Core ran Gentoo on a retired HP Vectra VL420 desktop which I salvaged from one of my previous employers.  The PIII 800 was sufficient to run all the necessary services and apps I needed like email, web server, and general file storage.  It ran cool and quiet and only drew about 44kw of power while running, but after 4+ years of silently serving the family, I felt it was time to upgrade to a newer server.

[core]

The new server needed to be quiet and power efficient.  I ended up going with an Intel e5200 cpu with 4GB ram running on an ECS board.   A 1TB Western Digital Green hard drive dedicated to storage (system is on it’s own drive) and a Seasonic 300watt power supply (80plus certified) rounded out the parts list.  Total cost was about $300 including the basic case from CompUSA.

It took 2 hours to build the server from scratch and about 2 days to install an instance of 64bit Gentoo.  I contemplated installing a different Linux distribution on the new server, but at the last minute I just couldn’t give up the control I have with Gentoo.

‘Serenity’ was born.  A week later, I had finished migrating all our, email and other data over to Serenity so Core officially went into retirement.

[serenity]

Performance-wise, Serenity kicks Core to the curb.  I don’t have any formal benchmarks between the two to post, but I certainly saw a huge performance gain while compiling operating system.  As per the power efficiency, I’m right where I wanted to be.  Core was pulling a pretty stable 44w, while Serenity is pulling anywhere between 41w and 44w.  Not bad for a much more powerful server!