[shibapuppie]

I do the same with an old Optiplex and OpenWRT but I want to make clear the power consumption of an x86 box is magnitudes higher than an embedded-ARM box and is something to consider when leaving running 24/7. If you were to use a NUC or NUC-like form factor, power may be less of an issue.

[tombert]

Yeah, I'm using a mini PC with a thunderbolt 10GbE card. According to my Kill-a-watt, most of the time it hovers around 10 watts of power. Not as low as something like a Raspberry Pi but within my pain threshold.

Though that said, even with a regular old desktop, which is what I used before, the power consumption actually didn't get that high. Even with a lot of torrent traffic FROM LINUX ISOS, it generally hovered around 35W of power, and considerably less when it wasn't busy. Maybe I just had a decent power supply in there, not sure, it was literally a desktop that I got for free from a neighbor that was moving.

ETA:

I should clarify, even though the computer itself hovers around 10-15 watts, I do have an external switch and an external access point. The switch hovers between 25-30W, and the access point hovers around 15 watts. This is definitely a fair bit more than you'd get with a consumer router, so adjust for your pain tolerance. You might be able to find lower-power switches if nothing else.

[jordand]

Yeah I've investigated this before and found as well those old Intel dual/quad 10GbE PCI-E cards have quite a high idle power consumption just on their own