With all this talk about power reduction...I'm going to toss out one small suggestion:
Get a Wattmeter, and measure... Don't waste your time speculating. An ammeter and high school physics V*A=>Watts doesn't cut it for AC (in general -- a lot of machines are power-factor corrected now so V*A becomes QUITE useful again, but some have a really big power factor still...just discovered a P4-vintage machine running a power factor of 0.65, which surprised the heck out of me. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, just get a good Wattmeter that understands real AC Wattage, and don't worry about it). You really need to test assumptions. I'm quite confident a number of you are wasting a lot of time on things that Just Don't Matter in the Big Picture. Twisting the most knobs may not improve things enough to justify the downtime you will see. Spending a lot of money on bizarre hardware may look laughable when you see how little power some vastly superior systems draw. Some slightly older systems which make no attempt to brag about magic power saving technology use very modest amounts of power. Others are gluttonous pigs, of course. Wait until OpenBSD is fully booted (and the system is idle) before worrying about what the meter is showing. Also, look at what your AVERAGE load will be on the system, and be realistic -- most of the time, it will probably be completely idle. I've been quite pleased by the power draw on some PIII-vintage Celeron i810-chipset machines. I haven't got around to putting a "full" PIII in one to see what it "costs" for the additional performance. I have theories, but the meter tells. On the other hand, this 1.8GHz P4 with two 80G drives, completely normal mini-tower, is drawing less than 50w (though it is the one with the wicked power-factor -- 75VA). I paid $10 for this machine (yes, great deal), it would take a long time for a Soekris or other specialty machine to save any money for me, IF it could do what I wanted it to. Nick.
