Going Live

The State of Things

My four wire case fan arrived last week featuring low speed operation, rubberised frame and unique corrigated design blades. Originally I'd ordered the three wire version by mistake, but this was unsuitable if you want the system board to be able control the fan speed. Then towards the end of the week I worked out how to transfer my databases over for Davical and Mediawiki. I'd already transferred my other mySQL databases by copying the files from /var/lib/mysql, but the Wiki failed to work and Davical uses PostgreSQL. I knew next to nothing about PostgreSQL so it was a slog to work out how the security worked, how data might be transfered, and how to fix the annoying missing PHP library problems along the way. Nothing works without a battle and this was a fresh install, so it should have been easy?! Go-live was now or never, the other apps could wait, and I didn't want to go through the hassle of transferring data again.

On the hardware side, the new fan (an 80mm 'be quiet!' SHADOW WINGS SW1)
required its mounting plugs to be modified, as the plastic locking pins wouldn't go through the threaded mounting bracket. It would have been flimsy anyway, so I discarded the pins, shortened two of the mounting plugs and used a couple of long bolts and washers to secure it. The fan was then plugged into the system fan header on the motherboard and the computer started. It was immediately obvious that the fan was running very slowly, the BIOS reporting just 500 rpm.

Fan mounted using modified only the lower pegs.

Nb, always test things before you modify them, that way if it's DOA you can get it replaced!

That should be just enough to keep a small amount of air moving through the case, and if temperatures heat up, then the fan should speed up to a maximum of 2000 rpm, at a whisper quiet 16.6dB sound level.

Out With The Old

Going live essentially means moving the data and backup disks over to the new server. But before doing this I was keen to compare power usage and disk speeds, (before and after) ultimately reassuring myself that spending all that money was worthwhile.

With all drives running on the old Via C7 based machine the system was shown to draw a steady 32 watts. This dropped to 24 watts after the drives were removed, leaving just the IDE SSD and case fan as additional loads. That's higher than expected for an eleven watt system board, even allowing for power supply inefficiencies.

I used a utility called hdparm to measure the drive speeds. This is a general purpose drive tweaking tool that can perform a multitude of tasks such as optimising speeds and changing time-out parameters. The following command produces two performance measurements:

   pingu:=# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdx (where x is the drive letter to be measured)

Drive	Cached Reads	Buffered Reads
IDE SSD	225Mb/sec	28.4Mb/sec
Samsung Momentus HN-M101MBB 2½" sata disk (via IDE to SATA adapter)	225Mb/sec	29.5Mb/sec
Samsung Momentus ST1000LM024 2½" sata disk (sata port)	233Mb/sec	30.1Mb/sec
Western Digital Caviar Green 3½" sata disk (sata port)	234Mb/sec	111.5Mb/sec

It's interesting that the SSD wasn't out-performing the other drives in this test, though in practice it had certainly yielded a performance boost when I'd first installed it. I know they wear out, but I'm sure they don't go slower!

For Shiela.

In With The New

The disks where installed in the new Intel i3 based machine and mount points added to the fstab. These I added using their Block ID rather than their device name, which is a unique drive identifier rather than one that's tied to the port being used. You can find out which disks are connected by typing the following command:

   pingu:=# blkid

The address numbers are a little bit too long to write down and type in manually, so I piped the output of this file into my fstab and edited the result to the correct format.

   pingu:=# blkid >> /etc/fstab

This task completed, I re-tested the disks for speed.

Drive	Cached Reads	Buffered Reads
Intel 525 60Gb mSATA card	6470Mb/sec	247Mb/sec
Samsung Momentus HN-M101MBB 2½" sata disk	6500Mb/sec	103Mb/sec
Samsung Momentus ST1000LM024 2½" sata disk	6590Mb/sec	100Mb/sec
Western Digital Caviar Green 3½" sata disk (in SATA2 port)	6500Mb/sec	119.5Mb/sec

There's quite obviously a performance boost but it's surprising that the 3½ inch desktop drive connected to a faster sata2 port wasn't any quicker on buffered reads. To be fair this disk is designed for efficiency and low power with only a 5,400 rpm platter.

Two laptop drives on top and a desktop drive under the mounting plate.

With all disks running the power drawn was just 23 watts, a nine watt saving over the previous machine. That's like turning off a compact fluorescent light bulb that's been burning for the last four years.

Power Corrupts

Pleased to Meter

My plug-in electricity usage meter arrived from Maplin (N67FU). It cost just just a tenner and gives me the ability to see if my careful purchasing has actually delivered me an efficient server. You plug it into a mains outlet, and then the device to be measured connects to the three pin 13 amp socket in the front. It has a maximum power rating of just over 3Kw so it should be enough for an Intel i3 (laffs), and the flat-ish design means wall-warts shouldn't be a problem.

It works really well, and it's cheap as chips, but the niggle I've had with it is reading the LCD screen. Parts of the display are really tiny and my eyes aren't what they used to be. Plus mains power sockets tend to be in low, poorly lit places, making reading harder still. The only real issue has been the mode indicator, which is the smallest bit and block inverse. (Who dreamed that up?.. I can understand from a design point of view how you'd want to differentiate that a little, but they might as have well used Egyptian Hieroglyphs!)

Meter mode indicator shown top right.

Thankfully the screen layout changes enough so that you can work out which mode you're in, and it's mostly about that big number in the top left so I can get by without needing a flashlight and my reading glasses.

Measuring Up

The existing Pingu had to be shut down to install a replacement /home and /data drive. I use 2.5" laptop drives these days to keep check on the noise and heat, and this disk was the first one I'd bought after switching to the policy four years ago. Last week it started to fail big time, throwing numerous errors, making loose rattling noises and finally showing files with zero bytes size. I won't bore you with the gory details because I have regular backups, but it gave me the chance to plug in the power meter and see how much juice my trusty old server has been using all these years.

The Via system board is rated at 11 watts, there's an SSD, two laptop drives and a 2Tb desktop drive for my auto-backups, which is normally asleep. So after allowing for a power supply efficiency of 80%, I'd estimated about 25 watts in total, but found it actually used just under 27w. I'm pretty sure it's the disks that are dragging it up so high, but until I unplug them it's just an educated guess. But having the electricity meter means I can be a little more pragmatic about future disk purchases. Maybe one day SSD's will be big enough and cheap enough to fulfil my data storage requirements.

Next to be benchmarked was the new Intel i3 based machine. The bulk of the software, two database servers (Postgresql and mySQL), as well as Apache2 had already been installed but not configured. And as I blogged last time, Minecraft Server was ready to go. Turning on the machine it peaked for a few seconds at 20 watts and then dropped to a very reasonable 14.5 watts. It pretty much stayed at that value until I started the Minecraft service and then it went up by about ½ a watt. I measured CPU temperature by installing LM-Sensors and CPU utilisation was monitored using the Top utility.

With one player joining the game the power rose to about 15.5 watts and (by pressing 1 while running top) I was able to see that all four of the CPU cores had started to register light utilisation. (So I stand corrected, Minecraft Server does use multiple cores - thanks to Dr Vesuvius for that heads-up).

top - 18:47:19 up 1 day, 22:48,  1 user,  load average: 0.18, 0.12, 0.08
Tasks: 106 total,   2 running, 104 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu0  :  5.6 us,  0.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 93.4 id,  0.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu1  : 18.6 us,  1.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 80.4 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu2  :  3.3 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu3  :  6.4 us,  0.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 93.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   8127440 total,  1199480 used,  6927960 free,    19984 buffers
KiB Swap:  3090420 total,        0 used,  3090420 free,   862192 cached

Some of this could be the other services running but without the Minecraft Server there's very little utilisation on the other cores.

With the case lid removed the CPU temperature drifted up to around 45 degrees centigrade and the fan still turned at it's original lazy rate. I gotta admit, that's better than I expected.

Coup de Grace

Digging in the Wrong Direction

Sometimes when you take a step into the unknown you fall into a hole. But when you start digging your way out, make sure you're not digging downwards! I'm starting to feel this way about the new server project. There's been new stuff to learn and as ever, the devil's in the detail.

I took the decision earlier this week to order a new mSata card, altering my return request from 'replacement' to 'money back'. The idea being to get alternative hardware much quicker, and once the returned item had been processed I'd be back in pocket in a week or so. Sure enough the order for the replacement card arrived the next day (another thumbs up for eBuyers free five day postage) and I called eBuyer's tech support to get a returns number, then printed off the postage label they'd emailed.

After seeing the newly delivered jiffy envelope my son was keen for us to try the server again that evening. We got the younger two off to bed, I set the server back up, whipped the lid off and fastened in the new card. To keep things simple I decided to just try a plain disk format rather than doing a partition copy. I ran fdisk, creating two partitions, and then entered the following command to format as the basic Ext2 linux format.

   pingu:=# mke2fs /dev/sda1

I'm using Ext2 because I want to limit writes to the SSD as writing to them wears them out. (No seriously it does!) Similarly I'll specify noatime in the fstab so that file last access times are not saved, further reducing disk writes.

The format command started OK, then I felt that awful deja vu as it crashed again with the same "Buffer I/O error on device" error, followed by a segmentation failure. There seemed little point in sending the original mSata card back now, clearly the problem lies elsewhere!

Search and Ye Shall Find

I did a bit of googling using search terms 'DQ77KB' and 'mSATA' and eventually I found Martijn Koster's blog about his almost identical build. The only real difference is that he's using a slightly faster processor. He'd put together quite a good overview but the thing that really interested me was that he'd updated his BIOS to 'KBQ7710H.86A.0051' using the F7 and USB stick method.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, I downloaded the zip version & did the same. Then I then restarted the computer and ran another format using the Debian 7 installer disk. This time it seemed to get through and went on to install the operating system. It still threw up the odd error along the way, but it allowed me to continue. After a few minutes it announced it was finished and then performed an auto re-boot. Sadly it but didn't get very far, more kernel errors flashed by and then it locked up. I was starting to wonder if something else might be wrong, maybe the memory?

I decided to sleep on it.  Z Z Z Z Z Z z z z z . . . . .

The following day I did a few more searches, mostly hitting the same stuff from the previous day, but then I saw a post where somebody recommended resetting the BIOS to defaults after after an update. Well that made sense, and I certainly hadn't, so I decided to give it a try that evening.

To my amazement it worked, so I returned back to the task of cloning my old disk and setting up lilo so the mSATA card would boot. Then remembering I'd previously altered some of the bios settings I set the RAM voltage back down to 1.35 volts. Restarting again I found that the computer would no longer boot, the errors coming back. This continued until I set the voltage back to the default  of 1.5 volts.

I'd gone out of my way to buy low voltage sodimms, but it looks like that may have been one of the root causes of my hardware problems. Now I had a 2nd nSATA card that I didn't need along with an mSATA to 1.8" adapter board (which I'd hoped to use as a backup plan). To add to my frustration the adapter came with a micros-sata connector on it (which was no use to me). Ghaahh.. how many connection standards do we bloody need!!!

1.8" Adapter board alongside standard SATA plugs

I looked up the micro-sata connection standard on wikipedia and found the data connection is the same but the power is much smaller. Instead to two separate plugs it expects one, with the data and power merged together.

Quick, Think of a Plan B!

The computer was now working fine, but cloning the old servers root partition wasn't. After messing about setting up the boot loader, all attempts to start it resulted in an invalid chipset error. I can't say that I'm that surprised, but it meant I was going to have to re-install Debian from scratch. It's not the end of the world, but it means running two servers until I got all the software installed and configured on the new box. I was really hoping to avoid this!

The first thing after a fresh operating system build was to install Java 7 and get Minecraft server running for 'His Nibbs'. Stack Overflow had a Q&A page where somebody had asked about how to install java using the apt-get utility. So I scrolled down to the answer, then copy and pasted the following code into the terminal window:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys EEA14886
apt-get update
apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

It worked a treat, adding the java sources and then performing the install in only a few minutes.

Next thing was to get the latest Minecraft Server build from www.minecraft.net/download. We grabbed the minecraft_server.1.6.1.jar and installed the linux screen utility. Requiring us to simply copy the jar file onto the server and run it with the following command:

screen java -Xms512M -Xmx1G -jar minecraft_server.1.6.1.jar

Then you can leave it running by pressing Ctrl + A D, and return to it later by entering screen -r

Is it me or do some sites seem to hide there stuff in amongst a load of old twaddle and psuedo-information? I scanned down the main minecraft.net page unsure of where to click,  then gave up and googled "minecraft server download" to find that link above. I despair at times!!

A Game Of Two Halves

Building the Beast

It was the day of building the eponymous beast, we had all the bits, the house was cleared of small urchins with their touching fingers, and we were finally ready to go. I opened the system board box and carefully removed & inspected the contents. The Intel DQ77KB board comes with a poster sized "how-to-do" instruction sheet. It has good clear instructions, colour diagrams and each stage is split into simple numbered steps. My son Saul (who was new to computer building) had no problems following them under my watchful eye and with the odd word of assurance. I was like the sensei passing on noble skills to his apprentice.

Number one super guy!

We had a chat about static electricity and being careful about which bits you touch, and then kicked Off with Stage 1: processor installation. The Intel 1150 socket is a marvel of engineering and easier than it looked to use. I open and closed it a few times admiring the action, (it's a sort of tilt, slide and spring-lock). The retail boxed i3 processor came with a standard (four wire) cooling fan which just pressed into the four holes in the system board around the base of the socket. The fan header was close enough by to accommodate the short cable, and under operation it turned quite slowly and was almost silent.

nb. Inside the box I found a HDMI to DVI adaptor, which I'd gone out of my way to buy separately, but hey these things happen. The one I bought is far nicer :-)

Next the laptop style memory just slotted in like normal, though Saul was a little worried about how you had to joggle them a little before they would firmly snap down. The mSATA card fixes onto the full size PCI Express mini-card slot on the system board. I'd never seen these cards before and it really was small (see picture below with it in my son's hand). Resembling memory, it slid in at an angle and then had to be pushed flat against quite a springy force. Two tiny screws held it in place and there was some potential for this "liveliness" to catapult them (never to be seen again) if you didn't have your wits about you.

The mSATA card in Saul's hand.

Overall I am very impressed with the Intel system board, it's clear english instructions and the nifty processor socket and fan. Next step was to mount the board in the case and fire-it-up.

A Case of Beauty

The Streacom F7C EVO came exquisitely packed in a matt black cardboard box not unlike an Apple product, (we have a few of those in the house) protected by foam packaging and a white fabric bag. The comparison didn't end there, the look and quality of the case was equally top notch.

The Streacom F7C EVO Mini-ITX case.

I must say, I've very impressed by the solid feel and attention to detail. It's made of sand blasted thick anodised aluminium, laser engraved with large padded plastic feet and a minimalistic look. This does mean you don't get a reset button or a hard disk light. As a side project I started to contemplate adding an LED shining through the infra-red receiver window. The case is designed for a multimedia PC so an add-on receiver board for a remote control can be fitted behind the font panel, next to the two USB sockets.

Inside is also quite minimal (and no sharp edges anywhere, leaving fingers safe from cuts), there's a painted steel rack that bridges from front to back where you can bolt your hard disks (1 x 3.5" and 1 x 2.5") and a mount for a slot-loading CD/DVD drive. Then towards the rear there's a small bracket for mounting a standard 8" case fan.

Bagged Up Hardware.

Mounting hardware comes in individually labelled bags, but only sizes are stated & not what they're intended for. I took them out and by process of elimination worked out which ones where intended for mounting the system board. But I think they missed a trick here because there are no instructions in the box. Just adding 3.5" HDD or Motherboard to the appropriate label would have really helped, but if you've built a few machines before you'll soon work it out.

The motherboard matched the four mounting pillars exactly, but it does sit a little low in the case making some of the rear sockets slightly hard to access. Finally the power switch and power LED connectors were attached to the colour coded headers.

System Board Mounted Ready to Boot.

That went well, we had a full computer system on a board less than 9 inches square in under an hour.

And then the Fun Began

We both smiled as it booted first time, but then I couldn't get it into the BIOS settings. The splash-screen with instructions flicked by so quickly!! After a few restarts I figured out that F2 needs to be held down and then I was able to continue (surprising this wasn't on the quick-start sheet). I reduced the memory voltage down to 1.35 volts, and then spent a few moments looking at the various config pages. Each option has help text that displays over on the right of the screen, and it actually makes sense. This is a far cry from what I'm used to.

To take care of the disk cloning I downloaded a bootable CD image of Parted Magic. It took a while to start from a USB CD drive up on my old 1Ghz machine but once running it gives you a gnome based system to modify and manage your disks without having to get "down and dirty" with the command line. It actually does a whole lot more so I'd recommend checking it out if you run Linux.

Parted Magic Screen.

The plan was to clone the old IDE solid state disk onto a temporary disk, then clone that onto the mSATA drive. The first clone worked OK, taking about 10 minutes to do a 30Gb disk, but when I attempted the second stage (onto the mSATA card) it kept hanging. In one instance I left it running for over an hour, but it wasn't able to move on from 61% complete. I repeated this a few more times in vein, and then tried to manually format the mSATA from the command line. This rewarded me with a kernel panic and a "Buffer I/O error on device" message.

After a few more hours of trying different things I reverted back to my old server. I've raised an RMA with eBuyer to have it replaced, but it's left my son a little disappointed. He was really hoping to get the Minecraft server up and running. Perhaps it had been going too well, as those who have previously built computers will recognise, but as Saul's first experience at PC building it has actually been quite positive. He did tell me later that it was much easier than he'd imagined, and I think he enjoyed doing it.

So a result,.. though for the meanwhile only a minor one. (We'll try again after I've been through eBuyer's returns process)

Picking up the Pieces

Here's my Final List

How frustrating is would be to receive all of the parts bar one important little element. It doesn't have to be a significant part either,.. a missing two quid connector is all it takes. So once again I make myself a list of the supporting items required for the project:

• Mini-ITX case - Not able to re-use my old one.
• 2.5" IDE to SATA adaptor - For my old Solid State Drive.
• 19 volt 90 watt laptop adaptor (not sure about connector).
• Displayport or HDMI to VGA adaptor. (My TV doesn't have any HDMI sockets).

Replacing the SSD

Re-installing the server operating system is to be avoided at all costs. It's far too much work and I know I'd end up with bits missing. Hence my original idea to try and move all the disks over to the new server and hope it still works OK. It's Linux not Windows so I might get away with this.

I'd planned to get a disk drive adaptor for my old IDE system disk on eBay, but things are never that simple. IDE to SATA adaptors tend to go the other way, letting you use a modern SATA drive on an older motherboard. What I need is a way of connecting an older (IDE) drive to a modern motherboard. I did find something on eBay, but it was located in China and I wasn't prepared to wait at least two weeks before it was delivered.

This set about the seeds of change and I started to wonder about replacing the SSD. This meant cloning the existing system partition to another disk and getting the boot loader to work,... sounds like it might work! A quick google on the topic and I found you can use Clonezilla, or if you don't mind messing about on the command line then you can use the dd utility.

Here's a good page I found that takes you through the basics.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/2-methods-to-clone-your-linux-hard-drive/

Now the problem was reduced to a simple "what to buy". I could get another 2.5" laptop size drive, and the choice was huge, or I could use one of those Mini PCI Express sockets on the new motherboard to attach a solid state disk directly to it.

Mini PCI Express is a laptop technology to help reduce the size of upgradeable components. (USB and wireless adaptors, that sort of thing.) But an interesting variation allows mSATA solid state drives to be fitted.

nb. Not all mini PCI express sockets support this so check your motherboard documentation before you order one.

The full length mini pci express socket in the DQ77KB can be used for an mSATA card, which means I have one less drive to worry about mounting in the case. The only real disadvantage being that I won't be able to connect both the mSATA and the IDE system disks in the same machine in order to perform the disk cloning. But I have a few old SATA disks kicking about so I'm sure I'll be able to either clone a clone, or create a clone image file that I can use. I'll worry about that task later.

So I ordered an Intel 60Gb mSATA card which had the 6Gb/sec interface and around 500Mb/sec read and write speed. There seems to be an Intel theme building here!!

Another Brick for the Wall

If you remember the motherboard uses an external laptop power supply rather than the usual internal desktop type unit.

Laptop power bricks can be really expensive to buy unless you get one from ebay. Elsewhere even the cheap ones are sixty quid and others as high as ninety! Now ideally I don't want to be a cheap-skate here because the more frugally priced units tends to have less efficiently designed circuits. There's loads of articles on the web about this but the main thing to realise is that the majority of the power supplies out there are at best 80% efficient. The head of the company Delta recently stated, "we can produce units with an efficiency of 92%, but the laptop manufacturers are unwilling to pass on the expense to their customers."

Now consider that different laptop manufacturers choose different voltages from each other, and then compound that with the fact that they have a range of possible DC connectors. I looked at a lot of different power supplies and in the end I played it safe and just bought something that I knew would work. Most forum posts stated that the Dell PA-10 works fine so that's what I bought, for just £12.

Hard Case

I like my current server case, but when I put together Pingu Mk3 I had to do some extensive dremeling on the back panel to allow the system board sockets to fit. It had been a cheap case designed for a board that I didn't have, but it was close in design to Pingu Mk2 and I liked it so I bought it. Odds are that I won't be successful if I try to modify the rear panel again so I'm going to get a new case.

Trying to find a case that's cheap, quite small, yet can house more than one 2.5" disk turned out to be another challenge. I have two 2.5" laptop drives and a full size 3.5" desktop drive so the small cases were no good to me. There were a few slightly larger with built in ATX power supplies (which I don't need) that made the case really quite deep, and then there were much bigger cases, some with quick release disk drive bays. I originally had a target of around £30 which is OK if you're not too bothered what your case looks like, but I didn't like them.

I fell in love with the Streacom F7C EVO case which I discovered on the kustompcs.co.uk store, but at nearly seventy quid I hesitated. It is made of lovely thick aluminium and oozes quality, but I just couldn't bring myself to buy it. So I dallied around for another day or so trying to find cheaper alternatives and in the end I figured "Why shouldn't I have a nice case" and ordered it in silver.

You can get fanless versions higher up the range, which come with cpu heat pipes and have integrated heatsinks down the sides of the case, but the prices where getting silly. Plus it doesn't take into consideration the heat generated by the disk drives.

And Finally..

These days everything's digital, and very few system boards have analog video out, so this rules out using my old analog TV as a display (during setup). OK quit laughing again!... my best bet was going to be a HDMI to VGA converter and borrow the screen from the boys' mac mini. Cheap on eBay.

Prepare to be Boarded

Boards as Bad as that Pun?

OK, Intel socket 1150 boards which accommodate the Core i3, i5 and i7 cpus are ten a penny (well maybe not that cheap, but they ARE dead common), and as I mentioned last time they're designed to a cost leaning towards performance. So I started off by searching for product reviews against all of the motherboards that LinITX and Mini-ITX.com stocked. Some of them weren't exactly cheap but they still yielded excessive power usages of at least 50 watts at idle.

In other words that's 50 watts to do absolutely nothing, zip, nada, nix, zilch... get the idea?

There went my lunch time on fruitless searches, but I suppose deduction requires that you eliminate the impossible in order to infer a conclusion. Or in plain talk, "get rid of the dross!"

But I'm not the target audience (I hear you cry), they're aimed at people who want to build small gaming or media centre machines, lusting after oodles of power and not minding a few fans whirring away. Typically there's a slot for a nice high-end video card, multichannel sound and support of up to 16Gb of memory. OK,.. they're not really rubbish, but it's not a good fit for my list and far from being considered green. In the car world they'd be called "a hot hatch" like a Golf GTi whereas I'm looking for a Prius.

That evening I started searching on Google for a mini-itx board for socket 1150 using low power, and to my surprise (and quite quickly) I found that again Intel had produced the very thing I needed. It wasn't cheap, but still priced reasonably, and it's primarily aimed at the embedded systems market where a lower power slim motherboard is valuable. It's called the DQ77KB and this baby will run under 20 watts.

Silent PC has the following to say it's power use (equipping it with a 55W dual core Pentium G2120 which runs at 3.1 GHz). Essentially they have it 'ticking-over' at 17 watts and peaking at 56 watts. OK that's not quite 10 watts at idle, but for a 55W TDP cpu that's pretty darned good!!

More about the DQ77KB

Apart from efficiency the QD77KB isn't that different the other socket 1150 boards, but there is a restriction on the maximum processor TDP of 65W. This rules out some of the higher end Intel Core based processors, but this wasn't a problem to me as I was planning to use an i3 2100T cpu. It does of course leave the door open for the mid range level of performance if you require it, as long as you have enough room in your case for the bigger cooler that would be required.

There's various LVDS and eDP (embedded DisplayPort) sockets which I don't intend to use, the usual array of standard sockets (ethernets, usbs and displayport / hdmi etc), a couple of mini PCI Express sockets (which I'll talk more about later) and a PCI-E 4x slot for a high end graphics card.  Importantly it was 4 SATA ports, two of these being the faster 6Gb/sec variety.

Oddly it doesn't use a standard 20 or 24 pin ATX power supply, instead there's a co-axial barrel type power connector nestled in the corner for an external 19 volt Dell laptop type power supply. (seems a bit non-standard!!) The SATA drives are then powered from a daisy-chain cable that fastens directly to the edge of the motherboard, which is neat, and I guess overall it keeps another source of heat outside of the computer case.

Finding a UK supplier who stock it was another problem, and in the end I found it on Pixmania who in the past have always come up trumps on my more esoteric of my purchases for £115.

Then I tried to order an i3 2120T and it wasn't in stock, but they did have an i3 3220T which after a little googling discovered it was a later Ivy Bridge version (instead of Sandy Bridge) giving slightly higher performance for the same price and thermal/power constraints. So at £93, I ordered that too.

Thanks for the Memories

One of the details I'd read about the DQ77KB was that you could alter some of the voltage and clock settings. Now whilst this doesn't give you full over-clocking control it does give me some scope for lowering some of the voltages, chasing those green fairies. Memory could be reduced right down to 1.35 volts.

That doesn't seem like a big difference from the 1.5V standard but if your memory is being clocked at 1600Mhz switching all those memory circuits on an off requires quite a bit of power to drive these changes so quickly. In fact it's general practice on memory and cpu that if you want to over-clock it then you HAVE to increase the voltage. So maybe I can reverse that, slow down the memory speed and reduce it's voltage.

In the end (after much deliberation) I found a pair of 4Gb 1600Mhz DDR3 sodimms that where rated at 1.35 volts. I figured that if I was spending all that dosh on a new system that fitting cheap ram was folly. I toyed with the idea of just getting one at first, leaving the door open for future upgrades. But then after reading that with both slots filled you get the benefit of dual channel and the increased performance this brings I opted for the pair.

So I placed the order, and then was surprised when they split it across three different suppliers and charged me three lots of postage. Damn,.. but couldn't be bothered to change it now (watch out for this people!!)

The Search for Spec

What do we want?

To start with, I think it's best that I make a note of my demands and then we'll see which I have to compromise due to technical realities. So here's my list:

• Low Power - it's a server running 24/7 (so ideally around 10 watts at idle).
• Mini-ITX form factor (we don't have much space).
• At least 2Gb of ram.
• A way of using my old IDE SSD root drive (so I don't need to re-install).
• Able to run silently (or as near as possible).
• Able to ramp-up performance to run Minecraft.
• Let's not have any cost restrictions at this stage!

My research so far has shown a few flies in the ointment..

1. The IDE SSD (solid state drive) in my current server was bought about five years ago and back then I decided to get this type in order to utilise one of the IDE disk ports on my system board. It only had two of the newer SATA sockets so it made perfect sense at the time, but hardly any of the new boards retain this old technology.
2. The 10 watts target seems impossible because the majority of system boards are built to a price without real thought of power use. Even the fanless (so called) lower power boards are typically greater than 35 watts (in fact some are 50 watts).

I'll come back to the SSD issues at a later date as I feel I have bigger fish to fry. Right now I've got to concentrate on system board and processor efficiency.

In Need of Intel

I decided to spend a little more time looking into the AMD E350 based system boards to see if a more efficient version of the Gigabyte board could be found. Best seems to be the MSI E350IA-E45 which manages about 28 watts in idle. I'm starting to feel like I'm flogging a dead horse!

Then I stumbled upon this article that compares an E350 based system board with an Intel Core i3-2100T.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i3-2100t.html

If you go straight to page 11 you will see that the i3 is seriously low when idling, at only 9 watts. And it's only 10 watts higher than the E350 under load (yet four or five times faster). The secret seems to be the 'T' on the end of the cpu's model number, which signifies "Ultra Low Power" and this uses various underclocking and voltage reductions to achieve these amazing benchmarks. The results of these tricks is to reduce it's TDP value from 65w on a standard i3 to just 35 watts.

Lets see how this works:

• Idle is at about 9 watts.
• It's faster at performing tasks than the E350 (so it's quicker getting back to idle)
• Therefore you use less power.

nb. TDP (Thermal Design Power) is the maximum amount of power the cooling system is required to dissipate.

OK so that decision has been made,.. motherboard selection should be easy!

Getting up to Speed

What about VIA?

Currently Pingu is running quietly and efficiently on a VIA EPIA LN10000EG mini-itx fanless motherboard. I tend to plug in a quiet case fan in the summer months, but the rest of the time the only fan running is in the 1U compact power supply ( which I swapped out for a quiet version sourced from QuietPC ). It sits inconspicuously on the floor in the lounge and needs to remain as silent as possible. So it made sense to start the search for a new fanless system board with VIA.

I've always been a fan of the mini-itx.com site, both for its news articles and its fine (if slightly pricey) store. But these days there's no sign of the humble VIA series of systemboards, it's mostly full-on desktop machines (for socket 1150 cpus) or one of the many flavours of intel Atom board. Certainly there's not much that runs fanless with more than two SATA sockets, or has IDE (don't laugh) sockets.

I checked next on LinITX (which is my alternative source for Pingu upgrade parts) and did at least find they stocked the VIA VE-900 1.4GHz Nano X2, but at 1.4Ghz I didn't feel is was much of a step-up from my 1Ghz C7 (nor would it make those "Can't keep up" errors go away),... and with only two SATA's was a deal-killer.

That left me with a real dilemma,.. I had to learn about the opposition

Splitting the ATOM

Naturally Intel's offering was the next place to start looking (they are well known for power saving features in their latest chips) but with all those model numbers I really didnt know where to start. I knew that the minecraft server couldn't use dual cores, and that I needed something running at about 2.5Ghz to really do it justice, so it was looking unlikely that an atom powered board would do a great job. But you could at least get fanless systems at the lower end of the spectrum and it would be better than the VE-900. I was starting to think that my requirements were way too ambitious!

Not wanting to make any hasty decisions, I decided to sleep on it.

Is Ebuyer Reading my Mind?

The next day I received one of the weekly special offer emails from ebuyer and amongst the usual dross of cheap laptops, portable disks and remote control helicopters they had a Gigabyte E350N dual core mini-itx board for about 45 quid. Initially I dismissed it, but on reflection I figured it was such a good price that I should at least investigate it. Mini-itx.com were stocking them in their store so it couldn't be rubbish and then I found a few good reviews:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Gigabyte-E350-AMD-GA-E350N-WIN8,21088.html
http://techreport.com/review/20516/gigabyte-fusion-infused-ga-e350n-usb3-motherboard

I'd never heard of an APU before but if you read between the lines of AMD's advertising blurb it's a low power dual core cpu + gpu. It certainly looked very interesting (1.6Ghz processor with integrated AMD Radeon HD 6310 and four sata ports) but it still wasn't quite powerful enough, and more importantly is used too much power on idle. It could at least be under-clocked and being only a 18 watt TDP design you could just about run it with the cpu fan unplugged.

It was something to think about, but it wasn't shouting "BUY ME!"

Time to be IDLE

Tom's Hardware article and the reader comments highlighted the fact that even when doing nothing these boards were using 33 watts of power. So the CPU might be efficient, but the system board had supporting chips and circuits that were far from sipping the power. I wasn't surprised to read that Atom boards also had this problem. One by one the doors were closing!

By now I was pretty hacked off, and after reading that an intel i3 board could use less power under idle than an Atom one I decided to forget all-in-one boards and concentrate my search in that area.

Here's were I stumbled into my biggest gripe with tech articles on the web!!.. how many times do you get most of the way through (thinking that you've just gained some really useful information) just to find out that it was written in 2009? It got to the stage that I wouldn't commit to reading anything unless I could find a date. And then anything older than a year would also be discarded.

So I spent a few more days procrastinating and bumbling from technical review to review, filling my lunch times and evenings with endless google searches. The more I searched, the more uncertain about what to buy I became. This was getting hopeless!

What to do about Pingu?

The Painful Truth

It comes with some degree of sadness that I resign to the fact that my current home based server is reaching the end of it's natural life. It's not about to crash any moment, nor is it problematic or unstable in it's operation,.. no, something's come along that's revolutionising it's use. And it's not the first hardware refresh either, but the VIA C7 based machine has been pretty consistent for about six years now, having only software upgrades and additional disks thrown at it.

Pingu (my debian based server) originally started out as a way of adding network shares to my computers back in 2001. It was a simple affair, thrown together from cheap parts and a case so thin that I routinely cut my fingers when ever I 'lifted the bonnet'. A few years later I replaced the whole lot with a Mini-ITX machine and it has evolved along those lines ever since. Additionally Pingu has been a test bed and learning environment for me, and ultimately became the platform for iShare, my photo sharing portal (written in perl). These days Pingu does loads of useful things (web server, torrent downloader, media streamer, caldav server, network shares, timemachine store, dns alias updating, dns masquerading, web proxy and adzapping), but then my kids got old enough to start making demands of it.

Ultimately they're the revolution, and the technical impact that they bring is called Minecraft.

The Minecraft Hammer

It was easy to do, you just install the Java 7 runtime engine, download the server jar file from minecraft.net and run it. It then goes about creating all of the additional files it needs along with a barrage of messages and errors. Knowing the humble C7 to be under-powered for this use and the system low on memory I splashed out a tenner and installed a 1Gb SODIMM (maxing out the motherboards capability). I added a bigger swap file and after a little config tweaking we had a running Minecraft server. The console was throwing up loads of "Can't keep up! Did the system time change" errors, but it wasn't affecting the gameplay so my son was happy. (well,.. as happy as a teenager can be!)

Using the 'top' utility I monitored the impact on the server with just one player in the game. It hovered between 65% and 75% cpu usage while memory use was modest. It was about now that my wife started to mention that the web access and our photo hosting was much slower.

A few days later we had two players on the server, so once again I ran the 'top' utility noticing that the memory usage was still pretty low, but the cpu was consistently in the mid to high 90s. During this time none of the other services were responding enough to be usable, web was painfully slow and in the end we gave up our web browsing and facebooking and watched TV.

After a few days of this I decided we needed a new Pingu.