OK, just for a giggle I've ordered some odds and sods to see if I can build an UnRAID box that uses less power then my current rig, but can still run Plex Server acceptably.

 

Spec as follows:

 

Asus AM1M-A motherboard (£33)

Athlon APU 5350 (4x2.05GHz) (£42)

2x2GB DDR3L-1600 (recycled),

2x SSD (recycled),

2x HDD (recycled),

Startech PEXSAT34SFF PCI-E SATA card with SFF8087, (£49)

SFF8087 to 4x SATA cable (torn down backplane out of an old HP Microserver).

300W PSU.

 

I'm hoping this will use half the power of my current UnRAID box, and be fast enough to do the limited transcoding I do (720p content transcoded down to 480p).  It should be as the APU is faster than the Celeron J1900 which I know works fine for my uses.

 

Current rig running idle: 49W.

 

The new parts are due tomorrow, so I'll update as I go along. 

 

Edit:

For posterity and completeness, at the time of writing my "current rig" was as follows:

i5-3570S, 2x8GB Kingston DDR3L-1600, AsRock C216WS.

All other things being equal, the Passmark score of 2608 is 37% better than the J1900 score of 1896.  Performance should be fine, and I'm really curious how your low power system works out.  For a server that is running 24/7 the annual number of hours is 8760.  I use a three year life for hardware such as this, although one may reasonably expect a system to last much longer.  I'm reading your point as that the cost of the electricty used to power a server can be a very significant portion of the total cost of ownership and should be penciled out so that one can reasonably weigh the costs vs benefits of moving to a low power system.

 

To belabor the point, compare two systems that have average power consumption of 50 W and 75 W.  Over three years the total electricty consumed will be 1314 and 1971 kWh respectively.  With an electricity cost of £0.14 per kWh, the three-year cost to run those servers will be £184 and £276. 

 

 

I have a thing about power consumption.  We have a 5kW PV array on the roof, so every watt saved when it's dark is bringing the break-even date closer.  I already have all I can running during the day while it's sunny.

 

I'm currently looking at a 225W night-time power use, but I'm hoping to cut that down below 200W with the server doing it's nightly downloading.  I'd aim for less than 190W total idle, which means the server needs to use about 20W. The current machine is rarely below 50W, usually more towards 70W.  Everything else is turned off apart from the PVRs, fridge and electric clocks/timers.

 

I already have the server doing it's housekeeping during the day.  Unfortunately the PVRs are hard-coded to housekeep at 3am, which tends to be the time my downloads happen, so I can already see the spike in power consumption at that time.

I have the board up and running.  The AM1M-A is surprisingly small, it's about 1" shorter than a normal uATX board, and much narrower.  There's basically only four chips on the board, Asus' EPU, the Realtek NIC and Realtek audio chip, and the SuperI/O chip to run the serial and parallel ports.

 

I'm still building parity, and currently it's using 41W.  I should see sub-30W when the drives spin down.  Currently running off a 150W 1U PSU.

Idling with the drive spun down it uses 24W.  That's a few watts more than the i3 at idle, but under load it uses 40W compared to nearly 80W of the i3.

Performance is "adequate".  It's no lighting machine, but it does do the job just fine.  Seems to run about the same as the Celeron G1620 I have in my test box which is dual 2.7GHz.

 

I'm just setting up a small Windows 7 VM on it to see how well that runs.

 

I'm not sure that I'll use this machine in anger, I'll probably run with my old C216WS board as it has ECC support on the Celeron.  The C216WS uses more power, but if I can virtualise my 24/7 machine (currently running on a DN2820 NUC) then it should work out about the same.

 

In a serious quandary about this at the moment...

 

 

with the server doing it's nightly downloading

 

Not sure if I understand this well, but there are download manager running on routers.

Perhaps that's a solution for your downloading?

with the server doing it's nightly downloading

 

Not sure if I understand this well, but there are download manager running on routers.

Perhaps that's a solution for your downloading?

 

"Downloading" is probably a simplified description.  I run Sonarr, NZBGet, Deluge which search for shows, download and then manage and place the resulting files.  I think it's probably beyond a router's capability. 

 

To be fair, Plex is the biggest program I run.  All the rest is incidental. I could probably run everything on a NUC with a Drobo plugged in to it, but where's the fun in that? I also have an Asustor NAS that I can run everything on, but it's pretty dull. 

You could also save some more energy if you stop transcoding and just use disk shares to play your content directly...

You could also save some more energy if you stop transcoding and just use disk shares to play your content directly...

 

Thanks for your useful contribution.  Could you explain how I play content directly to my web browser at work? 

 

 

Everything is run via DirectPlay when I'm at home (I use Plex Home Theatre on Windows exclusively).  It's just the stuff I watch when away from home on mobile or via the web interface that's transcoded due to my slow upstream internet connection at home (720kb profile is the absolute maximum it can sustain, and even that skips now and again).

Agreed, transcoding requires certain cpu resources but it won't run the whole night (probably).

 

I know NZBGet runs on several routers.

I don't know about the other apps.

But while downloading is the most time consuming thing, "managing and placing" can probably be done

during day times when your PV array is online again?

 

Setting up NZBGet on the router is probably also "fun".

Thanks for your useful contribution.  Could you explain how I play content directly to my web browser at work? 

Maybe you should just do your job when you're at work and don't watch crappy quality video's. You see, i can be bitchy too

Seriously, i did not know about your specific needs, but in a home situation, skipping transcoding is an option.

... Maybe you should just do your job when you're at work and don't watch crappy quality video's.

 

:)

Have you tried S3 with either of these systems?  Typical S3 power draw is 2-4 watts, so if you could get this to work well you'd easily be well under your nighttime power consumption goal.  A sleep timer will "wake up" the system to do the housekeeping, so as long as the system is "S3 friendly" (not all are) that would keep your power consumption a good bit lower than you're seeing now.

 

I did some testing last night.

 

The AMD system cannot beat my Haswell i3 in any way as far as power consumption goes.  The Haswell idling (HDDs spun down, SSDs active, 4 Dockers, 1 Windows 7 VM) uses 18.5W.  The AMD running exactly the same install of UnRAID, same drives, same SATA card uses 24W. 

 

I used my little Kill-A-Watt to record power consumption over 30 minutes while I did the same things (viewed a 5 minute clip via Plex, copied files back and forward off the array, etc), and the Haswell ended up using 30Wh.  The AMD doing the same used 43Wh.  The AMD was under load longer, so power consumption was in total higher. Idle power was also higher.

 

I'm really surprised by the results.

 

Specs of the two machines:

 

AMD Athlon APU 5350, Asus AM1M-A board, 2x8GB Kingston DDR3L-1600, StarTech SATA controller, 2x500GB Crucial BX100, 2x8TB Seagate Archive v2, 300W Supermicro 80Plus Bronze PSU

i3-4350, MSI B85M-Eco, 2x8GB Kingston DDR3L-1600, StarTech SATA controller, 2x500GB BX100, 2x8TB Seagate Archive v2,  300W Supermicro 80Plus Bronze PSU

 

I'm probably going to use the AM1 as a HTPC, to replace an increasingly wobbly old Pentium G620 machine I have in the bedroom.

nzbget was written to run on a router.  If you have a "fast" download speed, it's likely to choke, though. 

 

I'm not surprised at your power consumption results.  The Haswell CPUs and chipsets are extremely power efficient.  I built my wife a new desktop a few months ago with an i7-4790 with 16GB of RAM => and even this beast idles around 20w.

This thread is exactly what I'm looking to acheive.  The lower the power consumption, the better!

My current Rig (specs in signature) uses 40W in Idle. Which means that the cache drive is spun up, while all the others are spun down.

 

I am pretty happy with it. Especially because S3 ist working flawlessly it is only use approx. 8 hours per day.

It also handles downloads etc, but because of the clever S3 setup it goes to sleep when finished.

OK, so I've just ordered a few bits, just to play with.  I'll be interested to see what power consumption will be like.

 

Supermicro X10SBA (Celeron J1900 10W)

2x4GB Kingston DDR3L-1600 DIMMs

 

I'll stuff them in my InWin MS04 case, power it off my 150W 1U PSU, and see how it goes. 

 

Board is due next week.

Board arrived.  I had some baffling issues getting the case LEDs hooked up to the Supermicro board (they use a proprietary layout).  So, it turned out my Supermicro case's ribbon cable to the front LED/button panel hooked right up to the board, so I'm using that case instead.

 

Running off my little Silverstone 300W SFX PSU, I'm seeing 16W idle, and a whole, staggering 37W building parity with 3 HDDs (one is an enterprise 7200rpm drive, too!) and 2 SSDs running.

 

I'm very pleased with the performance of the X10SBA and it's J1900.  So far.

That's a VERY nice power consumption figure !!  It actually idles lower than my Atom-based system while providing nearly triple the "horsepower" 

That's a VERY nice power consumption figure !!  It actually idles lower than my Atom-based system while providing nearly triple the "horsepower" 

 

Agreed.  I suspect that running it off a PicoPSU would bring it down below 15W easily.  The PSU I'm using is the smallest and most efficient I have.  I'm pretty happy with the outcome, anyway. FAR better results than the AMD machine.

So how does it work for Plex?

 

I run some dockers on my setup, and recently one of them is plex (the rest are SickRage/CP/BtSync/kodi headless). I only really use it to stream to my iphone while i'm on the train, I have pi's otherwise around the house.

 

How many streams/transcoding/etc do you think you can get with that J1900? I like the setup of that board (6 sata + msata, and intel nic, and a pci-e slot) and with a super low power draw.

 

I'd love to replace my c2q9650 setup. I'm almost scared to figure out how much i'm currently using at idle, but surely its WAY more than even 40w while idle.

I wouldn't count on a J1900 doing any transcoding.

 

 

your C2Q-9650 has a passmark of 4263.

 

The J1900 has a passmark of 1885.

 

My Celeron G1840 has a passmark of 2939 and it struggles to transcode a stream.