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Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Depends.
Toss the GPU/wifi, disable audio, throttle the processor a ton, and set the OS to power saving, and old PCs can be shockingly efficient.
You can slow the RAM down too. You don't need XMP enabled if you're just using the PC as a NAS. It can be quite power hungry.
Eh, older RAM doesn't use much. If it runs close to stock voltage, maybe just set it at stock voltage and bump the speed down a notch, then you get a nice task energy gain from the performance boost.
There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.
At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.
Yeah.
In general, 'big' CPUs have an advantage because they can run at much, much lower clockspeeds than atoms, yet still be way faster. There are a few exceptions, like Ryzen 3000+ (excluding APUs), which idle notoriously hot thanks to the multi-die setup.
Peripherals and IO will do that. Cores pulling 5-6W while IO die pulls 6-10W
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-5700x/18.html
Same with auto overclocking mobos.
My ASRock sets VSoC to a silly high coltage with EXPO. Set that back down (and fiddle with some other settings/disable the IGP if you can), and it does help a ton.
...But I think AMD's MCM chips just do idle hotter. My older 4800HS uses dramatically less, even with the IGP on.