My current setup is in my signature but I am not utilising it as much as I thought I would. I want to downgrade to a more power efficient rig, sell the graphics card and just run dockers and the odd VM. My current system idles at about 100W.

 

So as I see it my approaches are (1) just change my 14 core E5 processor to a lower power v4 one and see if I can tweak BIOS settings etc, perhaps implement sleep hours during the night and so on to lower general running costs. Alternatively (2) replace the motherboard, CPU and memory with something else like a modern Pentium Gold or 8th gen i3 (for Plex transcoding)

 

I am based in the UK and pay about 14p per kW/h.

 

Any ideas? I don't think I can re-use my memory with a 1151 motherboard and i3 so would need to sell that and buy some more. My E5 is one where I have BIOS unlocked it to get an all-core boost of 3.2GHz across all 14 cores. It would be nice to have hardware transcoding as I share my library with friends and it often transcodes.

 

Edited June 18, 20197 yr by planetwilson
update

When my calculations are right you pay about 10 pounds per month when it idles...that is not that much. At least to change your whole setup and eventually investing new money for saving like a max of 5 pounds per month, IF you are able to get it down to 50W...

 

I would just let it run like that.

100W = 0.1KWh / hour = 876 KWh / year = 73 KWh/month = £10.22/month.

 

 

Let's be super optimistic and say you can cut that down to 25W i.e. 1/4. That is a saving of £7.67/month = £91.98/year.

(note that even my old mini-ITX Xeon-E3 v5 server without a GPU idles at 30W with all disks spun down, there's no way you can get to 25W!)

 

That means even in the most optimistic scenario, it will take you at least 2-3 years to break even. Not worth it.