Reducing power consumption

[TiNas]

I am looking at reducing the power consumption of my system.

 

System specs:
ASRock H370M-ITX/ac Version

Intel Pentium Gold G5400 CPU @ 3.70GHz

Corsair DDR4 Valueselect 1x8GB 2666

Corsair PSU TX550M 550W

1 case fan that is set to 0rpm when system is idling

 

Storage:

Kingston SSD UV500 120GB (Cache)

WD Blue 3,5" (CMR, 64MB cache, 5400rpm), 2TB WD20EZRZ (Parity)

WD HDD 3.5" 1TB S-ATA3 64MB WD10EFRX Red (Data)

 

 

I am using both the ethernet ports on the system (2 different VLANs)

The system is running a VPN in Docker which is rarely used.

Homeassistant (running as a VM) with Zigbee gateway and is used as my NAS  backup drive.

 

 

Things I already done to reduce power consumption:

- Spin down harddrives after 4 hours

- Disable WIFI and Bluetooth controller

- Disable audio controller

- Made sure all the C states are enabled in the BIOS

- Turn of case fan below 50c CPU temp

- In unraid tweaks:

      - Disable Intel Turbo/AMD Performance Boost

      - At night turn Power Saving CPU Scaling Governor to 'power saving'

- Tried enabling powertop used auto-tune and it broke my Zigbee connection and didn't notice a difference in wattage used

 

 

My power consumption idles at around 28 - 31 watts.

I would like to see if I can lower the usage more.

 

Any ideas?

 

Edited February 20, 2023 by TiNas

[TiNas]

@mgutt I am not sure if you can help out. But noticed you have a lot of posts on power consumption. Would appreciate it if you could take a look at my post

Edited February 20, 2023 by TiNas

[BarbaGrump]

I run Unraid in a Proxmox VM, and haven't tried this it on a "normal" Unraid, but if I run it on my Proxmox host, it saves me a couple of Watts because if doesnt wake all cores if just one is needed if I'm understand it correctly

 

Check

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/status (you might have to change path somewhat)

If it says "active", you can change it to "passive"

echo "passive" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/status

 

If it works, add it to /boot/config/go

If not, change back with 

echo "active" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/status

 

*edit 

source: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1380386/permanently-setting-intel-pstate-driver-to-passive

Edited February 20, 2023 by BarbaGrump

[Daniel15]

On 2/20/2023 at 1:32 AM, BarbaGrump said:

if doesnt wake all cores if just one is needed if I'm understand it correctly

 

The "passive" mode for intel_pstate is mostly for older processors that don't support HWP (hardware-managed P-states). For processors that do support HWP, it's better to keep it in "active" mode and instead set energy_performance_preference to balance_power:

for x in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/; do echo balance_power > $x/energy_performance_preference; done