Could someone recommend me the the most power efficient cpu for a supermicro x8sil-f motherboard. Performance isnt an issue purely power efficiency. This system will be running pfsense only. The l3426 and l3406 are out of my price range, unless anyone knows a good deal. How does the celeron g1101 compare to the pentium g6950 for power efficiency? What about the i3 and xeon 3400?
I've been wondering the same question, so I bought some bits to test. I realise the OP went with an 1155 solution, but I thought as I've got some concrete numbers, I'd post them in this thread as it showed up on a google search I was doing.
I already had one set of 1156 parts, and figured that the 0.6V idle state would make them competitive for idle power, so I picked up an extra Xeon and i5-650 to compare. (the i5-650 is an interesting cpu - it supports ECC, VT-d, and AES, is 32nm, and has hyper-threading.. once I've got my Xen environment set up, I'll be comparing performance of the i5-650 versus the Xeon x3450.
Power consumption figures are taken using a cheap AC-draw power meter from a local store called Aldi.
Setup Config:
Supermicro X8SIL rev 1.02,
Intel stock 1156 0.2Amp cooler,
1 LAN port active,
X25-M 160 SSD,
Antec VP350 PSU (local supply is 248V, 50Hz),
1x 120mm Antec tri-cool case fan on slow (run off molex),
Microsoft PS/2 keyboard,
MS usb optical mouse,
4x4G Kingston 1.333 unbuffered ECC (16G total)
States measured:
Idle - boot Centos 6.4 off USB and measured once at desktop
Bios - Lowest watts observed whilst in first bios screen
i5-650: Idle: 29.2W, Bios: 51.8W
i5-750: Idle: 31.7W, Bios: 65.5W
Xeon x3450: Idle: 30.5W, Bios: 64.0W
Note that I used the X8SIL and not the X8SIL-F which has IPMI. The -F variant apparently uses about 4W more, although I don't have one here to test.
I also tested the i5-650 on an Intel DQ57-TM and works with the i5-650's on-die GPU); it came out around 1.5W higher idle than on the X8SIL using all the same other bits except the keyboard (no PS/2 slot on the DQ57-TM, so I used a generic Dell usb keyboard). The DQ57 doesn't appear to support ECC tho, despite a page on intels site saying it does
support ECC .