What's your idle power consumption?


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The power supply on my ancient server just bit the bullet, so I'm using it as an exuse to start from afresh.

 

The server is mainly used for Plex, NAS and home automation, so well need to be available 24/7. However I don't want to break the bank in running costs, so am looking for a build that will maybe idle around 40W.

 

I'm finding it hard to find decent idle power consumption for various systems, so my question is:

 

What CPU and components are you rocking, and what is your idle/average power consumption?

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I idle at 65 watts, but that's with two drives always spun up, a parity drive and a torrent/download drive, and 13 more on standby. I also have two drive controllers, a Dell Perc H310 and a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8. Each of these draws around 10 watts on its own I've noticed.

 

System specs:

M/B: ASRockRack E3C246D4U
CPU: Intel® Xeon® E-2288G CPU @ 3.70GHz
Memory: 32 GiB DDR4 Single-bit ECC

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1 hour ago, Tom3 said:

Using a Xeon D-1541 (8 core / 16 thread) 2.1 GHz, motherboard is Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F.

Idle power runs between 21 and 25 watts.  32G ECC RAM, NVMe Cache.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow, that's really nice. So if I look somewhere around the 50W TDP mark I could expect something sub 30W on idle

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6 hours ago, teedub said:

Wow, that's really nice. So if I look somewhere around the 50W TDP mark I could expect something sub 30W on idle

I haven't been following the discussion, but idle and TDP really have nothing to do with each other. TDP is a design spec that determines how much heat sink mass, airflow and overall heat rejection must be accounted for.

 

Two processors from the same die family, one with limited TDP, both will idle at nearly identical power. The difference at full load will be significant, with the low power model throttled back to reduce the amount of work done so it doesn't need as much cooling. However, it will take much longer to complete the same task. During that time, the rest of the system will still be running at full power, so the net effect is that a low TDP processor may actually take more power over the long term with the tradeoff being much lower peak draw.

 

Laptops are a good candidate for low TDP, servers, not so much.

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I think I win... or lose... overnight "idle" low is about 217 watts. But it's never really at idle.That includes:

 

2 8 core processors (32 threads)

128 GB ram

5 disk main array in various states of spun up and down

7 disk backup pool spun down

2 SSD cache up

4 SSD pool up

1 vm running with 2 rx580's

 

and some various dockers contributing to a few watts here and there.

 

1434187826_ScreenShot2020-10-02at1_20_53PM.thumb.png.b5e2878a1d5980c621e30d0adc21b5b4.png

 

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System specs:

M/B: Asus Z170-A

CPU: Intel Core i7 7700

Memory: 16 GiB DDR4

Storage: 5x HDD, 1xSSD (Cache)
Expansions: Dell H310

 

Parity check: 78-82W

All HDDs spun down: approx. 50W

S3 sleep (roughly 67% of the time, but can often stretch to 2-3 days): 16W (not sure how accurate my power meter is for sleep. I think it should be less)

 

Don't use any dockers or VMs which need to be on 24/7. Via WOL, server wakes up and is ready to stream in about 20 seconds or so, which is good enough for me (my old N54L, which does not support S3, was closer to 3 minutes). Due to frequent power outages I have battery backup for the house, so every watt saved helps to extend battery life. To save more power I really should shut down the server more often, but it would take longer to start up and the drives would spin up on every start up (they remain idle when server resumes from sleep).

 

Using a NUC to evaluate Home Assistant. Would probably keep using that (or similar) for home automation.

 

@Morrtin thanks for your nice format.

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  • 2 weeks later...

System details :

 

Model: Custom

M/B: ASRock B450 Gaming-ITX/ac Version - s/n: M80-D5009300599

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. Version P1.70. Dated: 12/17/2018

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Eight-Core @ 3700 MHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Enabled

Cache: 768 KiB, 4096 KiB, 16384 KiB

Memory: 32 GiB DDR4 (max. installable capacity 256 GiB)

Network: bond0: fault-tolerance (active-backup), mtu 1500
 eth0: 1000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500

Kernel: Linux 5.8.13-Unraid x86_64

OpenSSL: 1.1.1h

 

GPU: Nvidia QUADRO P2200

 

Storage: Array of 2xSSD ATA A400 KINGSTON 480Gb, Cache 1xSSD NVME A2000 KINGSTON

 

My UPS show idle at 67 Watts, but there's also an ubiquiti 5-Port TOUGHSwitch PoE on the same UPS (this switch deliver power to two other switches via POE), so i think my idle is less...

 

i adjusted the RYZEN TDP to 35 Watts in the bios, and i'm using a script to enable nvidia persistence mode, it may help to reduce consumption...

Edited by doobyns
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S3-Sleep .... 2,6W
Boot (peak 2sek) .... 225W
No-Load all HDDs OFF .... 49W
Full-Load all HDDs OFF .... 101W
No-Load all HDDs ON .... 107W
Full-Load all HDDs ON .... 158W
Parity-Check .... ~ 120W
Transcoding 1x 720p .... ~ 65W
Transcoding 2x 720p .... ~ 70W

Edited by Zonediver
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  • 2 months later...

Hi

I used to have a Dell 3050 micro i3 7100T with SSD and 20gb of ram as a server.

 

12w at idle.

 

it's fast (at least for my needs), cheap if used, gigabit ethernet, 6 usb 3.0, ultra small, cool

now a changed for a ryzen 3600 (I regreted with 60w+ at idle and not noticing signifcant performance except for videogames).

 

the only downside is it's crappy UHD 630 graphics, maybe a problem with plex

Edited by Groy
grammar
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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...
On 1/17/2021 at 11:50 AM, harm said:

i3-9100

16Gb

2 x 4Tb

2 x 1TB SSD

4 x USB (zWave, Zigbee, RFlink, smart-meter)

1 x USB boot device

 

Active Dockers:

  • Postgres
  • MariaDB
  • HomeAssistant
  • PiHole
  • MQTT
  • Deconz
  • OtMonitor
  • DSMRreader
  • Nextcloud

 

8.5W average

@harm Which Mainboard are u using? And what Kind of RAM ? WD Red HDD ?

 

Can anyone go under this W ? xD

Edited by UNRA1DUser
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/17/2021 at 11:50 AM, harm said:

i3-9100

16Gb

2 x 4Tb

2 x 1TB SSD

4 x USB (zWave, Zigbee, RFlink, smart-meter)

1 x USB boot device

 

Active Dockers:

  • Postgres
  • MariaDB
  • HomeAssistant
  • PiHole
  • MQTT
  • Deconz
  • OtMonitor
  • DSMRreader
  • Nextcloud

 

8.5W average

Can you kindly let us know the Motherboard you are using please ? @harm

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  • 2 weeks later...

Woww 8.5W. What is PSU ? 

 

With my old config (i5-4440, 16GB, 2x1Tb ssd), I’m at 22W average on idle. 
 

I know diff between 22w and 8.5w is about 20€ of electricity by year but I need to lower my power consumption. Thinking to change CPU and MB !

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

Hi all,

 

I'm struggling to choose the right HDWR for my new unraid server. My objective is zero noise, lowest possible power consumption with plex transcoding capabilities and at least 8 threads for my VMs.

 

I thought to found the right config with this:

 

https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/IMB-V1000 CPU (V1605B, 4C/8T, 2GHz, TPD 12-25W) - CPU mark 6876 !!

 

The problem that I discovered that PLEX doesn't support HW AMD trascoding 😞

 

Now the problem is to find a right config to have a power consumption of about 15w in idle. Actually my idea is to use this:

 

CPU i3-10100 / 10300

MB ASRock B560M-ITX/ac

 

What do you think? Anyone have tested this cpu? Could be possible to limit the frequency and tune the undervolting setting to achieve this objective?

 

Any suggestion?

 

Thanks

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

- G6400

- H410 itx

- 2x4GB

- nvme cache

- 3x 4TB WD Red

- R7 240 GPU

- 1x120mm case fan which is always running

 

My idle consumption (disks spun down) is about 20-21W. Without the GPU its about 15-16W. Thats with everything unused turned off and bios tuned for power savings (eg. turned off wifi antennas, bluetooth, onboard sound, turned on pcie aspm...). I'm running the conservative cpu governor as it makes zero difference in power draw but a giant difference in overall speed.

 

 

On 7/16/2021 at 9:25 AM, Surfparadise said:

Now the problem is to find a right config to have a power consumption of about 15w in idle. Actually my idea is to use this:

 

CPU i3-10100 / 10300

MB ASRock B560M-ITX/ac

 

What do you think? Anyone have tested this cpu? Could be possible to limit the frequency and tune the undervolting setting to achieve this objective?

 

Any suggestion?

 

Thanks

 

 

I do not use Plex with transcoding, but if thats your objective even something like G5400/G6400 is plenty powerful for such task and might be closer to your power target then an i3.

 

Cheers

Edited by Ver7o
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