Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2012 8:23 Post subject: Intel Atom real life power consumption
Hey there,
Currently I'm running DDWrt on a Netgear WNDR3700 and so far I'm very happy with it. I very much like the NAS function, but it could be a bit faster (write/read). Plus when someone uses the NAS, phone calls sometimes are a bit chopped up.
As far as I know, the speed of the NAS is heavily dependent on CPU/RAM.
That's why I was starting to think about a Intel Atom as a router and also as a fast NAS.
I would like to have a low power consumption (which is why I would use one green SATA for storage and the system on a flash card), but the information I find about the power consumption of the Intel Atom series is a bit conflicting.
I'm mainly concerned about idle power consumption, as that is the state it would be in most of the time (it has to be on all the time, as it serves as a PBX as well).
As far as I understand the D525 will not have a lower power consumption than 18 W, but I was more looking at a N270,N550, N2600, N2800 or maybe a D2500/D2700 which I hope to have a lower idle power consumption.
Some people have reported to have a power consumption in idle mode as low as 5 W with a N550, but it wasn't clear to me if they measured the CPU consumption only, or the consumption of the entire system. Also I read a couple times that the consumption varied heavily depending on which OS was used.
So my question is, does anyone have experience with DD-WRT on lower power consuming x86 hardware?
Joined: 20 Feb 2012 Posts: 2 Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2012 4:17 Post subject:
Hi ongabonga,
I have never played around with DD-WRT x86 nor DD-WRT file serving module (although it seems to run Samba), but its wiki page (http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/X86) states that USB storage is not included in the public image. You can buy the professional licence in order to gain the feature back, but since you already have a router you are happy with, I am wondering if it would not be simpler/better to keep it as is and build a file server instead of trying to put everything on a x86 version of DD-WRT.
Power consumption seems important for you, so it might be the reason why you want to go that way, but if I were you I would add separation between your DD-WRT instance and your file serving needs. It would solve your current problem, as it would have its own dedicated hardware and it would probably be easier to manage while giving you more options than what DD-WRT is offering.
You need to have an efficient power supply to achieve these results, but using something like a Pico PSU you will get similar results. It will also depend on whether DD-WRT supports all of Intel's power saving features such as c-states.
I run DD-WRT on a Sandy Bridge i5 2405s system and I idle at about 16 watts. It is definitely much faster than when I ran it on my old Asus WL500W router, when doing stuff like torrenting, serving up files etc. On my setup, I run vmware and DD-WRT on a virtual appliance, so on my system the host OS handles the power saving features.