Intel Atom vs. VIA C7: Which Makes a Faster, Cheaper NAS?

bigclaw · #1 01-28-2009, 02:42 PM

How about power consumption?

thiggins · #2 01-28-2009, 03:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigclaw

How about power consumption?

39W for the VIA, 35W for the MSI.

bigclaw · #3 01-28-2009, 03:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thiggins

39W for the VIA, 35W for the MSI.

Thanks. I'm not sure what chipset the VIA uses, but at least for the MSI, the ancient 945GC chipset is probably dragging it down unnecessarily in terms of power consumption. It'd be interesting to see whether one of the mobile chipset-equipped boards can fare significantly better. For now, the higher costs of these boards negate any gain (in terms of costs) in power reduction.

thiggins · #4 01-28-2009, 03:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigclaw

Thanks. I'm not sure what chipset the VIA uses

Spec says "VIA VX800 Unified Digital Media IGP chipset"

tipstir · #5 01-28-2009, 06:44 PM

Tim,

VIA is faster or about equal to the Atom or AMD clone of the two right? VIA should make a good CPU. I had one way back when they first release them to the USA. I never had issue with it. Today it's mix AMD and Intel here.

00Roush · #6 01-29-2009, 01:59 AM

Thanks for doing the review. I have been wondering what kind of performance can be had from these CPUs. I also liked the general summary of what kind of performance one might expect from using a particular NAS based upon what CPU it uses.

Now all you need to do is get some results for a NAS that uses a Atom dual core CPU.

00Roush

#7 01-29-2009, 06:44 AM

Hi !

First of all, this is my first comment on this website I keep reading for years now. I love it, please keep going !! :-)

And How about the last CPU form VIA, the nano, versus the Intel Atom ?

Little suggestion : I think you should really include Power consumption (specifically in IDLE state) in every test you perform. A NAS is expected to run 24x7, so this is not negligeable.

zedpol · #8 01-29-2009, 10:30 AM

yeahgreat article, thanks. I was hoping the Atom was going to do a little better. I had been thinking about upgrading my couple year old via c7 1ghz machine to an atom machine but looks like there isn't sufficient performance gain to do so.

A great part 2 would be to see what kind of performance you can get with some tuning.

Anyways, Thiggins, great site..good forums, you run a tight ship here.

Z

scoob · #9 02-05-2009, 02:47 AM

Hi Tim.

How was your experience setting up ubuntu OS on a USB stick for your NAS tests.
Could you elaborate on how you did this setup, any gotchas and pitfalls?
Maybe even URLs to the on-line doc that helped you set things up.

So far, I've used a partition on one of the drives in my RAID but I'd prefer to run from a USB stick.

Thanks in advance and thanks for the great articles!
- Christian

thiggins · #10 02-05-2009, 11:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by scoob

How was your experience setting up ubuntu OS on a USB stick for your NAS tests.

All I did was:
- Download Ubuntu server and burn the iso to a CD
- Put the CD in a USB CDROM drive attached to the system
- Ran the install, did guided partitioning and set the USB flash drive as the target
- After install, I used the info in Build Your Own Atom-based NAS - Part 2 to set up the drives and shares.