Graphics card idle power usage in unraid server

[scorcho99 7]

I'm curious if anyone else has any numbers on some modern GPUs when used with unraid. I've been testing this out the past couple days with my limited selection of cards. I've found a couple weird things, like my nvidia cards seem to use more power when the VM is shutdown than at the desktop. But my AMD cards seem to be at their lowest when they're unloaded, albeit not by much. Any observations are of interest.

 

I'm testing with a killawatt and using subtraction with different cards swapped in. The idle power is a little noisy on this system but I'm pretty confident in the read +/-1watt

This is with a gold Antec power supply.

 

My GT710 seems to idle at 5watt, although I'm using it as a host card so perhaps it would do better with a driver loaded.

 

My R7 250 DDR3 seems to idle at 6watt

 

My 1060 3GB seems to idle at 14watt which seems high.

 

Has anyone gotten zerocore on AMD to work in a satisfactory way? It didn't seem to make much difference to be versus shutting down the VM. It appears to be broken in newer drivers as well, the fan only shut down when I loaded an old 14.4 driver in Windows 7. There are forum posts indicating it doesn't even work in Windows 10.

[ph0b0s101 0]

Hi scorcho99,

 

i am facing the exact same issue with my build. I am running a nvidia 1080 for my daily driver and gaming windows 10 vm. I have also loaded the "unraid nvidia" plugin, which provides the nvidia driver so the card can be used in docker containers as well. So I can issue the nvidia-smi command on the unraid cli. So there i can see, that the card alone hast an power draw of about 40-45 watt because they sit at Power State 0 (P0), which is the performance powerstate). So the card alone makes 50% of the hole power consumption of the entire system. When i run my windows vm and i issue the same command in the windows cli i can see that the card is in Power State 8 and draws only 12-14 watt, which is not good but okish with two monitors plugged in.

 

Unfurtunaltely i haven't found a way to bring the nvidia card to power state 8 during idling without running a windows vm. So this is really unsatisfing. So any hints / tipps are really desirable.

 

 

[Octa 1]

On 10/11/2019 at 12:15 PM, ph0b0s101 said:

Unfurtunaltely i haven't found a way to bring the nvidia card to power state 8 during idling without running a windows vm. So this is really unsatisfing. So any hints / tipps are really desirable.

 

 

I've found that forcing persistance mode does the trick. Open a terminal and "nvidia-smi -pm 1". Why? Dunno but it works in my 1060

[ph0b0s101 0]

Hi Octa,

thanks for that tipp. So have you also a Windows VM with GPU passthrough? If yes, did the vm work with this setting active?

[Octa 1]

Yes it does. But in order to get the power state 8 once you power off the VM you have to execute the command again.

 

As far as i can tell, the bahaviour is like the win VM sets the graphics card in power state 0 when is shutting down (of course if it wasn't a VM this doesn't matter), and then the host leaves it that way. I don't know if there is a way for QEMU to catch a shutting down machine and automatically set the persistance mode, i haven't researched that far.

Edited October 20, 2019 by Octa

[ph0b0s101 0]

Hi Octa,

 

so it seems that it helps to save some watts in idle without passthrough the gpu to vm. So I try to find a possibility to script the command after shutting down the vm. When I am succesful with that, I let you know.

[Octa 1]

Thank you, much appreciated.

 

Btw, worth noting that this also spins down tha fan/s, which was my main concern.

[ph0b0s101 0]

Ah thanks for that peace of information. Didn't noticed it at all, but my system is really quiet

[ViproXX 2]

On 10/22/2019 at 9:17 AM, ph0b0s101 said:

Hi Octa,

 

so it seems that it helps to save some watts in idle without passthrough the gpu to vm. So I try to find a possibility to script the command after shutting down the vm. When I am succesful with that, I let you know.

Hey, did you find a possibility to automate to power down the graphics card after shutting down the VM?

 

Greetings,

ViproXX

[ph0b0s101 0]

17 hours ago, ViproXX said:

Hey, did you find a possibility to automate to power down the graphics card after shutting down the VM?

 

Greetings,

ViproXX

Unfortunately not yet. I am a little bit busy at the moment so I haven't found the time to do some research 😞

[ViproXX 2]

I used the Plug-In "User Scripts" to put the drives only the VM uses to standby and to issue the nvidia-smi -pm 1 command. This is quite handy and works, although I have to trigger the script manually (in the Unraid-GUI) after shutting down the VM. One could set a schedule with cron for that, thou.

 

Stay healthy!