow much an entry graphics card uses in idle?.
Or you could consider an i3 2100T which is a dual core 35W part with processor graphics. Motherboards supporting the xeon should run the i3 and vice versa (I'm running a 1260L here in a DH67CF).

With regards to the motherboards for these, they don't consume exorbitant amounts of power - these processors are based on the same die as the current i3/i5 and the boards are very much entry level things. I have one system with server motherboard running at 25W idle power. Without undervolting btw The thing I would value about using a server board is the BMC/IPMI functionality giving you remote power control even from off, and some basic alerting for hardware issues.

Oh and as an aside - in idle there is hardly any difference between the low power parts and the normal ones (provided the rest of the specs is the same; particularly number of cores & graphics) It is only under load when the low power parts shine. This is also why you have to pay more for them - they are cherry-picked processors that have been selected for their efficiency.

Lastly someone here said intel has no cheap processors supporting ECC - not entirely true, it is a combination of processor and chipset. If you have a server chipset on your board (C200 series) both Xeon E3 and Core i3 will support ECC memory. In fact on some of these boards I have used even core I3's won't boot if non-ECC memory is used. This means you could pick up an i3 2100 for around £70 and have ECC memory working.

I was obviously talking about the CPU which this thread is about.
You shouldn't need graphics but if the consumer dual-cores indeed support ECC, you should get a G620 or a G620T if you can't underclock or need the LP heatsink (these are more appropriate than a 2100 for a small NAS).
It'd be nice if you had documentation or proof for the ECC support of the consumer dual-cores. That they take ECC RAM doesn't mean the controller makes use of it. Someone found a document stating Clarkdales have ECC support so it's plausible but if you need ECC you usually don't want to gamble.

I have no idea why you bring this up but the limitations of current Atoms for a small NAS (I/O, ECC support) do not include processing power as should be obvious from their use in the premium models of reputable vendors.


details?
That's about 10W higher than a good consumer board but it would be good to know if that's system power consumption since the somone measured a Supermirco of the older generation at 40-50W (about 20-30W over a good consumer board).

Consumer boards have all the remote control from off you need for a home NAS which is WoL which consumes less power when the system is off than the stuff on server boards.

Some L/T CPUs are no more efficient than the regular ones unfortunately. If you have actual data about some processors being cherry-picked (which is of course plausible), people have been looking for it so please provide it.

I can say some words about power usage measurements done by so called "experts", someone has measured AMD APU E350 as 7W (xbitlabs) another review site 50W so the moral is: get normal meters when measuring AC power usage, that takes into account power factor, reactive power etc. and is very precise since we need to know idle and turned off (nobody actually measured this, this only speaks for itself their meters are crap) something like this is a good meeter:
https://www.elfaelektroniikka.fi/elfa3~ ... &toc=19355

Yes it's expensive but if you're review site then why we regular users need wrong information?


Idle 15.6W
load 25.9W
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Motherboar ... onsumption


Idle 39W
load 59W
http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/msi/msi-e ... e350.shtml

Idle 39W
load 59W
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4499/fusi ... on350ae/11

Idle 7.3W
load 15.8W
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... html#sect0

Where can I find the benchmarks for xeon 20TDP and 45TDP CPU's? www.cpubenchmark.net does not have these.

Agreed. I saw things like this, and then questioned specifically whether i3 + ecc memory would simply boot but not use ecc functionality, or whether it would actually detect and correct ECC errors. I was told it would correct ECC errors but unfortunately I cannot share my sources for this - although I trust them for technical accuracy. Added to this the S1200BT requires ECC memory, even with i3, otherwise it won't boot. From the tech specs: "Only ECC memory is supported on this platform."
I have yet to find a utility which can tell me whether ECC mode is enabled on a live running system. If you can point me to such a utility, I'd be more than happy to run it on a C200 series based board with Core i3 (quite curious myself to see whether what I was told is true!).
Bear in mind though I only received this confirmation for Core i3 21xx, not for the pentium you refered to.
Just done some more digging and ran into this, which is interesting even though it talks of mobile products.


In house measurements - cannot show you any evidence. This was a system with an Intel S1200BTL board, Xeon E3-12xx (not sure which model, presume an 0W model without processor graphics), 2x 2GB ECC UDIMM, one hard drive, and windows 2008 R2 (I believe).
Power was measured at the wall socket using a watts-up power meter.



Agreed - but they cannot send you an email out of band (I am spoilt! -)


No evidence that I can share - but this is the way it works. Same wafer, same die, fluctuations in performance means binning into different SKU's among which the low power ones.

I wish I could share more details with you but this is unfortunately not the case (I value my job!!).

I think memtest (the one you boot) shows a difference but I do not consider that a test. I use edac-util to watch for errors. I know three ways to test:
-wait until you get an error (most likely a looong time unless how have a lot of these systems)
-try a marginal DIMM which produces errors regularly (don't throw them away, people!)
-short pins on a DIMM with a resistor (someone documented the potentially damaging procedure which I never tried)


That's probably why you got a fairly low power consumption. Intel's consumer boards are among the very best at optimizing power consumption so I imagine their server boards are similar (with higher power consumption due to the extra features like the OOB management which usually burns a significant amount).

You neglected to mention the power supply you used by the way. That's very important if you measure at the socket and goes a long way to explain why people get different values. You can correct for the inefficency of known power supplies (except when badly adjusted or otherwise ridiculous numbers are provided by the likes of xbitlabs).


Whether or not Intel actually does this for all models, it clearly doesn't work in some cases. And when it does, the effect can be insignificant (see SPCR's review for instance but there are more damning numbers out there).
I still buy the low-power models when I have no real use for the regular version (just in case) but I give more credit to measurements than confidential generalities.

Whoops. It was the 80-plus silver rated 365W PSU in the P4304BTLSHCN system.

The few times I've lost data it's been due to the "human factor". ECC RAM, server class hardware etc are all good and well, but like everything we have diminishing returns regarding what we get for the money we spend. I'd say "normal" cheap stuff is good enough for most peoples NAS boxes. What's more important is good backup practices and lots of redundancy, which also can be done cheap.


That Xbitlabs reading is clearly DC. But I agree that a good meter is nice to have if one is interested in stuff like low AC power draw.

I forgot to mention something: I wasn't able to buy a box version of the E3-1260L, only OEM. You will to buy a CPU heatsink too, if you don't have one already.
I opted for the SCYTHE Samurai ZZ, which should be more than enough for this CPU

Any benchmarks??? I'm thinking to buy E3-1260L, but also thinking about lower TDP 1220L for only NAS it should be OK.
The is no GPU in 1220L means that I need separate video card on my supermicro X9SCL-F ?

Isn't there a GPU on board anyway? Unless you want to transcode video or something, you have no use for more on a server.
Perhaps you should confirm it with them if you're unsure or google to see what others have done.

don't you read product specifications before you buy them?
I highly recommend you to read the products specs.

as for benchmark, I found one a little while ago (I just googled) the 1260L did very well from performance point of view but did badly on value for money. But value for money has never been the point of low voltage XEON CPUs.

the 1260L has an integrated GPU but 99.99999% of the MB in the world won't support it. you need a C206 chipset to support the integrated GPU

As a matter of fact, only 2 C206 MB are available today:
Asus P8B WS
Portwell WADE-8011

The Asus is way too expensive for a server and lacks IPMI.
The WADE-8011 is a mini ITX. I've never heard of Portwell before and they are badly distributed in Europe. So I would never buy it.

In the very near future, Intel will release the Server Board S1200KP.
I found out that HP and Dell also have c206 MB, but it's not available to consumers.

It's been more than 6 months since the c206 is available and very few manufacturers seem to be interested.

I finally got a Supermicro X9SCM-F and it has a Matrox G200ew GPU (manufactured by Nuvoton). for a server that's more than enough.
I don't recommend this card as it doesn't work properly when two AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 are installed on the system. What a shame for Supermicro. They don't even test that their own products work with each other.
they're trying to fix it, gave me a new BIOS that's not even publicly available but the combination of the MB and the HBA still doesn't work.