Is an Atom low enough power for a fanless enclosed system?

guises · Post by **guises** » Fri Oct 31, 2008 2:02 pm

I'm looking to make a router and I want it enclosed (pretty) and silent. I've got basically two good options:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813135095
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813135100

Both are passively cooled by default. The first would be ideal but I've been warned away from Realtek NICs and I can't find any power consumption information for it. The second is an Atom board and with that high power chipset I don't know if I can put it in an enclosure without any kind of additional cooling. What do y'all think?

guises · Post by **guises** » Fri Oct 31, 2008 7:12 pm

All right, replying to yourself is a little crass but let me add something - Tom's Hardware has the Atom board as 36 watts at peak and what I can find of the other one puts it anywhere from 8-21 watts. So the question is, just how much is acceptable in a non-ventilated environment?

jessekopelman · Post by **jessekopelman** » Sat Nov 01, 2008 9:13 am

If this is just for a small network, I'd consider using something like this. A lot less horsepower, but should still be adequate for the task and heat and power consumption won't be an issue at all. The board itself is more expensive, but things start to even out when you consider the super cheap case that goes with it. Should be under $200 when built out with case, power brick, and CF card.

guises · Post by **guises** » Sat Nov 01, 2008 4:40 pm

Well I'd considered waiting until December for one of these:

http://www.wirelessnetworkproducts.com/ ... rodID=1979

but ultimately decided that I wanted an x86 processor. You're right that I had dismissed the Geode for being too expensive, but the cheap case doesn't really help me - I had had a project something like this is mind:

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/radiosphere/

I'll keep mmy eyes open on ebay for a cheaper Geode though. Maybe something'll come up. (High powered mini pci wifi cards are also really expensive. That was another turn off for those dedicated router boards.)

jessekopelman · Post by **jessekopelman** » Sun Nov 02, 2008 10:43 am

You didn't say you wanted WiFi! You should probably go with that ECS PMI8M, then. The price is right and the component choices seem likely to do well in a very low airflow environment. The issue isn't necessarily how much the TDP is, but what kind of temperature the components are rated for. The mobile CPU and chipsets are usually rated for considerably higher temperatures than the desktop parts. This will be considerably more power hungry than building something around an ALIX board, but given the price difference, even 15W more power consumption will probably take many years to even things out.

fri2219 · Post by **fri2219** » Mon Nov 03, 2008 4:24 pm

You might be better served by buying an OpenWRT based router and flashing it with something like DD-WRT. With a DD-WRT based system, you get a full blown version of Linux (BusyBox) capable of almost any network function you'll ever need- BGP, OSPF, DHCP, DNS, RTP, SSH, Telnet, Virtual Hosts, VLAN, SPI, QoS, remote logging, SMB, RADIUS, etc...

For the money, stability, energy consumption, and performance, you can't beat a 200MHz Broadcom processor.

If you want to roll your own extremely low power device, take a look at: http://www.dd-wrt.com/shop/catalog/

guises · Post by **guises** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 4:28 pm

So I wanted to get back to you, it's rude to just ask for help and then drop it afterwards. Just been kinda busy.

First off, I started with a basic all-in-one router like the one that fri2219 is suggesting - a Buffalo WHR-G125. I got that one because it was the most capable one that I could get that could run Tomato. And it did and, briefly, Tomato was great. Then I tried to connect to it wirelessly and found out that Tomato has this problem where it can't connect to Intel 2200 b/g cards which, as far as I'm concerned, makes it useless.

So I went through several rounds of flashing different firmwares, including DD-WRT, trying to fix this problem and, evidentally, flashed one that wasn't compatible with a WHR-G125. So I looked at my newly minted useless hunk of plastic, got annoyed, and decided that I was going to make an x86 router that I had full, proper, control over.

So that's that.

Here's what I ended up getting. With jessekopelman's suggestion, I looked on ebay for Geode boards and found one of these:

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_sp ... &class=ipc

With three Intel gigabit NICs, a low power mobile chipset, supporting mobile CPUs, and several expansion slots including PCI and a PCIe 16x slot (for a multi port NIC, should it be nessesary). When I started bidding on it, it was pretty cheap too.

Anyway, the downside is that Intel doesn't sell it's ULV CPUs so I'm stuck with a 31w core solo. I'm not certain that I'll be able to stick with my passive cooling plan, but I think that it's still possible if I underclock/undervolt this way down. Maybe with a Ninja Mini? SPCR is selling a Cooler Master Hyper Z600, and that would probably work, but size might be an issue.

Anyway, that's the deal. I have / have ordered everything but that heatsink now, so I'm pretty much all set. Thanks for the input.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 8:08 pm

I've been using Tomato firmware (albeit on a WRT54GL) with an Intel 2200 wireless card for months now. I'm not sure why your router wouldn't be able to connect in general.

That board looks interesting though. Three gigabit connections (each on independent PCIe x1 lanes) is definitely cool.