Power consumption sanity check, and new build (Intel and Ryzen owners, help wanted!)

[-Daedalus]

Hi all,

 

Electricicy getting more expensive these days, I'm taking a closer look at my server's current power usage, and eyeing up a more power efficient build.

 

At the moment, my server idles at 140W. All drives spun down, nothing running. 170W with drives spinning.

Hardware: 13 8-18TB drives, 2 SATA SSDs, 2 NVME drives, 2 9207-8i controllers, an X-540-T2 NIC, and a 3900X, running on an X470D4U

 

The controllers use around 10W each, and the NIC can use around 15-20W. Let's assume another 5W each for the solid state storage, and that means my CPU is pulling around 80W at pretty much zero load, which seems high. I have turbo enabled, CPU governor set to power save.

 

Can anyone with anything similar share numbers, in case I might have missed something here?

 

 

 

Second, I'm thinking of switching to something like an i5 13500, for Plex to use the iGPU rather than CPU at the moment.

What are people's thoughts on this? I assume power consumption is pretty low while transcoding but it's a difficult thing to find numbers on. Anyone have a better idea? 

[SirReal63]

Ryzen 7 5700G, X-470 Gaming Plus Max, 32 gigs Ram, 3-HGST 7200 rpm 8tb Helium drives, 2-HGST 7200rpm 4tb drives which will be replaced by more 8tb drives soon, 1-500mb NVME cache, 2-80mm Noctua fans, 3-120mm Noctua fans, an Icy Dock 3 bay cage.  I run 2 active dockers, Agent DVR (which runs always and records farm activity) and Jellyfin.

 

All drives spun up and dockers running, I idle between 66 and 90 watts per my ups.

All drives spun up and dockers off I run at 60 watts

All drives spun down and dockers off it runs at 30 watts

 

Prior to the 5700G I ran a 2700X and a Quadro p400 and with all drives spun up and dockers running was about 135 to 184 watts.  I direct play but audio would usually transcode.  I dropped power usage and gained passmark score with just a CPU swap and removing the Quadro.  I also removed my 9307-8i when I went to the 8tb drives so that helped as well. 

I almost never go above 20% cpu utilization except while loading a movie and that drops back to 10% or less almost instantly so in reality I could get away with a much less powerful cpu, you probably could as well, the 3900x wasn't really an energy efficient cpu just like the 2700x I used.  If your cpu utilization remains low, turn off turbo

 

I dropped the most watts by going to a newer architecture 65w tdp cpu over the older 105w tdp cpu but all of the changes helped.  If you are transcoding a lot the Intel IGP makes sense.

[-Daedalus]

Thanks for the response. That's significantly lower than mine alright. I know the HBAs and NIC will be pulling a certain amount of power (and probably the backplane as well, come to think of it), but my idle draw still seems high, though I suppose that's what happens with a 4-year-old architecture at this point.

 

I'd like to go intel for iGPU, and I like the idea of having game server stuff on performance cores, and unRAID stuff on efficiency cores. Only downside is LGA 1700 server boards are expensive, and there aren't many consumer boards that offer the layout or features that I'm after.

[SirReal63]

How much cpu utilization do you use?  You may be better served by going to fewer and larger drives.  Running 18 drives and the associated hardware will result in higher electrical consumption, even at idle the drive hardware is consuming electricity.  You also need to consider how long it will take for a 50 watt drop to be offset by the expense of getting a 50 watt drop.

[-Daedalus]

Well I'm looking at it because I'm maxing out CPU some of the time (4K/HDR/HEVC library) with enough users, so I'd be upgrading for perf reasons anyway, I'm just thinking to reduce power while I'm at it, given that having that CPU stuck at 100% for hours at a time doesn't feel great.

 

I hear you on ROI. My server at the moment is costing around €35-40 per month to run, so if I could cut idle power by 50W and lots-of-plex-power by maybe 100W(?), the savings there would be enough for a couple of coffees a month, at least.

 

Larger drives would be nice, but I've been continually expanding the server as the content grows, so I'll just be phasing out the 8TB drives with 18/20TB ones as needed.