Idle Power Consumption 12600k vs 5800x


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Hey all,

 

I'm currently researching options (12600k vs 5800x) for my server build to prepare for my switch from my old Qnap NAS to unraid.

 

Context:

System will host ~20 TB of data, ~20 docker containers and 2 VMs. These are all for my home automation environment, so not CPU-heavy but have to run 24/7 (with exception to some lighter 1080p video transcoding for surveillance steams.

My hypothesis is, that the system will run close to idle CPU usage most of the time. Therefore I think it make sense to optimize the build for this working mode.

 

Now to the question, that I couldn't yet really solve through my research:

There seem to be multiple sources that indicate that the 12600k is able to stay well under 10W in idle/low CPU usage scenarios due to its hybrid architecture. Even if Linux is currently not supporting hybrid architecture I think I could pin the containers and VMs to the e-cores to force the low power consumption. I was not able to find information on idle power consumption of the 5800x (just the CPU - not whole system). Some meta-information suggest, that the 5800x is more efficient than the 12600k under high load, but much more inefficient in close-to-idle scenarios. Is that the case?

 

Does anyone here have more information, experience or an advice what build I should prefer in my specific context?

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Great question. I also look at idle power draw primarily.

I have just ordered 12600k for my server build. You should only consider total system power consumption, not just CPU in isolation. As these systems are on different motherboards/chipsets with different features. AMD has x570 and B550 motherboards for 5800x. B550 is more efficient than x570, but offers less PCIe bandwidth, and less features. Alder lake (12600k) only has z690 for now. I have looked through most reviews, and it seems idle consumption is more or less the same between 5800x and 12600k. Very close.

But you get much more PCIe bandwidth on the new Intel platform, at least on z690. That means you will be able to connect more NVME drives and faster drives (gen 4), fast ethernet cards, SATA controllers, and other PCIe devices. Comes in handy in servers down the line.

Also, the hardware transcoding only works on Intel CPUs currently. And the future 13th gen CPUs will be supported on the z690 motherboards. So IMO it is a more futureproof platform. For these reasons I chose Intel platform and 12600k for my server. I like AMD. My desktop is 5900x on x570 motherboard. But for server platform I recommend Intel

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In the end I chose the 12600k with a z690 (MSI PRO A).

 

If it's for interest for somebody: I measured the idle power draw of the pretty "bare bones system*" in a freshly installed win11. It was about 32-38 W(+/-5).

 

* 12600k, MSI Z690 PRO A, PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB M.2, Arctic Liquid Freeze 420, 3x 140mm fans (all stopped for the test), no OC, XMP on

 

Have yet to test it with unraid installed, but have to overcome some hurdles that came with the platform (e.g. onboard ethernet with intel 225-v not working, need for dedicated GPU since uhd770 has no supported method for sharing between VMs...). Pains of early adopting (or my personal incompetence/ignorance since this is my first build since ~7 years :D)

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On 1/10/2022 at 11:17 AM, Acidcliff said:

In the end I chose the 12600k with a z690 (MSI PRO A).

 

If it's for interest for somebody: I measured the idle power draw of the pretty "bare bones system*" in a freshly installed win11. It was about 32-38 W(+/-5).

 

* 12600k, MSI Z690 PRO A, PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB M.2, Arctic Liquid Freeze 420, 3x 140mm fans (all stopped for the test), no OC, XMP on

 

Have yet to test it with unraid installed, but have to overcome some hurdles that came with the platform (e.g. onboard ethernet with intel 225-v not working, need for dedicated GPU since uhd770 has no supported method for sharing between VMs...). Pains of early adopting (or my personal incompetence/ignorance since this is my first build since ~7 years :D)

Very interesting to me. Is that measured at the wall using a power meter? So total power consumption of the system? What power supply? Can you confirm that is with no gpu or any pci-e cards? I see you say it was barebones with just the M2 1TB in. 

Is that with unraid running and assigned to the e cores? How many? I'd be interested to see if you are still able to get those numbers when running a windows Vm assigned also to the e cores, and then again with one assigned to power cores to see how it varies. 

 

I was looking at the 12th gen i7 12700 series which seem to offer ones like the 12700T  (there are also E, H, F various) and I think one of them may be an economy series type OEM spec one which has a TDP of around 35w. It seems a bit confusing right now and I can't find any good performance indication outside of the K series which is reviewed the most being the most popular. 

 

Where did you read of the 12600 series going "well below" 10watt idle? That's can't be accurate? Do you mean just the CPU rather than total system at the wall watts? Even if just the CPU, that seems still very low.

 

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Is that measured at the wall using a power meter?  So total power consumption of the system?

Yes - Measured with an "Innr SP120" Zigbee Wall Plug

 

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What power supply?

Fractal Design Ion+ 660p

 

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Can you confirm that is with no gpu or any pci-e cards? I see you say it was barebones with just the M2 1TB in. 

Yes indeed - no GPU or PCI-E Cards. Just the M2 1TB mentioned


 

Quote

 

Is that with unraid running and assigned to the e cores? How many?

 

This was measured on a fresh "native" (no vm) Win11 install (no unraid) - so the values came from the Win11-Thread director

 

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I'd be interested to see if you are still able to get those numbers when running a windows Vm assigned also to the e cores, and then again with one assigned to power cores to see how it varies. 

I have done some new measurements using a pretty barebones (no Docker Containers or VMs running) Unraid (system mentioned above but now with 2x 12TB Western Digital HDDs):
- ~55 W with HDDs spinning idle / 45 W with HDDs spinned down (no CPU Pinning - i think unraid defaults to the first cores which are p-cores)

- ~45 W with HDDs spinning idle / 36 W with HDDs spinned down (exclusive usage of e-cores through CPU Isolation)

Adding a MSI Aero GTX 1050 2GB results in ~15-20 W additional idle power draw.
All are measurements of the complete system measured at the wall outlet.

 

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Where did you read of the 12600 series going "well below" 10watt idle? That's can't be accurate? Do you mean just the CPU rather than total system at the wall watts? Even if just the CPU, that seems still very low.

The ~10W were for idling CPU only - not the whole system. Don't know anymore from which source I got that information

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4 hours ago, Acidcliff said:

Adding a MSI Aero GTX 1050 2GB results in ~15-20 W additional idle power draw.

I think you have to pass through the gpu to the VM otherwise the gpu will work with full power.

 

Have you enabled any energy savings in the bios yet? The power consumptions seems quite high.

 

 

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45 minutes ago, Acidcliff said:

Yes - Measured with an "Innr SP120" Zigbee Wall Plug

 

Fractal Design Ion+ 660p

 

Yes indeed - no GPU or PCI-E Cards. Just the M2 1TB mentioned


 

This was measured on a fresh "native" (no vm) Win11 install (no unraid) - so the values came from the Win11-Thread director

 

I have done some new measurements using a pretty barebones (no Docker Containers or VMs running) Unraid (system mentioned above but now with 2x 12TB Western Digital HDDs):
- ~55 W with HDDs spinning idle / 45 W with HDDs spinned down (no CPU Pinning - i think unraid defaults to the first cores which are p-cores)

- ~45 W with HDDs spinning idle / 36 W with HDDs spinned down (exclusive usage of e-cores through CPU Isolation)

Adding a MSI Aero GTX 1050 2GB results in ~15-20 W additional idle power draw.
All are measurements of the complete system measured at the wall outlet.

 

The ~10W were for idling CPU only - not the whole system. Don't know anymore from which source I got that information

 

 

Thanks very much for the info. So it appears possible to pin unraid OS operations to the E cores and get 36w idle. That is quite good. My current 5900x system idles much higher at around 100w. This is with 2 x GPUs idling, a HBA card, 2 x nvme drives and 8 fans and a fan controller. This probably accounts for 40w extra. So perhaps my 5900x whilst idling consumes maybe 60w at the wall if it were bare bones. A way to improve consumption would be to obviously remove the GPU/s and move to a CPU with quicksync to aid transcoding, and try to move to less disks all running from the on board sata instead of a HBA card. 

 

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I think it would be possible to go even below the 36W since I use a 420mm AIO which is way overkill (but a silent pc was important for me).

 

The AlderLake iGPU has Quick Sync - but you'll run into the same problem that I'm currently trying to solve, that is, that beginning with intel gen 11, intel has dropped the support for VT-x (d or g) and switched to SR-IOV. So at least with the current UNRAID Plugins (like intel TOP) you won't be able to virtualize the iGPU to use it for your docker containers and vms in parallel. Unfortunatelly there is close to no material/tutorials to be found on the topic of "SR-IOVing" an iGPU. As long as this isn't solved you'll probably be stuck with using dedicated GPUs (and I guess the 1050 is one of the least power hungry that also have proper HW-encoding features - Features that lack for example in a 1030).

 

Details on the/my problems with the iGPU SR-IOV here:

 

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The thing I found out is that it makes a big difference which mobo vendor you choose. I have a Ryzen MSI (B450 Tomahawk) board with almost ZERO power tuning options in BIOS. Meanwhile, my server runs on a H410 Asrock ITX board with LOADS of BIOS power optimizations. The difference is such that I can get from like a default ~24, 25W to 16, 17W idle power draw.

 

My point is, before buying anything, I would look at some youtube vids of the chosen mobo's BIOS options.

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On 1/12/2022 at 10:35 PM, sylus said:

I think you have to pass through the gpu to the VM otherwise the gpu will work with full power.

 

Have you enabled any energy savings in the bios yet? The power consumptions seems quite high.

 

 

 

Had a deeper look into that - thank you again for pointing that out. In fact while not being under load the GTX 1050 was running in P-Mode P0.
 

Instead of running a VM to get it down to P8 i used, which seems to work (haven't had yet the opportunity to measure the impact):

nvidia-smi --persistence-mode=1

 

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On 1/10/2022 at 7:17 PM, Acidcliff said:

In the end I chose the 12600k with a z690 (MSI PRO A).

 

If it's for interest for somebody: I measured the idle power draw of the pretty "bare bones system*" in a freshly installed win11. It was about 32-38 W(+/-5).

 

* 12600k, MSI Z690 PRO A, PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB M.2, Arctic Liquid Freeze 420, 3x 140mm fans (all stopped for the test), no OC, XMP on

 

Have yet to test it with unraid installed, but have to overcome some hurdles that came with the platform (e.g. onboard ethernet with intel 225-v not working, need for dedicated GPU since uhd770 has no supported method for sharing between VMs...). Pains of early adopting (or my personal incompetence/ignorance since this is my first build since ~7 years :D)

I use the 12600K + ASRock Z690 PG Riptide as solution. ASRock Z690 PG Riptide has 8 SATA3 + 3 M.2 + 1 PCIe 5.0 + 1 PCIe 4.0 + 3 PCIe 3.0 + 2.5G Eth , just RMB 1499 ,about $236.5, so cool !!!

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18 hours ago, 杨克强 said:

I use the 12600K + ASRock Z690 PG Riptide as solution. ASRock Z690 PG Riptide has 8 SATA3 + 3 M.2 + 1 PCIe 5.0 + 1 PCIe 4.0 + 3 PCIe 3.0 + 2.5G Eth , just RMB 1499 ,about $236.5, so cool !!!

I am also interested in the PG Riptide. How is the idle power draw? Is the NIC already working?

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/19/2022 at 2:56 PM, Acidcliff said:

 

Had a deeper look into that - thank you again for pointing that out. In fact while not being under load the GTX 1050 was running in P-Mode P0.
 

Instead of running a VM to get it down to P8 i used, which seems to work (haven't had yet the opportunity to measure the impact):

nvidia-smi --persistence-mode=1

 

 

Have you already tried powertop to further reduce the power consumption?

 

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Yep - applied all from powertop - but to be honest that didn't make too much of a difference (maybe since my HDDs are mostly spun down anyways).

 

But applying "powersave" as scaling governor made a huge difference bringing the System down about 5-10W to 47-50W*.

 

Maybe I'll look into undervolting - but overall I think I can be happy with the 50W for the setup.

*Current Setup:

CPU: Intel 12600k, GPU MSI GTX 1050 Areo, 5xHDDs (~32TB), 32 GB RAM 3600MHZ, MSI Z690 PRO A, PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB M.2, Arctic Liquid Freeze 420, 3x 140mm fans (all stopped for the test), no OC, XMP on, 1 VM running (Linux Debian), 12 Docker container Running (mainly home automation stuff)

Edited by Acidcliff
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  • 8 months later...
On 1/22/2022 at 3:43 AM, 杨克强 said:

I use the 12600K + ASRock Z690 PG Riptide as solution. ASRock Z690 PG Riptide has 8 SATA3 + 3 M.2 + 1 PCIe 5.0 + 1 PCIe 4.0 + 3 PCIe 3.0 + 2.5G Eth , just RMB 1499 ,about $236.5, so cool !!!

It seems ASRock Z690 PG Riptide is now end of life. Is there a similar mobo that people can recommend? Even better if it has 12 SATA instead of only 8.

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