I've been researching the same thing too (finding the cheapest/lowest power consumption setup to run a NAS with ECC).I expect it will be cheaper then a small 1155 build but I wonder, since many of us essentially run our builds at idle the vast majority of the time, will it actually give us a much lower power draw over a E3 Xeon?
I have been piecing together a storage server and trying to save power where I can and decided I didn't need to much CPU but it did need ECC. I ordered a E3-1220L and now think it wasn't the best idea. Its a 4u case (huge) so airflow is a non issue and it will be idle most of the time. A E3-1220 (nonL) would have been near the same idle power but with much more overhead. Guess I can always sell it later if I end up needing more grunt or use it in a tiny build where the 20w TDP would be quite useful.
I was considering a "AMD cpu/AM3+ ASUS desktop board/ECC UDIMMs" combo, but the power consumption of the FX-4300 was disappointing.
So I moved on to do some research on Intel CPUs and there are boatloads of cheap ECC supporting CPU to choose from:
http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&ECCMemory=true
This one in particular caught my attention:
Pentium G2020 - 2.9GHz - 55w - ECC - built in graphics
With a recommended customer price of $64.00!
But, the problem then was finding a cheap LGA1155 board that supports ECC, after digging around for awhile I still haven't seen any info on cheap LGA1155 desktop boards supporting ECC, so far it appears that if the chipset on the m/b doesn't support ECC then you can't use ECC even if the CPU supports it, but a Supermicro board is around $200 so that defeats the purpose.
So as of this moment I am still looking for a cheap LGA1155 desktop board with ECC support. I mean there has got to be some out there, otherwise what is the point of having ECC on those cheap Pentium/Celeron chips?
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