November 21, 201510 yr Norco RPC-2212 Athena Power AP-U2ATX45P PSU M5A78L-M LX PLUS AMD Phenom II X6 1045T @ 2700 AOC-SASLP-MV8 Hard drive layout attached as image. On bootup, without the array started my Killawatt says 105w or so. With some load, parity check, docker, and a VM, it bounces between 130w to 160w. This seems very heavy. I am figuring 1 dollar per wat, per year. If this is as high as I think it is, id like to find a way to lower this, with a reasonable break even point on the cost of hardware.
November 22, 201510 yr 105W from the mains sounds about right for a Phenom II x6 CPU based machine with a few drives when at idle - those AMD CPUs are not especially low power devices. You'd need to switch to a more power efficient CPU to gain a significant reduction. That might also dictate a change of motherboard as well. Any recommendations are highly dependent on your intended usage.
November 22, 201510 yr Author Is it true that each spinning drive uses about 5w and my HBA will use 5w? If so, that adds up to about 35w. I am about to invest in a new board anyway because I need more than 8GB of RAM. I would still be looking at 200-400 for a new board/cpu. Assuming I should save 35w of the original 70w left unspoken for, id have a 10yr break even point on hardware. Is my math way off here?
November 22, 201510 yr How often and for how long do your drives spin down? If your drives never spin down or are spun up more than 5% of the time you will need to adjust your usage patterns. I use a SSD as an application drive so power use is trivial for that. I let my hard drives spin down and they only spin up when transferring shows and movies to the Tivo, and the periodic writing of new shows or movies for archival. Power use from hard drives is minimal when used that way.
November 22, 201510 yr Author these numbers were taken right on bootup, so I expect all of the drives were up. Perhaps "IDLE" was not the best term to use. I would say that there is a fair amount of time that everything is down, except the SSD cache. It runs 24/7 Crashplan keeps at least 1 or 2 drives up while its backing up my data. But, otherwise, id say most are sleeping
November 22, 201510 yr With a BIOS update that M5A78L-M LX PLUS should support 16GB. That AMD is a 95W TDP processor similar to the one I use and I idle no where near 100W (with all 10 7200 RPM drives up and idle). I do use AMD Cool and Quiet (frequency governor) so the cores sit at 1400MHz until needed keeping power consumption lower. A low quality power supply (not 80+, low dollar 80+, or just old) can waste surprising amounts of energy.
November 22, 201510 yr Author With a BIOS update that M5A78L-M LX PLUS should support 16GB. That AMD is a 95W TDP processor similar to the one I use and I idle no where near 100W (with all 10 7200 RPM drives up and idle). I do use AMD Cool and Quiet (frequency governor) so the cores sit at 1400MHz until needed keeping power consumption lower. A low quality power supply (not 80+, low dollar 80+, or just old) can waste surprising amounts of energy. Well SOB... I have never heard of a BIOS update increasing memory support. Had I known this, I would have purchased larger DIMMs. I have 2x 4GB modules in there now. And 2x 2GB modules that I removed recently. (only 2 slots) How frustrating. On a positive note, my power went out today and since unraids reboot, its using significantly less memory now. So maybe I can prolong a memory upgrade....maybe. My PSU is probably about 5 years old now. When I purchased it, trying to find a 2U PSU with a single 12v rail was not an easy task indeed. Per your suggestion, I will enable cool n quiet to see what changes. I do believe I have that disabled right now. I may also look into replacing the PSU. I suppose there is no way, other than swapping it out, to check what kind of drops I may see?
November 22, 201510 yr Author Actually I just found my PSU. Its an iStarUSA CP-02046 Athena Power AP-U2ATX45P I have updated my original post to reflect this. It does not appear to be terribly efficient. I see no mention of this on any site.
November 22, 201510 yr Actually I just found my PSU. Its an iStarUSA CP-02046 I have updated my original post to reflect this. It does not appear to be terribly efficient. I see no mention of this on any site. That iStar probably makes a good hair/hand dryer. Seasonic has a 2U in 80+ Gold (SS-500L2U) for around $100, if it is not too long for the chassis.
November 22, 201510 yr Author lol - Nice comparison. Any way to ballpark what I might save switching to something like the seasonic? I really appreciate your input PSU Updated again. I found my actual PO for the item. Its even worse than the Istar Athena Power AP-U2ATX45P
November 22, 201510 yr lol - Nice comparison. Any way to ballpark what I might save switching to something like the seasonic? I really appreciate your input PSU Updated again. I found my actual PO for the item. Its even worse than the Istar Athena Power AP-U2ATX45P The 80 Plus Gold rating is at least 87% efficiency at 20% load, 90% at 50% load, and 87% at 100% load. Didn't see any efficiency ratings for the Athena, but a guess would have it around 65-70% at 50% load considering the age, typically 70-75% when new for non-80+ rated.
November 22, 201510 yr Community Expert I believe that for you need to switch to Intel platform to have a significant gains, as they are much more efficient, e.g., this server after bootup with all disks spun up uses 105W. Corsair TX650/Asrock B75 Pro3-M/Celeron G540/4GB/SASLP + Adaptec 1430SA/15 HDDs (WD green and Samsung Eco drives)
November 22, 201510 yr Yes. Changing power supplies might help a little, but even if the power supply was (say) more than 95% efficient (unlikely) then the overall idle power consumption for the system would still be around 80 watts or so. Changing to a modern i3 or i5 CPU with matching motherboard could get that down to 40 to 50 watts quite easily, possibly without needing to change the power supply, although if it is several years old it might be worth it just for the sake of reliability.
November 22, 201510 yr Community Expert If you are looking at this from a Cost-Benefit perspective, You need to be careful to do an realistic economic analysis. It appears that your max power reduction would be about 65 watts (105-40). That would save you about $65 per year based the costs you provided. Now figure what it will cost to achieve those savings and how long it will take to recover the costs of a new MB, CPU, memory, and PS.
November 22, 201510 yr A refresh Vishera idles much lower than those old Phenoms. My FX6300 on an M5A97 LE R2.0 idles at 30W, using a Corsair CS450M 80Plus Gold PSU. Even a FX8320E will idle sub-50W. What are you using for a video card? I'm using an old ATI RageXL 8MB PCI, which has a really low power consumption.
November 22, 201510 yr Keep in mind cool and quiet was not on for those measurments. Changing to an FX cpu as was suggested is a relatively small expense vs. a complete platform update. An i5 would be around $225, plus motherboard, an 8-core 95W FX can be had for $100 (microcenter.com). If your needing more than the 16GB ECC support or need iommu then you might want to consider Intel upgrade.
November 23, 201510 yr Author If you are looking at this from a Cost-Benefit perspective, You need to be careful to do an realistic economic analysis. It appears that your max power reduction would be about 65 watts (105-40). That would save you about $65 per year based the costs you provided. Now figure what it will cost to achieve those savings and how long it will take to recover the costs of a new MB, CPU, memory, and PS. You are spot on and this is the reason for my post. If I spend 300 to save 50 bucks a year, a 6 year break even point is hardly realistic. Now, if my system died or I had a use for the current hardware, say if a family member needed a new rig, that's a different story To answer the video card question, I am using on board graphics. So with no real certainty, it appears my best options are an FX could with a 2-3 year roi or wait till this hardware craps out
November 23, 201510 yr Depending on what you need CPU wise. The 1037u Celeron is a great option. A board with that CPU is under $100 easy. My Network Setup... 8 Disk Unraid - 1037u Kodi Box - 1037u Router 847 HP Laptop - Domain Controller and PBX Plus switch and modem PoE for Voip Phone and WAP draws ~150w It all depends on if that can do the CPU lifting you need.
November 23, 201510 yr Author I need some decent CPU Horsepower. I run several dockers, several VMs, Plex Transcoding, and crashplan Can someone explain how a 95w FX is a better option than my 95w phenom?
November 24, 201510 yr I need some decent CPU Horsepower. I run several dockers, several VMs, Plex Transcoding, and crashplan Can someone explain how a 95w FX is a better option than my 95w phenom? 95W FX will have 'e' suffix, such as FX-8320e. Using that model as example: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-Phenom-II-X6-1045T-vs-AMD-FX-8320E Key features are two more cores, higher clock, higher performance per watt, etc.. It will be a small to modest improvement and would address your wattage concerns, handle faster DDR3 memory, more 'horsepower', etc. There are other cpus that will fit your board, but this suggestion is one of the best cost/performance at $100 from microcenter.com and addresses your initial power consumption concerns along with 80+ gold or similar psu. Did you enable cool and quiet and Cstates in BIOS and take new power measurements?
November 24, 201510 yr Author That is a plan for today. I did a Parity check 2 days ago, and to my surprise, I found 23 errors, which has never happened before, so I have been waiting for a second parity check to finish before I shut the system down. I will report back later this evening.
November 26, 201510 yr Author I need some decent CPU Horsepower. I run several dockers, several VMs, Plex Transcoding, and crashplan Can someone explain how a 95w FX is a better option than my 95w phenom? 95W FX will have 'e' suffix, such as FX-8320e. Using that model as example: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-Phenom-II-X6-1045T-vs-AMD-FX-8320E Key features are two more cores, higher clock, higher performance per watt, etc.. It will be a small to modest improvement and would address your wattage concerns, handle faster DDR3 memory, more 'horsepower', etc. There are other cpus that will fit your board, but this suggestion is one of the best cost/performance at $100 from microcenter.com and addresses your initial power consumption concerns along with 80+ gold or similar psu. Did you enable cool and quiet and Cstates in BIOS and take new power measurements? Cool n Quiet is enabled already....thats unfortunate. I did not see Cstates. Is that somewhere that I am missing?
November 26, 201510 yr Cool and Quiet is better on the newer chips. They can idle much lower than the older Phenoms. At work the Poweredge R515 with two 6-core Opterons, 8x 3.5" 10k SAS drives and 2x 2.5" 15k SAS drives and 32GB RAM idles at 120W. That's a recent model dual chip AMD machine with redundant PSUs.
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