Benchmarking a 15-year-old Atom as a home services box (yes, really)

So its 3am and im running pihole + mosquitto on this intel d945gclf2 I found in a closet. Atom 330, 2gb ddr2, 40gb ide laptop drive duct taped to the case. Idk why I do this.

Anyway heres yabs because of course I ran it

# yabs.sh v2025-01-01
CPU: Intel Atom 330 @ 1.60GHz (2C/4T)
Geekbench 6: 412 single / 891 multi
Disk: 87.4 MB/s (seq read, this poor ide thing)
Network: 94.2 Mbit down / 41.7 Mbit up (comcast, not the board's fault)

DNS response times are like 3ms though. Mqtt broker for my 4 smart bulbs doesnt even break a sweat. Power meter says 23w at wall which is... something.

Anyone else still torturing atoms in 2026 or am I the last one

2gb ram, two 500gb drives, consumed something like 19 watts. They don't make them like that anymore, not really. The new stuff is faster but the charm isn't there.

Your 23w is actually pretty respectable for that era. The 330 was dual core with ht, basically a supercar in the atom world at the time. I remember when these launched and people thought they were the future of low-power servers.

Keep it running. There's something honest about hardware that old still doing useful work.

Fun little project, I love it

I ran something similar last year but cheaped out and got a $30 used j4125 mini pc off some auction site. 6w idle, aes-ni, actual sata. It actually works way better but I felt dirty about it, like I betrayed something

Your mqtt setup is basically identical to what I had. Heres my mosquitto.conf for comparison, nothing special

listener 1883
allow_anonymous false
password_file /etc/mosquitto/passwd
max_connections 10

Ten connections because im not running a datacenter here

The 23w would bug me though. My j4125 idles at 6w with a ssd. Over a year thats like... some amount of money. Idk math at 3am

23w at wall for a 330 sounds about right. Those boards pulled 12-15w bare, add a spinner and an ancient psu and youre there.

For perspective: thats half a rack unit of modern gear doing actual work. A current gen celeron n5105 pulls 10w full tilt with better per-watt performance than most xeons from 2015. I just shipped a pallet of dell r630s to a recycler, dual e5-2680v3, 135w each under load, and the customer replaced them with six tiny fanless boxes.

Your atom is basically a space heater that happens to compute. But if the goal is "use what you have" then the math works. replacement cost of even a $30 box is 2-3 years of electricity at average us rates.

Keep it if it makes you happy. Scrap it if youre actually counting watts.