I'm considering building a home server which I kinda want to use as a private git forge, but maybe also distributed compiler and maybe other things.
And I want it passively cooled with a thermal budget of around 100W for the CPU.
But what I do wonder about is what CPU to choose. Do we have proper ARM boards now in the ITX form factor? Should I go with AMD or Intel? What are the power efficient options here and what option has the lower idle power consumption?
Anybody any experience with that?
@karolherbst I've heard that typically more energy is used producing the CPU and rest of the computer than the computer will consume over its lifetime. Idk how accurate that is or what the ratio is, but so far I've had good results from buying used computers and sightly upgrading them for cheap. (Ssd and maybe ram too)
My process was:
1. Consult the power performance xy scatter plot on cpubenchmark.net:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html#scatter-cpu
2. Search engine search for each CPU in the area you are targeting to figure out what kind of computers it was put in and how much they cost used
3. Finally, shop on your local used market for good deals on one of those models. For me, this was EBay.
Personally I was looking for something quite different, I just wanted the cheapest fanless option that would make a reasonably good web server. I ended up buying 10 of these for $300 total, and then spent another ~$600 on ssd and ram upgrades for them. https://git.sequentialread.com/forest/dell-wyse-5070-server
For $100 each they work great!! I've given them to friends and sold some of them for use as a proxmox cluster. Without the ram upgrade they use 2 watts at idle, with the extra 16gb of ram, they use about 6watts at idle.
Obviously this specific model doesn't fit what you want if you care about CPU performance, but I just thought I'd share my process.
