Last weekend my server kinda died. Boot loop before OS, probably a mainboard issue. Since the Hardware is 10 years old (Supermicro X10SL7-F, Xeon 1230v3, 16GB ECC, 650W Seasonic Focus Gold PSU) I didn't do much troubleshooting figuring it was time for some new hardware anyways.

The Supermicro Board has an onboard 8i HBA and 6 SATA ports. For the additional needed ports I was using a 4 port SATA PCIe x1 card and a LSI SAS 9300-16i (8 disks attached).

For that old server I never did much power consumption optimization with powertop. Only thing I did was Tips And Tweaks set to Power save.

Idle was 65W with all drives spun down (24 HDDs and 1 SATA SSD for Cache).

New Build:

• Asrock Z690 Steel Legend (has 8 onboard SATA ports)

• Intel i3-14100 (iGPU for Plex HW transcoding)

• 16GB DDR4 Kingston Memory I already had

• 2x 2TB Viper VP4300 Lite NVMe SSDs for new cache pool (were on sale, to eventually replae the old single SATA SSD as cache)

• Corsair RM850e ATX Power Supply (to have some room to max out the HDDs to 30, I know I probably don't need the wattage but with that many disks I was more concerned with the max load on the 12V rail)

• LSI SAS 9300-16i from the old server, now with 16 disks attached

• 4 port SATA PCIe x1 card (because I was missing one SATA port)

• same amount of 120mm Arctic PWM fans

The new server now draws 85W in idle with all disks spun down.

This is with powertop --auto-tune (gave about 4W less) and one of the NVMe SSDs as unassigned (won't spin down). I currently removed the second NVMe from the CPU M.2 Slot thinking that might be the cause to prevent deeper c-states.

I am on Unraid 7.1.4, I installed the RTL8125(B) PCI Drivers App.

I disabled CPU Turbo in BIOS, activated all ASPM settings (although I think the 9300-16i and the 4 Port SATA card don't support it anyways), enabled all c-states and package c-states settings in BIOS, enabled SATA Aggressive Link Power Management in BIOS, Tips And Tweaks set to Power save.

Unraid dashboard always shows the CPU at 3465 MHz, which I think is just a visual bug because powertop is showing lower frequencies.

Current powertop and lspci ASPM output screenshots are attached.

I have found the reddit posting on how to enable hidden ASPM settings using Windows, which would be the next thing I would try but I am unsure that would really do much with the HBA and PCIe SATA controller potentially not supporting ASPM at all.

I was expecting new hardware to have less power consumption than 10 year old components.

I don't think the difference in PSU (potentially less efficient at idle load because of more wattage), 1 additional NVMe SSD and more disks attached to the 9300-16i should account for 20W more power usage.

What else can I do?

Edited July 24, 2025Jul 24 by Agamemnon
typos

14 hours ago, Agamemnon said:

I have found the reddit posting on how to enable hidden ASPM settings using Windows, which would be the next thing I would try but I am unsure that would really do much with the HBA and PCIe SATA controller potentially not supporting ASPM at all.

I feel your pain as I have an ASRock Z690 RS Pro and a 13100, currently I'm at 46W idle though.

Powertop Idle stats are similar to yours with pck c-state not going over c2.

Booting Windows is a PITA so I'm studying this method : https://github.com/datasone/setup_var.efi

I already found the arguments I need for my BIOS just need the courage to do it !

Next time I upgrade my server hardware I will carefully check for ASPM support.