My setup draws about 46 watts idling, at wall socket:
Chenbro ES34069 case w 120W PSU
Core i5-650
Zotac Mini-ITX board w USB3 ports (not sure of product name)
8GB DDR3-1333
2.5" 120GB laptop SATA boot drive.
4x SATA drives mixed WD Green and Seagate 5900RPM
Running 2008R2 SP1 Hyper-V Server as OS with 3 guest OSes:
- Virtual WHS 2011 RC
- Virtual 2008R2 SP1 as web server
- Virtual 2008R2 SP1 as Team Foundation Server
Hard drives are set to spin down after 5 minutes.
The i5-650, when set to Balanced power profile, stays at 1.2 GHz unless load is quite heavy. Performance setting makes it much more power hungry.
The main advantage of i5 over i3 is hyperthreading, if I recall correctly. From what I have gathered from various CPU tests, power consumption at idle should be roughtly equal.
The WHS VM is set to use 2.5 GB memory. The other two VMs use the dynamic memory feature introduced in SP1, they seems to hover around 1.3 GB mem usage each. When I move to WHS RTM I can hopefully use dynamic memory on the WHS VM as well (does anybody know
if RTM supports that?).
Peak load is about 85-90W so there is some margin.
Since WHS is a VM I can use any size boot drive and set up a dynamically expanding virtual hard drive to install WHS on.
