kithylin wrote:I wanted to use my 486-133 system for a server for a long time and toyed with it at one point for novelty's sake. I put debian linux on it, and even photo'd it and made a little "This machine is hosted by a 486 in 2016" website about it and had it running. But then one day I decided to put it in through a kill-a-watt and realized it was using nearly 175 watts just sitting there idle.
Which brought me to the realization that.. having to pay for our own power, I can't do this. If I needed something as a "server", a Pentium-III @ 1.2 ghz would do the same thing faster at roughly 40 watts with a modern gold tier atx power supply. OR a modern 1.7 ghz dual-cpu atom board would do the same thing at 18 watts.
Due to practical reasons... I wasn't able to keep it online.
The Windows box running everything currently online is an Atom D330. I have no idea how much power it uses, but it doesn't seem to affect the bill very much, even with power management turned off for the hard drive, no idea how much a few planned upgrades to that machine are going to affect things though nothing major is expected. I just want a larger drive, a second drive and a new PSU.
So far as I know, the 486DX-33 (Which should be the chip in that board as AMI only spec 33MHz operation) uses less than 5 Watts. CF Cards are probably like 1 Watt if that, though I could be stupid and run the site from a CD-ROM just to see how much power that used. Due to the lack of a -5V pin on any of the cards I plan to install and the chances of the onboard devices never needing it (Unusual to have onboard stuff on a 1991 board) I actually planned to use a modern PSU. In fact, I was contemplating making a cable and feeding power over from the 450 Watt supply in the Atom, as the Atom needs nowhere close to what the PSU can give. Come to think of it, as I planned on changing the case for the Atom, I could probably invent some way to fit both boards in a single case... Not sure I'll bother with that, but the shared power is certainly a possibility as I don't trust my 20+ year old 150 Watt Akhter supply to run 24/7 unattended.
Chances are, I will just use my Demo rig's case for now and either replace the demo rig with an ATX board. Actually, a Pentium 233MMX seemed good enough for everything I use with the GUS, even on the incredibly slow Packard Bell I was using before the current Cyrix box, so I might merge that project with the TIme Colossus upgrade provided I can find a way to run the GUS and YM719/704 at the same time... I never had much luck with the whole multiple sound card thing, it always causes problems. If not then, well, I just have to find another AT case down the line, I inquired about one on AmiBay ages back but the mods never approved the post so fuck that idea, they obviously don't want my money over there and it's too late now as I have none left and plan to spend big on the Xeon and a DX7 before I do anything else.
On power consumption, I shall definitely have to measure that, but I really don't see the machine using a lot. I also do wonder if DOSIdle will have an effect while the server application is active, no idea as I am unsure how far its abilities extend off of the DOS command line. Honestly though, I still think I can get it down to 50 Watts, partly because the expected hardware roster is minimal;
AMI Series 39 (Baby Voyager) Motherboard
Intel 486DX-33 - was going to use Hooker's old DX CPU but it looks like the board comes with one, if not I won't really be mad as it wasn't advertised that way and I don't have a shortage of 486's.
8MB SIMM RAM - leftovers from other machines... Might be stuck at 4MB as most of my 1MB sticks are faulty and, sod's law, I only have 1MB sticks as the 386 uses all eight of the 4MB sticks and doesn't boot with only four.
1GB Compact Flash - I have one left that I never use because it's too small for everything I've needed one for.
Western Digital WDC90C00 VGA - Got this last year from another YouTuber because I knew an ISA Only machine was something I wanted to do.
Intel EtherExpress 16 LAN Card - Same as the above card.
1.44 MB Floppy - I'll never really use this past setting the system up unless my F5 key breaks off and I can't bypass starting the server.
Possibly a CD-ROM - only if I can find one working in my stack of drives. They started dropping like flies last year. Might have mismatched color/age for a while, but two machines are going over to SCSI this year. This isn't an important piece of hardware for it though as I plan to update the site via FTP, leaving the network card handling mass file transfers, so it isn't unlikely the drive will be left out entirely.
The cool thing is that the line is so slow, nobody will notice how slow the machine is. I could probably use an SX and then de-turbo it to save more power with no ill effects, wonder how much power the U5S uses? Might have to try that one. I expect power will spike during scheduled reboots.
