Our electric bill went up by $15 last month. Either Georgia Power is passing on some extra fees or we have to look at how we can use electricity more efficiently. Right now we have 3 laptops and 4 desktops that are plugged in mostly all the time. One of the laptops (Macbook Pro) is usually plugged into a 21" NEC monitor pretty much all the time. One of the desktops is a dual 604 pin Xeon server with 4 hard drives--that's our VM server. The other desktop is a P4 Prescott machine that acts as a security gateway appliance--it's running Untangle 8. The last desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz machine for general use and media serving. Is that too much.? I was contemplating adding an old HP 4U server to the mix, but I thought better of it. My latest trip to Fry's had me thinking about replacing all of the servers with some of those Mini-ITX boards. However, some of the boards feel pretty cheap and the others have way more stuff than I need. Supermicro has a couple of dual Atom Mini-ITX server boards, but they are pretty expensive. You get what you pay for with those boards, though. <div>
<br></div><div>I was thinking it would be a good idea for someone to make a Mini-ITX server board with reconfigurable pin headers (future expansion), a couple of USB ports, and maybe 5 or so PCI-E x1 slots. The PCI-E slots can later be filled with a couple of LAN cards and a RAID card. Some of the boards should have silent Atom chips and the others should have 775 sockets. There are a lot Core 2 Duo chips that could be reused for light server use. We have about 5 Dell machines in our office with dead motherboards, but perfectly functioning C2D chips. Even better, make them compatible with CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS). </div>
<div><br></div><div>What do y'all think?</div><meta charset="utf-8">