In my last post, I wrote about my intentions to build another PC Build which I planned to use for SAP HANA and SAP BPC experiments. The server has been running already for few months, but because of the busy working and private schedule, I was not able to share any updates.

After having my previous server for a little over a year, I understood that running a PC 24/7 has an enormous impact on the electricity bill. Therefore my aim was to build power efficient training server which I can run non-stop with marginal impact on the utility bills.

Following were my requirements which I met:

• Energy efficient to run 24/7 (Less than 100w on full load, 30w idle)
• Decent performance (64GB of RAM and i5/i7 quad core processor)
• Silent and small so it can stay in the living room
• HTPC – Home Theather PC for Netflix or Amazon Prime

Here are the exact parts I used for the build you can find on Amazon.

• In Win BL641 Black Slim Desktop Micro ATX Case 300W UK / US
• Gigabyte GA-B150M-DS3H UK / US
• Intel Core i7 Quad-Core i7-6700T UK / US
• Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 GT Rev.2 Intel Processor Cooler UK / US
• Arctic Silver 5 AS5-3.5G Thermal Paste UK / US
• 2 x Crucial 32GB Kit (16GBx2) DDR4 2133 MT/s (PC4-17000) CL15 DR x8 Unbuffered UK / US
• TP-Link Wireless 150 Mbit PCIe card UK / US
• Windows 10 Professional 64bit UK / US
• SSD Disk 512 GB 2.5 UK / US
• WD Scorpio Black 750GB 2.5 UK / US

The build process can be found on youtube here.

So, after performing some tests, the maximum energy consumption was 87.8w! Idle consumption is between 15 and 30 w. The performance is great and the PC is remarkably silent. I am genuinely pleased with it and I can honestly say it is running 24/7 for the past four months with no problems at all.

Thanks to the Remote Desktop capabilities of Windows Professional I can manage VMs and play with the images from any part of the world. Please comment if you need more information. Enjoy 🙂