1151 board with lowest power consumption

Power consumption be damned, taking into consideration it running 24/7 I wouldn't cheap out with my selection of motherboard and PSU.

The old adage "You get what you pay for' applies to both board and PSU purchase.

Hi, i want to run VMware ESXi 6.0 as hypervisor, which need some Core i3 / i5 / i7 CPUs which have special functions like VT-d and so on... I am not going to use proxmox, because i want to gain some deeper experience with the vmware stuff, which i also use at work as an IT technician.- So Beebox-like pcs with the N3xxx cpus are not capable to support the requirements for ESXi or they are far too expensive for the power they serv (bang for the buck), as far as i don't need a "mini" pc, normal size is also OK (or even better). - Also i want the ability to upgrade in the future, and have the possibility to add some HDDs (but this is not planned at the moment) - At the moment e.g. I want to run a VM with my "ubiquiti unifi accesspoint controller" and perhaps "pfsense" or "sophos"-firewall solution. The unifi controller runs currently on an old notebook (prior it ran on an raspberry pi 2, but that was not optimal for performance reasons). This old laptop consumpts 23W only for the unifi thing. So i guess, i can do a bit more with virtualization and the right hardware choose. - The microservers of the "two letter" company are also OK, but not exactly what i want and of course the hardware of the microservers is outdated and expensive when it comes to upgrades.
Today i found an article of a german computer magazine where they have build a 11W pc with a Z170 board with i5-6400 (without the T at the end) and a normal 300W psu, so i see that there is a way if the mainboard is capable to run in maximum energy efficiency. (When i add a PicoPSU and the "6400T" cpu, there should be a way to stay beneath 20W, even with ESXi instead of running Windows. (As i know, windows is better in energy management than esxi hypervisor) - So with this post i tried to reach someone at "asrock"-company, who perhaps can say what is the best 1151 board when it comes to energy consumption.

I already run ESXi 6.0 on an old Core i3-4150 machine with 430W thermaltake psu and 8gigs of ram, also a 128GB sandisk SSD for the VMs. - But this machine consumpts 52W for doing absolutely nothing, in the highest power saving setting and all unneeded chips deactivated in bios (soundcard, usb, sata ports, and so on)...

In my main rig i have an Asrock Z87E-ITX with i7-4770k, 16GB dominator ram, Bluray drive, GTX980Ti, WD RED 3TB, 256GB SSD, 580W BeQuiet. - It was not designed for power saving operation in common, but that beast machine needs only 42W in idle mode. (With my old GTX780 graphics card the overall power consumption was even lower)


I hope you could understand all of my english text, because i am a native german speaking person, which only read a lot of manuals/websites in english language but never has to speak english on a daily basis. :) - If i have written total nonsense in the above english text, please also let me know that, because i am very interested in getting better with the english language.


Edited by ThomasB - 31 Dec 2015 at 6:39am

wardog wrote: Why not a BeeBox or the likes? You didn't stipulate mATX so I'm assuming more than one or two HDD, which will kill your overall consumption limits. A BeeBox and when needed external drives would certainly reduce overall consumption. Home server"? Care to expound on just what that might entail for your intended purpose? hehe My home server, the one with movie iso's, is a beast of a machine with VM's and two quad port i350's running 24/7 but we here in the US don't subsidize organics as you do there.

That is a beast of a machine, given your system Sig shows a "4200W Seasonic" PSU.

ThomasB, information about the power usage of mother boards is not normally provided by manufactures. Reviews of mother boards may include some power usage tests.

The Beebox series of all in one PCs that wardog suggested are based on Intel NUC boards that include a CPU.

If you just want a mother board rather than a mini-PC, check this list of the Intel CPU Onboard Series boards from ASRock. These boards will use more power than a Beebox PC, but will use less than a standard board and processor:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/index.asp?s=Intel%20CPU

Hello from germany,

i am going to build a 24/7 "home server" with Intels i5-6400T (35W TDP) and a 90W PicoPSU. I will start with 8 or 16GB DDR4 RAM (for running some VMs on it). My goal is an overall power consumption of 20W or lower...

So, what is the asrock 1151 board with the lowest power consumption ? It would be great if the board supports M.2 socketed SSDs, but it is no "must-have"- Power consumption is more important because energy prices are high here in germany (All germans are bound by law to pay their contribution for solar and wind energy through energy costs).


Edited by ThomasB - 30 Dec 2015 at 8:42pm