Why Pentium 511

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 21:27:35 +0000 (UTC), Andrew Smallshaw

Some uses are fine with them. Car MP3 player, light duty file or webserver are all good uses, and basic office, email and websurfing (except elaborate scripts or animations) will do fine too, but it is just so easy for a typical desktop PC to be used for something more demanding too if it is a primary use system instead of special-purpose.

Funny thing is, I've thinking about using a C3 platform w-CompactFlash for a very quiet, low heat and power fileserver. It will be a shame that I'm going to put hard drives in it, more than doubling the power and making system slightly audible, requiring a fan. ;-)

I've half a mind to see just how low power I can make it, by underclocking, reducing voltage to the motherboard chips and CPU I'm wondering if I can lower the whole thing to under 20W (sans the drives, RAID card and Gigibit nic). It's a software raid card though, I'm suspecting I can't underclock the C3 too far before it impacts drive throughput. Seems like perviously I'd tested a similar Gigabit card and PCI controller and found a Celeron 400 was about the lowest performance level possible before the performance started degrading, but then again I don't think it'll need any particular level of floating point performance so the small L2 cache may be the main issue as impacted by a lower, underclocked memory bus speed.

I'm more eager to get my hands on an AMD Geode, but for the time being the price hasn't dropped enough yet, the aforementioned C3-motherboard combo I picked up for only $35, and that it allows using a smaller PSU and less power continuously running as a server, means it's practically paid for itself already.