Hi Wolfgang, nice video, I just got myself a fujitsu computer with D3417 motherboard, with 4 HDD an NVME ssd and a sata SSD, I use it as a NAS with OMV and ZFS and it works great, and I'm able to get C8 state with powertop --auto-tune. But I'm not sure how to set it up to get the maximum power efficiency. I don't have a power meter yet but the HDDs don't seem to stop spinning even if I used the appropriate setting in OMV. I'm also not sure how to set it up so that it goes into an "idle" state when it's not really doing stuff ? Not sure how to monitor these things kin debian (BTW I'll get my power meter soon)
So true. A server is 90% of the time waiting for something to do but runs 7x24. A desktop is only running when it is needed. Therefore optimizing for idle power is a good approach.
@@martinmusli3044if you're using it for services (like Plex, wifi management, diagnostics) then no. If you're just using the home server to do ad-hoc tasks (test server, storage server that's not expected to be up the whole time) then yes... In my case i have both, my NAS is only on when it's being used, my virtualisation server is low power and always on because it manages my wifi (fw updates, managed roaming etc)
I would also point out that even if the server is doing something, it's rarely at 100%. A system capable of idling at very low power consumption, is often very efficient when slightly loaded. So even if the server is doing something, it's probably a low load anyway. Home assistant for example runs on a potato basically, so having it doing something isn't really affecting your power consumption, and the server it's still basically idling even when doing something. Same thing for a NAS service, the only thing you have to add is hdd spinning, but still, if your idle is 20W, you're still going to be more efficient when the HDD are spinning that a system that idles at 35W.
Unrelated but I really like the shirts you're wearing during your videos! Thanks for this efficiency series, I really feel like more people should be invested in running gear with as low power consumption as possible.
People actually start to put 4090 cards in their home labs more frequently now due to ML an AI tools becoming more popular, for example Stable Diffusion for image generation, rope and deepfake for videos. They all need a lot(!) of VRAM and cloud GPU instance offerings are expensive due to high demand.
Regarding HDDs spin up and that pico psu can't handle it. It might sound counterintuitive but second power supply just for hdd's would do the trick. Regarding small factory desktop PC's - ThinkCentre M910q I have uses around 6Watt with Windows 11 and Plex.
Mine is. Just took me $60k in parts and $15k in labor and lots of head scratching to get there. But it (my off grid solar system) is designed for two homes, a big workshop, and a future business building (think a smaller version of LTT in home and garden niches). But I still watch power usage, my solar setup is large, but not infinite (30k watts continuous available, but at full load, my batteries (120 KWH) would deplete in four hours at night and cloudy days are an issue). Should last a week with normal usage during a week of cloudy weather if I watch what I’m doing (no big power tool and dust collector use).
@@silverbackag9790 I'd just like to note that your electricity still comes at an opportunity cost where yes, you are now not paying for it, but every watt of wasted energy could instead be used mining bitcoin which would actively generate you money instead (sort of assuming you're not selling the energy itself, but same applies there) So instead of just thinking about money spent, loss of money gained is effectively the same.
It was a great video Wolfgang. After a week of watching CPU and GPU reviews featuring insane power demands, it was refreshing to see power efficiency considered for computing tasks.
murica home lab: i bought 4 dell r710 of ebay and run them 24/7 german homelab: raspberry pi or die. for the 'murica peapole here: in germany Power can cost (depending on region) up to 55ct/kwh. you can literally go bankrupt compiling gentoo XD
I admire your patience, and level responses to the rude folks out there. Sorry about that. I hope to someday build my homelab, and you're videos keep me informed. It's keeping that dream alive Thank you!
Now that's proper engagement. It's always great when you upload a helpful and interesting video. It's even better when response to community feedback turns into another video, going deeper on the same topic. Nice one!
With rolling blackouts being a normal thing on our power grid these days trying to reduce your power consumption has become a necessity here to be able to keep things running on ones backup power solutions. Researching a replacement server as we speak as I've ran into a little RAM limitations on my current server so trying to find an equivalently efficient solution (20-30w) and at the same time solve the limitation and upgrading the setup, so I'm finding these videos useful 👍
For the first time in seeing Western countries talking about blackouts and power supply costs which the American channels talks like it didn't exist or matter to them ..
Your suggestions are good, but they often require people spending money on equipment that they may not already have. I think the first thing a person should do, if low power consumption is the goal, is assess what they need and only buy equipment as powerful as what is needed. If they use a component of a higher spec than necessary, then it'll not only cost more to purchase, but likely consume more power too. For example, if some only needs a file server, why not use a 2.5" USB3 HDD connected to your router? A router is usually always on. You need not buy anything new (unless your router doesn't have a USB3 port) and you have storage that can always be accessed for probably somewhere between 3-9w router power consumption and 3w HDD consumption while in use (while HDD heads are parked it will use much less power, fractions of a watt). BTW, certain models of router use much more electricity than others and in some parts of the world the difference between a router that uses 5w and one that uses 15w, will perhaps be 50 Euros or more per year - some routers (WIFI 6 mainly?) use closer to 30/40w. If you have no need for these capabilities, then this is just money flushed down the drain.
Absolutely! This video was targeted at homelab enthusiasts, who would probably already have some servers at home. And in some cases, depending on how power hungry your current hardware is and how expensive your electricity is, you might actually save some money by selling your current hardware and replacing it with a more power-efficient option. Other than that, definitely some good points, and I will consider making a video about super-budget low power hardware (e.g. using your router as a mini-NAS, like you said)
You could get something like a Beelink GR9/GTR5 with an AMD 5900 HX cpu. It's costs around the same as Mac Mini, uses around 2x the power as a mac mini on full load, but it's also about 2x as fast. Idles around 6w.
ehh, you can get low power managed switches but only up to like 8 ports. I think TP-Link SG 108E is the lowest power managed switch for 8 ports. its like < 3W fully utilized.
That video was a huge help to me and it just randomly popped up on youtube. I’m now trying to assemble a power saving server based on that spreadsheet and I’ll be saving tons of money on electricity (totally justifying the expensive hardware). Many thanks from a frustrated Euro nerd feeling the power squeeze!
Thanks for the video, Wolfgang :) Can't wait to see more of your homelab adventures! And definitely these QA videos are a nice change of pace. Take care.
You explained well problems that many people interpret efficiency wrong.The most efficient setup is the setup that does the job you want it to do the cheapest. So if you have only light tasks it is overkill and not efficient to use a 4090 like someone mentioned. Sure output frames/sec per watt might be good but if you don't need that much power you are very wastefull. I have a homeserver that has several tasks and one way i saved power is combining tasks to one machine. So my VmWare host runs a virtual NAS and a virtual router and a virtual windows machine. Combining did mean 1 time the idle powerdraw instead of 3 times. For the router example i run PfSense. Starting that VM and creating a lot of traffic i only increase about 3 to 4 watts. I cannot find a physical box that has the same routing performance that only uses that little. Sure the host has a idle power but that is lower then 3 seperate devices idle power. I invested in the smallest titanium 80+ powersupply i could find (400W) which was more expensive but the 12 year warrenty was enough for me because i already had the experience that no mayor brand PSU i ever owned that is working 24/7 365 days a year makes it past about 6 to 7 years. So in case of this one making it 12 years or i case it dies and i get a new one i win.
Some people just cannot understand that the challenge is the fun part of the project. It's really easy to turn all the knobs up and add power, making something efficient is a much more analytical engineering task.
The Ryzen 1000-series hat a lot of issues, including freeze bugs. Don't think it'll be resolved anymore as those who care enough (and have the skills or money) have moved on to later series CPUs. It's support for x86 emulation (in x64 mode in simple terms) was also super broken iirc. In short: Stay away from those CPUs, later ryzens are fine
Although some of the consumer CPUs support ECC there are a lot of Xeon E3-1200 series L CPUs that supports ECC and have a TDP of just 25W. I like the Fujitsu TX1330 servers as they draw very low power compared to the other servers. Only downside is that the license to enable KVM capability is bound to the server and quite expensive...
There was a question about a managed low power switch. Once I started to look into my home lab's power burners, my fancy catalyst was high up the line (200W). I replaced that with a zyxel GS1900-24E which is a managed switch with plenty of features and runs between 8 to 11W. That pushed the usage down by a lot. Now I'm looking into the servers.
Apart from power ....A video idea on choosing hardware for Linux(Desktop & Server)? Pple know #AMD is best on graphics but what about CPU? @Chris Titus Tech and @Distrotube need to join this chat...
Re ECC, it's not like Xeons are necessarily expensive or power hungry either. I have a 12 core Haswell Xeon in my NAS, and according to intel-undervolt it draws under 30W under full non-AVX load, ~1W idle. It was 65€ when I bought it (from an EU seller because I live in EU), and there were 45€ units available on Aliexpress. Sure the base clock is 1.8GHz and it won't boost beyond 2.5GHz but it's still faster in MT loads than the i7-6800K it replaced. And C-states work at least up to C6 in stock Debian.
Hey there, nice video! May I ask what's your setup in 7:10 ? I'm using a HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Tower with i5-7600T, 2x 4TB WD Red Pro (3.5"), 1x 240GB SSD, 32GB DDR4-2133 (non ECC) RAM. --> Total 125$ Idle around 21W with Proxmox and 1 VM. Will add like ~5 more VM's and assume Idle state will rise up to 30W+ Thought about upgrading to i7-7700 since its same price for me. Did I do a bad choice with the setup to achieve a low power consumption server?
Regarding the Question on powerefficient Managed Switches: Have a look at Netgears GSS108E switches. They can to VLAN tagging and don't consume that much power. Another cool feature ist: one can disable the LEDs!
Hello, great videos man :) you mentioned some embeded MoBos, In my TrueNAS Core build i got my hands on Supermicro 4U 16bay case and this tiny MoBo ( X10SDV-4C-TLN2F ), it works realy fine for small server, a lot of features like Low power XeonD CPU, ECC RAM support, 10Gbit networking, IPMI, full 16x PCIe 3.0 (supports bifubrication, so you can buy riser and split it to 2x 8 ), M.2 slot and some SATAs. Its an older unit, but todays prices are afordable :) would say these kind of boards are golden for low power, at least thats why i bought it :)
Managed switches: I recently got Aruba 1930 JL683B. In IDLE (no ports connected), it uses a bit more than the mikrotik, around 25W. However, you also get up to 195W POE available. Also, there is a fan inside, but it's pretty quiet. I hear the fan is worse in the (older?) A version.
thunderbolt (chipset to provide TB functionality to a PC) draws a lot of power. There's a topic that is often forgotten in this videos (including yours): remote management. Minimum requirement: vPRO (allows to have a remote KVM at HW level, allowing to also enter the BIOS), ideal: remote management HW (HP iLO, Dell iDRAC) and these sadly can be game changers depending on the implemntation; as an example iDRAC 7 on 12th gen PowerEdge server draw 10w (whether the system is powered on or not). I'm actually running a PowerEdge R520 with 2x E2450l v2, 8x 16GB DD3L (1,35v) ECC DIMMs, 1x integrated SAS HBA (driving the 8x 3.5" 7,2K SAS drives), 1x PCIe external SAS (driving an external enclosure with 12x 7,2k SAS drives), 1 dual FC8 HBA (to connect the 2x LTO-5 tape library) and 4x internal SATA drives driving small SSDs. Trying to find a more power efficient alternative to the server (the external enclosure is quite power efficient) but nothing that offers enough PCIe lanes/slots and DIMM slots + remote management at a decent price. Suggestions are welcome! :)
yeap, the low-power homeserver question was quite a novel thing to me, too. got my tired braincells going and was an interesting topic to dig into as a followup to the video. I actually started to experiment with power states, too and was able to run some infrastructure services like dns/dhcp while being in low power states. where I just didn't care before, I'm saving around 1.5 kWh per day across 3 machines, just by fine tuning power states and how services run on them.
Exactly .... or the Odroid H3 😉. The idle power consumption of H3 and H3+ boards may or may not be very similar. However, the H3 is less expensive. The only difference is the CPU, i.e. H3 CPU has lower clockspeed than the H3+. I've been wanting and waiting for an affordable low-power x86 64-bit single board computer with 8GB or more RAM, dual GB NICs, at least two SATA ports and passive cooling since 2015. Finally it arrived! (Literally, got my H3 yesterday 😊😊). If all goes well it will replace a 1L mini-PC serving as a NAS. The mini-PC will then replace my desktop PC (which uses far too much power).
I'm about to finish my NAS build (my current cloud runs on a raspberry pi with 2 pidrive in raid1 and it's showing its limits but it uses close to no power). Not exactly cheap but not over the top, I do have a few 1TB 3.5 inch drives laying around that I'd be using to get me started, I'm thinking about using mergerfs (so no raid), and rotate those drives around when I need more storage. What's your opinion on snapraid to add a bit of redundancy to the array? I'm on the fence when it comes to using it cause it would mean I need to use my biggest drive as parity. Would it kind of work if I just set a lvm vg that's half the capacity of the drive and use that as parity? Of course I'm aware that all the content that gets on this drive would be lost if it failed since data and parity would be on the same drive, but once I get another bigger drive I can just use that as parity and reclaim that space on the other drive. That's what bothers me with Raid, it's hard to grow your NAS space without replacing the entire array.
I have my entire house down to 64w at idle :) Home assistant just sips 5w on a Pi and controls pretty much everything with the power hungry devices only coming on when i have enough solar to power them. Throw in some nodered for more control you really can expand power saving out of just your home lab
the thing is with the Ryzen G and GE prozessors there are exactly the same tho only difference is who it is deployed. in a laptop for example, there are configured mostly as GE because of the weak cooling solution therefore the TDP is set to 45W and marked as GE but on a desktop platform you can choose if you want a G with 65W or a GE with 45W. but the idle consumption does not change maybe by a little because some under volting but this might be 0.1W or so. i have a server with a 5700G in it and it is set to 45W because my server is passive cooled and the case cant handle 65W. this is not the only reason my system runs about 3% to 7% so i could ignore the TDP but i use this system also as a compute machine for some heavy calculations. i could do this on my gaming system but i dont want it to run for hours and drawing 300W if my server can do the same stuff with 50W and needs only 100% more time, so a 3h job on my gaming system uses 0.9kwh and my server needts only 0.3kwh for the same task and it took 6h. i dont see the point using my gaming pc for such things and on my daily driver pc this needs way longer because it is a asrock j4050-itx in it. my monitor uses more power as my computer ^^
Fantastic video, I would wholeheartedly enjoy a potential video of you giving some advice for how to create a power-efficient workstation, where factors such as short term high intensity workloads, as well as hardware such as monitors and speakers, come into play. I share your concern over power efficiency, minus the knowledge, and with rising energy prices in Europe it's definitely a large factor in any future projects.
Great channel, loving the sensible questions your answering to keep our hobby affordable and fun. With electricity prices sky-rocketing over the past few months, i too (like many of us i guess) have been looking into a more sensible build. These videos are a great help with achieving that goal (and maybe finding a new joy in getting there). For the 2.5" drives, they are definitely very power efficient, seeing they usually find theyre way into mobile devices. Idle draw at 3.5" being around 3-4w, 2.5" drives do 0.5w easily, however they are quite a bit slower (at same rpm, smaller size platter means less actual speed). Ive also been finding it hard to find reliable models, consumer drives often failing way too soon. (also smr being a no-go).
My nas does nothing probably 99 percent of the time so i totally agree idle power consumption is paramount importance. I'm planning to build a diy nas then i can get rid of the dedicated laptop running my home assistant instance and jellyfin or plex
Hello! Thank you very much for all your videos, I do not often write comments, but I really want to know why you chose unraid? I heard that you wanted to choose truenas. Why did you leave the pure Ubuntu server. Thanks in advance!
Hi wolfgang, I love your home server videos and that inspired me to make my own but i have one big problem. My isp, o2 is using DualStack-Lite on cable which means that i cant port forward anything, do you know how to bypass this in some way?
@@WolfgangsChannel Thank you, i tried that recently and it didnt work but i guess now it does, except for https i have no clue why it hates me but nothing works with it
Keep in mind that SMR disks are NOT supported by TrueNAS or ZFS even. CMR is the only option. So 2,5" disks are inefficient, because they can't be bigger than 2TB each. So you will need 5 of those to get to 10TB (without factoring in redundancy). By the time you have 5x 2TB 2,5" disks running, it consumes almost the same as a single 10TB disk.
@@WolfgangsChannel Which is clearly an SMR disk, if you read the site of Seagate correctly. SMR is not recommended for any ZFS application, whether it's TrueNAS or something else.
Sorry, I understood your comment as “the biggest 2.5” drive you can get is 2TB”. Yes, SMR drives are definitely not recommended for anything ZFS-rated That being said, many people use Unraid or Mergerfs instead, and those aren’t as picky as ZFS
@@WolfgangsChannel Hence why I specifically said anything that runs ZFS :) Nice efficient homeserver though. I'm running less-efficient enterprise gear at home 😆
5:33 "You have to break even on the hardware costs" ... depends. Well, I'm not rich AF but I would invest "some" money to lower my consumption!! Sure, if you have money you could also just spend it on Energy. And I know this videos are not about the environment but lower consumption is also good in that regard! 😉👍
True: Spending LOADS of money and resources just to have the lowest consumption is also stupid. The sweet spot of what makes sense for whom is probably somewhere else for each and everyone ✌
1:31:25 Das ist kompletter Blödsinn, dass man nur über Dividenden am Aktienmarkt rendite erzielen kann und der Aktienkurs nur zockerei ist. Da stelle ich das Verständniss von Herrn Höfgen schon sehr in Frage. Wenn ein Unternehmen sich eintscheidet Gewinne nicht oder nicht vollständig auszuschütten muss der Wert des Unternehmens und damit der Aktien steigen. Da ist es auch egal ob das Geld bei dem Unternehmen am Konto liegt oder ob es investiert wird.
Just switch it off for the night and save 1/3 of the energy consumption. Many people with a home server don't actually need to run their home servers 24/7. If you think about it for a second, you might be surprised to find your home server could also take a rest while you're asleep. And if that's the case, pressing the power button twice a day goes a long way, or you can even automate switching it on in the morning and off at night. Having a scheduled shutdown time for the server could also help to get rid of bad habits of staying up all night scrolling through meaningless stuff in a brain dead state instead of getting a good night's sleep.
Yep, I'm actually doing that with mine, and depending on your use case you might even want to put your server into S3 sleep automatically if it doesn't do anything and wake it up on network access.
@@WolfgangsChannel My system sports a nearly 10 years old Haswell i5-4670 along with an uATX Asus H87M-PRO and while I'm super happy with the 6 SATA ports and 4 PCIe slots that's also fully packed (a dedicated, but low end, low consumption GPU too), but my system draws 10W when it's turned off ... I find that's quite significant for a stand-by device. I'll also try to measure C8 sleep power draw if I'm able to get there, but because it does nothing meaningful at night, I completely switch it off ie. cut it off from electricity. Maybe I missed it, but how do you make sure your system stays in sleep mode at night if it's running tasks that can easily generate traffic 24/7 eg. torrents? By the way great content Wolfgang, love your honesty and the German point of view you're bringing in.
The 4090 is only efficient _relative_ to the amount of work it can get done. If you aren't loading it up then at Idle it's consuming maybe 20W, which compared to a 6600 XT of 4W, and a total server idle of 20W, is huge! Then there's 160W peak vs 400W peak. Yes, it might get more done per watt at full power, but it consumes 5x as much at idle so there's no point having it if you don't need it. Shame we don't have efficiency curves for mid range. Like low load power consumption.
Well I own Dell PowerEdge R715 and R815 Both with AMD Opteron 6180SE Compared to desktop with AMD Phenom II X6 1100T it is consuming 66% of energy for same performance or is 151% of performance at same power level Servers are inherently more power efficient Dell PowerEdge R815 with 4x AMD Opteron 6180SE and 128GB of DDR3 PC3-10600R 1333MHz RAM is fitting into 1100W at absolute top load Actually I can run at full speed at around 600W, definitely below 700W
For encoding, my 4090 idles at 40W (just the card) and up to 65W while encoding (CPU limited). In contrast my 13th gen i9900H uses 5-7W at idle in windows (while hosting a webserver, jellyfin and some other things) and 10-15W under load and its only a 50% drop in performance (still plenty fast for live encoding), if i unlimit my laptop and use performance mode it runs 40W peak and I get around 70-80% the encoding performance but thats still an easy win considering that all on the CPU and the 4090 you have to add your CPU watts at full bore. Really hope to see channels make some content around laptops as servers since if you arent using it you might as well, they are very affordable compared to a full system and as long as your fine with using external Ethernet and storage array they are just so handy. Plus the way mine is setup I can unplug it and still use it as a laptop so win win. 4090's are actually very efficient for gaming and other heavy loads if you power limit them or they have a bottle neck. Mine runs 85W under the same load as my old RX5700XT which used 180-200W, under heavier load i've never seen it get above 180W and im using a 100Hz 1440p ultrawide. Unless you can totally power them off when not in use I wouldnt use them for a server due to their high idle consumption (maybe its different with no display output but i doubt its much).
My 5950X spends most of its time in C6 and I've never once had it freeze (except when I got too aggressive with the curve optimizer). But it does nevertheless idle at ~60W (as measured by ryzen_smu/ryzen_monitor), which is way, way too much in my opinion. I know AMD can do better, because their laptop CPUs have great idle consumption stats...
A very cool hack for a Mac Mini is running a RAID card with PCIe over thunderbolt. There are reasonable options for this and with a cheap RAID card in HBA/IT mode. Someone actually rigged this all in 2U sever case. It wouldn't make sense to buy this but if you have a Mac Mini already...
You can both undervolt and underclock any ryzen cpu and pretty much any intel cpu and get them ridiculously efficient without having too much performance loss. The power consumption of these cpu's increase quadratically if you overclock because while overclocking you also need to raise the voltage of the vcore rail. Say you have a 4 ghz cpu, You overlock it to 4.4 without raising the voltage (that's pretty unrealistic but let's say it's somehow still stable). You suddenly increased the current draw from 100 amps to 110 amps, so if your vcore voltage is say 1.2 volts, you were pulling about 120 watts of power. Now you're pulling 132 watts of power. But suppose it's not stable because it needs more voltage. Say you increased the vcore voltage to 1.3 volts to get it back to being stable, Now congratulations you are pulling 143 watts of power. But the cpu is now running hotter and it's dissipating the heat to the power plain as the power plain is a nice chunk of copper and thru the inductors which are also made of copper, those run hotter now, as they run hotter, their resistance increases so there's a voltage drop and you need to increase the voltage even more to make up for that. You finally sat up the vcore to 1.35 volts so now the cpu is stable finally. But now it's 110 amps * 1.35 volts and that's 148.5 watts. You have successfully gained 10% performance at the cost of 23.75% power increase. These numbers are made up but this really is how overclocking works. But you can potentially go the other way around. Undervolt the vcore power and underclock it a bit. Like from 4.0 to 3.8 and reduce the vcore from 1.2 to 1.1. It'll likely be very stable even leave some room for more undervolting unless the motherboard is an utter junk. You can reduce the 120 watts power consumption to 1.1*(1-(3.8/4.0))*100amps 104.5 watts. That's about 15% less power for 5% less performance. A pretty good deal. You can even go further but there's a limit how low you can set the vcore, but I'm guessing you can still increase the efficiency by like 30-40% while only giving up about 10% performance. And this is not even considering the decrease of resistance of the power plain thus less power losses in the power plain and the vrm.
Concerning the last section, you are absolutely right. I tested DietPi, Debian, and Ubuntu on my SBCs and low-power consumption devices. DietPi is more efficient regarding memory use, for sure, but in my experience, it won't save you significant power.
low power price to performance goes to the i5-6500T and i5-8500T tinyminimicro's on ebay. J4105 thin clients are next best. For a basic raspi replacement the ultra-tiny wyse with the atom x5 in it is great, 2W and hosts as many micro-services as you need.
I've been tinkering with an old AMD 6400k computer I have lying around to turn it into a proper server, but can't get it to drop below 40w at idle. I've tried undervolting and underclocking, but still can't manage it. I am just using Windows 10 though for now, that could be why. In comparison I have a 2014 Mac Mini (sadly with only 4gb RAM) that uses 6w at idle.
Since Cyrix CPU era, I know so old, I've never been Intel fan. AMD is and will be my choice. But Wolfgang you are addressing great points. Power consumption on the low utilization levels. So much of it is wasted just because of bad server or desktop designs. Another excellent video. LOL thx
As to the Ryzen Freezes: I myself suffer from the same problem, it's a 1600 as well and I did just the same. Disabling C-States works, but yes it uses 60W with 5 drives. That's really unfortunate... At least my second nas runs at 36W with a 5600G and does not suffer from that problem. Enabling the power stuff and limiting the TDP to 45W actually does make a noticeable difference in idle.
Editing off your NAS only "references" the files used. It is non-destructive. It is only when one "delivers" or "renders out" the final project that the original files come into play.
pulled out of storage an old celeron g3900 and h150 with one 4gb ram stick with integrated gpu ssd it runs around 8 to 12 watts. not too bad. my new dual band wifi router is eating 6.5 watts... mybe should build openwrt router/nas/webserver...
In my opnion i dont think you need CMR drives for Unraid. ZFS hates SMR sure and i think the whole CMR debacle centered around rebuilding parity in RAID & RAIDZ. since Unraid does not use parity in traditional RAID, i dont think buying cheap SMR is necessary. SMR has nasty writes, but can be fixed with ssd cache in Unraid. please do correct me if im wrong.
I design and build High Performance, Sustainable, Net Zero Homes. I’m looking into wiring as much of the house as possible with 48v DC. I need power distribution, but i figure putting smart controls into it just makes sense. Your work you discuss in this video falls in line with a Passive House principle of reducing energy consumption. Is there a way i can contact you directly?
How important are CPU security features (like Secure Boot, Anti-theft Technology, OS Guard, etc.) when building a desktop, router, or server? If they are, which ones are the most essential depending on each use?
Re: staggered hdd start This used to be a much bigger deal but not as much now as hdd power usage is many times less than they used to be. 5 1/2 full height SCSI drives sounded like a jet engine starting up and used almost as much power (slight exaggeration)
Unless you reboot very often Reboot have nothing to do with HDDs spin up Already spinning HDD have pretty much zero difference in power consumption on reboot
Can you do a video on UPS and 4G fallback? Many smartphones collapse today if internet/power goes out. But most snart devices are battery powered. I know tp-link has an option and some have done it with openwrt
Most of it he already explained from the previous video, or at least I understood that much. Some were interesting suggestions. One comment completely missed the point of a NAS and if you want to build it with latest cpu and 4090 go for it! You can probably afford it along with the power bills too!
My power consumption is not tied to cost. It is tied to battery capacity which I have in the house. I experience power outages frequently for 0-5 hours a day.
2:51 1999 I worked at a school with 100 computers and whenever the power came back after a blackout 100 computers turning on at the same time blew the fuses.
I switched to a couple small, 1 liter, enterprise PCs and they payed them selves of in 2 years! (accounting for subscriptions and power costs on my old setup)
I love this video and the one prior. I think you're doing a phenomenal job and the information is extremely valuable Thank you very much for posting. I've been on a quest for low power consumption server hardware and the spreadsheet that you provided is gold.
The spreadsheet I talked about in the last video: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI
Hi Wolfgang, nice video, I just got myself a fujitsu computer with D3417 motherboard, with 4 HDD an NVME ssd and a sata SSD, I use it as a NAS with OMV and ZFS and it works great, and I'm able to get C8 state with powertop --auto-tune. But I'm not sure how to set it up to get the maximum power efficiency. I don't have a power meter yet but the HDDs don't seem to stop spinning even if I used the appropriate setting in OMV. I'm also not sure how to set it up so that it goes into an "idle" state when it's not really doing stuff ? Not sure how to monitor these things kin debian (BTW I'll get my power meter soon)
Thanks for the link to the spreadsheet 😊
So true. A server is 90% of the time waiting for something to do but runs 7x24. A desktop is only running when it is needed. Therefore optimizing for idle power is a good approach.
Can‘t one use Wake-on-LAN to mostly ignore the idle-time?
And I know: Works only in certain use-cases, hardware needs to support it.
Homelab is. Proper servers serve 24/7.
@@martinmusli3044if you're using it for services (like Plex, wifi management, diagnostics) then no. If you're just using the home server to do ad-hoc tasks (test server, storage server that's not expected to be up the whole time) then yes... In my case i have both, my NAS is only on when it's being used, my virtualisation server is low power and always on because it manages my wifi (fw updates, managed roaming etc)
I would also point out that even if the server is doing something, it's rarely at 100%. A system capable of idling at very low power consumption, is often very efficient when slightly loaded.
So even if the server is doing something, it's probably a low load anyway.
Home assistant for example runs on a potato basically, so having it doing something isn't really affecting your power consumption, and the server it's still basically idling even when doing something. Same thing for a NAS service, the only thing you have to add is hdd spinning, but still, if your idle is 20W, you're still going to be more efficient when the HDD are spinning that a system that idles at 35W.
Unrelated but I really like the shirts you're wearing during your videos! Thanks for this efficiency series, I really feel like more people should be invested in running gear with as low power consumption as possible.
People actually start to put 4090 cards in their home labs more frequently now due to ML an AI tools becoming more popular, for example Stable Diffusion for image generation, rope and deepfake for videos. They all need a lot(!) of VRAM and cloud GPU instance offerings are expensive due to high demand.
Great video and very useful. Hope you could monetize it!
Regarding HDDs spin up and that pico psu can't handle it. It might sound counterintuitive but second power supply just for hdd's would do the trick.
Regarding small factory desktop PC's - ThinkCentre M910q I have uses around 6Watt with Windows 11 and Plex.
Very often on YT channels from the US when the topic of homelab is discussed they forget to mention energy consumption.
As if electricity is free.
Mine is. Just took me $60k in parts and $15k in labor and lots of head scratching to get there. But it (my off grid solar system) is designed for two homes, a big workshop, and a future business building (think a smaller version of LTT in home and garden niches).
But I still watch power usage, my solar setup is large, but not infinite (30k watts continuous available, but at full load, my batteries (120 KWH) would deplete in four hours at night and cloudy days are an issue).
Should last a week with normal usage during a week of cloudy weather if I watch what I’m doing (no big power tool and dust collector use).
@@silverbackag9790 I'd just like to note that your electricity still comes at an opportunity cost where yes, you are now not paying for it, but every watt of wasted energy could instead be used mining bitcoin which would actively generate you money instead (sort of assuming you're not selling the energy itself, but same applies there)
So instead of just thinking about money spent, loss of money gained is effectively the same.
It's always a good day when Wolfgang uploads
Fax!
No
It was a great video Wolfgang. After a week of watching CPU and GPU reviews featuring insane power demands, it was refreshing to see power efficiency considered for computing tasks.
murica home lab: i bought 4 dell r710 of ebay and run them 24/7
german homelab: raspberry pi or die.
for the 'murica peapole here: in germany Power can cost (depending on region) up to 55ct/kwh.
you can literally go bankrupt compiling gentoo XD
not only Germany and it's about to get a lot worse
@@Airbag888 Well, not everywhere: 0.08 USD per 1 kw. :)
You were very patient with the comments. There are a lot of people who only exist to be unkind, ignore them. Do what you enjoy 🌟
I admire your patience, and level responses to the rude folks out there. Sorry about that.
I hope to someday build my homelab, and you're videos keep me informed. It's keeping that dream alive
Thank you!
Now that's proper engagement. It's always great when you upload a helpful and interesting video. It's even better when response to community feedback turns into another video, going deeper on the same topic. Nice one!
With rolling blackouts being a normal thing on our power grid these days trying to reduce your power consumption has become a necessity here to be able to keep things running on ones backup power solutions. Researching a replacement server as we speak as I've ran into a little RAM limitations on my current server so trying to find an equivalently efficient solution (20-30w) and at the same time solve the limitation and upgrading the setup, so I'm finding these videos useful 👍
Also you'll cut the UPS battery capacity, or double the running time on the other side of coin
For the first time in seeing Western countries talking about blackouts and power supply costs which the American channels talks like it didn't exist or matter to them
..
Your suggestions are good, but they often require people spending money on equipment that they may not already have. I think the first thing a person should do, if low power consumption is the goal, is assess what they need and only buy equipment as powerful as what is needed. If they use a component of a higher spec than necessary, then it'll not only cost more to purchase, but likely consume more power too.
For example, if some only needs a file server, why not use a 2.5" USB3 HDD connected to your router? A router is usually always on. You need not buy anything new (unless your router doesn't have a USB3 port) and you have storage that can always be accessed for probably somewhere between 3-9w router power consumption and 3w HDD consumption while in use (while HDD heads are parked it will use much less power, fractions of a watt).
BTW, certain models of router use much more electricity than others and in some parts of the world the difference between a router that uses 5w and one that uses 15w, will perhaps be 50 Euros or more per year - some routers (WIFI 6 mainly?) use closer to 30/40w. If you have no need for these capabilities, then this is just money flushed down the drain.
Absolutely! This video was targeted at homelab enthusiasts, who would probably already have some servers at home. And in some cases, depending on how power hungry your current hardware is and how expensive your electricity is, you might actually save some money by selling your current hardware and replacing it with a more power-efficient option.
Other than that, definitely some good points, and I will consider making a video about super-budget low power hardware (e.g. using your router as a mini-NAS, like you said)
You could get something like a Beelink GR9/GTR5 with an AMD 5900 HX cpu. It's costs around the same as Mac Mini, uses around 2x the power as a mac mini on full load, but it's also about 2x as fast. Idles around 6w.
ehh, you can get low power managed switches but only up to like 8 ports. I think TP-Link SG 108E is the lowest power managed switch for 8 ports. its like < 3W fully utilized.
That video was a huge help to me and it just randomly popped up on youtube. I’m now trying to assemble a power saving server based on that spreadsheet and I’ll be saving tons of money on electricity (totally justifying the expensive hardware).
Many thanks from a frustrated Euro nerd feeling the power squeeze!
Thanks for the video, Wolfgang :) Can't wait to see more of your homelab adventures! And definitely these QA videos are a nice change of pace. Take care.
You explained well problems that many people interpret efficiency wrong.The most efficient setup is the setup that does the job you want it to do the cheapest. So if you have only light tasks it is overkill and not efficient to use a 4090 like someone mentioned. Sure output frames/sec per watt might be good but if you don't need that much power you are very wastefull. I have a homeserver that has several tasks and one way i saved power is combining tasks to one machine. So my VmWare host runs a virtual NAS and a virtual router and a virtual windows machine. Combining did mean 1 time the idle powerdraw instead of 3 times. For the router example i run PfSense. Starting that VM and creating a lot of traffic i only increase about 3 to 4 watts. I cannot find a physical box that has the same routing performance that only uses that little. Sure the host has a idle power but that is lower then 3 seperate devices idle power. I invested in the smallest titanium 80+ powersupply i could find (400W) which was more expensive but the 12 year warrenty was enough for me because i already had the experience that no mayor brand PSU i ever owned that is working 24/7 365 days a year makes it past about 6 to 7 years. So in case of this one making it 12 years or i case it dies and i get a new one i win.
Commenting for engagement, lol.
I enjoy these unscripted videos, just needs to be regarding an interesting topic like this one
Some people just cannot understand that the challenge is the fun part of the project. It's really easy to turn all the knobs up and add power, making something efficient is a much more analytical engineering task.
The Ryzen 1000-series hat a lot of issues, including freeze bugs. Don't think it'll be resolved anymore as those who care enough (and have the skills or money) have moved on to later series CPUs. It's support for x86 emulation (in x64 mode in simple terms) was also super broken iirc. In short: Stay away from those CPUs, later ryzens are fine
Although some of the consumer CPUs support ECC there are a lot of Xeon E3-1200 series L CPUs that supports ECC and have a TDP of just 25W. I like the Fujitsu TX1330 servers as they draw very low power compared to the other servers. Only downside is that the license to enable KVM capability is bound to the server and quite expensive...
0:05 congrats on becoming a billionaire
I've got my freeze bug fixed by updating the BIOS
There was a question about a managed low power switch. Once I started to look into my home lab's power burners, my fancy catalyst was high up the line (200W). I replaced that with a zyxel GS1900-24E which is a managed switch with plenty of features and runs between 8 to 11W. That pushed the usage down by a lot. Now I'm looking into the servers.
Updating the bios on my first gen ryzen system fixed my freezing issue
Amd CPUs have a lot of fixes in kernel 6
Apart from power ....A video idea on choosing hardware for Linux(Desktop & Server)? Pple know #AMD is best on graphics but what about CPU? @Chris Titus Tech and @Distrotube need to join this chat...
Re ECC, it's not like Xeons are necessarily expensive or power hungry either. I have a 12 core Haswell Xeon in my NAS, and according to intel-undervolt it draws under 30W under full non-AVX load, ~1W idle. It was 65€ when I bought it (from an EU seller because I live in EU), and there were 45€ units available on Aliexpress. Sure the base clock is 1.8GHz and it won't boost beyond 2.5GHz but it's still faster in MT loads than the i7-6800K it replaced. And C-states work at least up to C6 in stock Debian.
ryzen supports ecc
Ryzen is also not the best choice for a power efficient server because of the relatively high idle consumption
Hey there, nice video! May I ask what's your setup in 7:10 ?
I'm using a HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Tower with i5-7600T, 2x 4TB WD Red Pro (3.5"), 1x 240GB SSD, 32GB DDR4-2133 (non ECC) RAM. --> Total 125$
Idle around 21W with Proxmox and 1 VM. Will add like ~5 more VM's and assume Idle state will rise up to 30W+
Thought about upgrading to i7-7700 since its same price for me.
Did I do a bad choice with the setup to achieve a low power consumption server?
Regarding the Question on powerefficient Managed Switches: Have a look at Netgears GSS108E switches. They can to VLAN tagging and don't consume that much power. Another cool feature ist: one can disable the LEDs!
Hello, great videos man :) you mentioned some embeded MoBos, In my TrueNAS Core build i got my hands on Supermicro 4U 16bay case and this tiny MoBo ( X10SDV-4C-TLN2F ), it works realy fine for small server, a lot of features like Low power XeonD CPU, ECC RAM support, 10Gbit networking, IPMI, full 16x PCIe 3.0 (supports bifubrication, so you can buy riser and split it to 2x 8 ), M.2 slot and some SATAs. Its an older unit, but todays prices are afordable :) would say these kind of boards are golden for low power, at least thats why i bought it :)
Managed switches: I recently got Aruba 1930 JL683B. In IDLE (no ports connected), it uses a bit more than the mikrotik, around 25W. However, you also get up to 195W POE available. Also, there is a fan inside, but it's pretty quiet. I hear the fan is worse in the (older?) A version.
thunderbolt (chipset to provide TB functionality to a PC) draws a lot of power.
There's a topic that is often forgotten in this videos (including yours): remote management. Minimum requirement: vPRO (allows to have a remote KVM at HW level, allowing to also enter the BIOS), ideal: remote management HW (HP iLO, Dell iDRAC) and these sadly can be game changers depending on the implemntation; as an example iDRAC 7 on 12th gen PowerEdge server draw 10w (whether the system is powered on or not). I'm actually running a PowerEdge R520 with 2x E2450l v2, 8x 16GB DD3L (1,35v) ECC DIMMs, 1x integrated SAS HBA (driving the 8x 3.5" 7,2K SAS drives), 1x PCIe external SAS (driving an external enclosure with 12x 7,2k SAS drives), 1 dual FC8 HBA (to connect the 2x LTO-5 tape library) and 4x internal SATA drives driving small SSDs. Trying to find a more power efficient alternative to the server (the external enclosure is quite power efficient) but nothing that offers enough PCIe lanes/slots and DIMM slots + remote management at a decent price. Suggestions are welcome! :)
yeap, the low-power homeserver question was quite a novel thing to me, too. got my tired braincells going and was an interesting topic to dig into as a followup to the video. I actually started to experiment with power states, too and was able to run some infrastructure services like dns/dhcp while being in low power states. where I just didn't care before, I'm saving around 1.5 kWh per day across 3 machines, just by fine tuning power states and how services run on them.
Do you have any tips? I have 4 VMs and 6 containers. I can't get below 100W. And I also have one storage Server which consumes around 140W :/
Also maybe you should take a look at the odroid H3+ for a power efficient home server
Exactly .... or the Odroid H3 😉. The idle power consumption of H3 and H3+ boards may or may not be very similar. However, the H3 is less expensive. The only difference is the CPU, i.e. H3 CPU has lower clockspeed than the H3+. I've been wanting and waiting for an affordable low-power x86 64-bit single board computer with 8GB or more RAM, dual GB NICs, at least two SATA ports and passive cooling since 2015. Finally it arrived! (Literally, got my H3 yesterday 😊😊). If all goes well it will replace a 1L mini-PC serving as a NAS. The mini-PC will then replace my desktop PC (which uses far too much power).
I'm about to finish my NAS build (my current cloud runs on a raspberry pi with 2 pidrive in raid1 and it's showing its limits but it uses close to no power). Not exactly cheap but not over the top, I do have a few 1TB 3.5 inch drives laying around that I'd be using to get me started, I'm thinking about using mergerfs (so no raid), and rotate those drives around when I need more storage. What's your opinion on snapraid to add a bit of redundancy to the array? I'm on the fence when it comes to using it cause it would mean I need to use my biggest drive as parity. Would it kind of work if I just set a lvm vg that's half the capacity of the drive and use that as parity? Of course I'm aware that all the content that gets on this drive would be lost if it failed since data and parity would be on the same drive, but once I get another bigger drive I can just use that as parity and reclaim that space on the other drive. That's what bothers me with Raid, it's hard to grow your NAS space without replacing the entire array.
I have my entire house down to 64w at idle :) Home assistant just sips 5w on a Pi and controls pretty much everything with the power hungry devices only coming on when i have enough solar to power them. Throw in some nodered for more control you really can expand power saving out of just your home lab
Teach me your ways 🙏
the thing is with the Ryzen G and GE prozessors there are exactly the same tho only difference is who it is deployed. in a laptop for example, there are configured mostly as GE because of the weak cooling solution therefore the TDP is set to 45W and marked as GE but on a desktop platform you can choose if you want a G with 65W or a GE with 45W. but the idle consumption does not change maybe by a little because some under volting but this might be 0.1W or so. i have a server with a 5700G in it and it is set to 45W because my server is passive cooled and the case cant handle 65W. this is not the only reason my system runs about 3% to 7% so i could ignore the TDP but i use this system also as a compute machine for some heavy calculations. i could do this on my gaming system but i dont want it to run for hours and drawing 300W if my server can do the same stuff with 50W and needs only 100% more time, so a 3h job on my gaming system uses 0.9kwh and my server needts only 0.3kwh for the same task and it took 6h. i dont see the point using my gaming pc for such things and on my daily driver pc this needs way longer because it is a asrock j4050-itx in it. my monitor uses more power as my computer ^^
I am greatly entertained by the idea of "ultimate power consumption build" at 9:59. Can we see that project come true someday on your channel? :)
Fantastic video, I would wholeheartedly enjoy a potential video of you giving some advice for how to create a power-efficient workstation, where factors such as short term high intensity workloads, as well as hardware such as monitors and speakers, come into play. I share your concern over power efficiency, minus the knowledge, and with rising energy prices in Europe it's definitely a large factor in any future projects.
+1 on the random freezes with ryzen 1st gen. I have a ryzen 5 1600 and the only solution was to disable the c-states in the bios.
Great channel, loving the sensible questions your answering to keep our hobby affordable and fun.
With electricity prices sky-rocketing over the past few months, i too (like many of us i guess) have been looking into a more sensible build.
These videos are a great help with achieving that goal (and maybe finding a new joy in getting there).
For the 2.5" drives, they are definitely very power efficient, seeing they usually find theyre way into mobile devices.
Idle draw at 3.5" being around 3-4w, 2.5" drives do 0.5w easily, however they are quite a bit slower (at same rpm, smaller size platter means less actual speed).
Ive also been finding it hard to find reliable models, consumer drives often failing way too soon. (also smr being a no-go).
I'm going to run local AI on my server with an RTX 5090, it seems that the power consumption of the CPU is quite negligible in that regard😂
Great video and so was the first one. Thanks for all the insights and clarifications!
Says no cool editing or other stuff in this video.
*Proceeds to add CGI Dinosaur anyways*
BTW Solid video! Keep up the good work.
Ooh is German electricity cheaper compared to the Netherlands ❓
If not, why... 🤔Hmmm
Unscripted, off-the-cuff videos are great! They're a simple way to get useful info.
My nas does nothing probably 99 percent of the time so i totally agree idle power consumption is paramount importance. I'm planning to build a diy nas then i can get rid of the dedicated laptop running my home assistant instance and jellyfin or plex
Hello! Thank you very much for all your videos, I do not often write comments, but I really want to know why you chose unraid? I heard that you wanted to choose truenas. Why did you leave the pure Ubuntu server. Thanks in advance!
That’s worth an entire video of its own
@@WolfgangsChannel ahahah, waiting for entire video! Thank you 💖
Hahahaha “no fancy editing” bit had me laughing
Hi wolfgang, I love your home server videos and that inspired me to make my own but i have one big problem. My isp, o2 is using DualStack-Lite on cable which means that i cant port forward anything, do you know how to bypass this in some way?
You can use the Cloudflare Tunnel
@@WolfgangsChannel Thank you, i tried that recently and it didnt work but i guess now it does, except for https i have no clue why it hates me but nothing works with it
Keep in mind that SMR disks are NOT supported by TrueNAS or ZFS even. CMR is the only option. So 2,5" disks are inefficient, because they can't be bigger than 2TB each. So you will need 5 of those to get to 10TB (without factoring in redundancy). By the time you have 5x 2TB 2,5" disks running, it consumes almost the same as a single 10TB disk.
The image shown in the video while I’m talking clearly shows 5TB 2.5” drives
@@WolfgangsChannel Which is clearly an SMR disk, if you read the site of Seagate correctly. SMR is not recommended for any ZFS application, whether it's TrueNAS or something else.
Sorry, I understood your comment as “the biggest 2.5” drive you can get is 2TB”. Yes, SMR drives are definitely not recommended for anything ZFS-rated
That being said, many people use Unraid or Mergerfs instead, and those aren’t as picky as ZFS
@@WolfgangsChannel Hence why I specifically said anything that runs ZFS :)
Nice efficient homeserver though. I'm running less-efficient enterprise gear at home 😆
ultimate power consumption build :D i wann see that
im still confused about that debian/dietpi comment
Athlon 200GE + 8GB Ram + 1 SSD = 27W in idle
Please do a new low power build but with truenas instead of unraid
5:33 "You have to break even on the hardware costs" ... depends. Well, I'm not rich AF but I would invest "some" money to lower my consumption!!
Sure, if you have money you could also just spend it on Energy. And I know this videos are not about the environment but lower consumption is also good in that regard! 😉👍
True: Spending LOADS of money and resources just to have the lowest consumption is also stupid.
The sweet spot of what makes sense for whom is probably somewhere else for each and everyone ✌
"pick your poison" :D yeah! 👍
yes it was a good video I hate that my unraid server idles at 45w :(
the comment at 15:39 is why linux users got a bad rep
1:31:25 Das ist kompletter Blödsinn, dass man nur über Dividenden am Aktienmarkt rendite erzielen kann und der Aktienkurs nur zockerei ist. Da stelle ich das Verständniss von Herrn Höfgen schon sehr in Frage. Wenn ein Unternehmen sich eintscheidet Gewinne nicht oder nicht vollständig auszuschütten muss der Wert des Unternehmens und damit der Aktien steigen. Da ist es auch egal ob das Geld bei dem Unternehmen am Konto liegt oder ob es investiert wird.
Just switch it off for the night and save 1/3 of the energy consumption. Many people with a home server don't actually need to run their home servers 24/7. If you think about it for a second, you might be surprised to find your home server could also take a rest while you're asleep. And if that's the case, pressing the power button twice a day goes a long way, or you can even automate switching it on in the morning and off at night. Having a scheduled shutdown time for the server could also help to get rid of bad habits of staying up all night scrolling through meaningless stuff in a brain dead state instead of getting a good night's sleep.
Yep, I'm actually doing that with mine, and depending on your use case you might even want to put your server into S3 sleep automatically if it doesn't do anything and wake it up on network access.
@@WolfgangsChannel My system sports a nearly 10 years old Haswell i5-4670 along with an uATX Asus H87M-PRO and while I'm super happy with the 6 SATA ports and 4 PCIe slots that's also fully packed (a dedicated, but low end, low consumption GPU too), but my system draws 10W when it's turned off ... I find that's quite significant for a stand-by device. I'll also try to measure C8 sleep power draw if I'm able to get there, but because it does nothing meaningful at night, I completely switch it off ie. cut it off from electricity.
Maybe I missed it, but how do you make sure your system stays in sleep mode at night if it's running tasks that can easily generate traffic 24/7 eg. torrents?
By the way great content Wolfgang, love your honesty and the German point of view you're bringing in.
The 4090 is only efficient _relative_ to the amount of work it can get done. If you aren't loading it up then at Idle it's consuming maybe 20W, which compared to a 6600 XT of 4W, and a total server idle of 20W, is huge! Then there's 160W peak vs 400W peak. Yes, it might get more done per watt at full power, but it consumes 5x as much at idle so there's no point having it if you don't need it.
Shame we don't have efficiency curves for mid range. Like low load power consumption.
Bruh I have a 2200g with a b450m pro4 2 sticks of 8gb and 2 of 4gb a white 80 efficiency 500w psu and a 5400rpm 3.5" hdd and consumes 28/29 watts
Well I own Dell PowerEdge R715 and R815
Both with AMD Opteron 6180SE
Compared to desktop with AMD Phenom II X6 1100T it is consuming 66% of energy for same performance or is 151% of performance at same power level
Servers are inherently more power efficient
Dell PowerEdge R815 with 4x AMD Opteron 6180SE and 128GB of DDR3 PC3-10600R 1333MHz RAM is fitting into 1100W at absolute top load
Actually I can run at full speed at around 600W, definitely below 700W
For encoding, my 4090 idles at 40W (just the card) and up to 65W while encoding (CPU limited). In contrast my 13th gen i9900H uses 5-7W at idle in windows (while hosting a webserver, jellyfin and some other things) and 10-15W under load and its only a 50% drop in performance (still plenty fast for live encoding), if i unlimit my laptop and use performance mode it runs 40W peak and I get around 70-80% the encoding performance but thats still an easy win considering that all on the CPU and the 4090 you have to add your CPU watts at full bore.
Really hope to see channels make some content around laptops as servers since if you arent using it you might as well, they are very affordable compared to a full system and as long as your fine with using external Ethernet and storage array they are just so handy. Plus the way mine is setup I can unplug it and still use it as a laptop so win win.
4090's are actually very efficient for gaming and other heavy loads if you power limit them or they have a bottle neck. Mine runs 85W under the same load as my old RX5700XT which used 180-200W, under heavier load i've never seen it get above 180W and im using a 100Hz 1440p ultrawide.
Unless you can totally power them off when not in use I wouldnt use them for a server due to their high idle consumption (maybe its different with no display output but i doubt its much).
Please make video about Unraid 😅
My 5950X spends most of its time in C6 and I've never once had it freeze (except when I got too aggressive with the curve optimizer). But it does nevertheless idle at ~60W (as measured by ryzen_smu/ryzen_monitor), which is way, way too much in my opinion. I know AMD can do better, because their laptop CPUs have great idle consumption stats...
Poor Latin 🙂 I also didn't study it in school.
A very cool hack for a Mac Mini is running a RAID card with PCIe over thunderbolt. There are reasonable options for this and with a cheap RAID card in HBA/IT mode. Someone actually rigged this all in 2U sever case. It wouldn't make sense to buy this but if you have a Mac Mini already...
10 Gig network on your laptop?
You can both undervolt and underclock any ryzen cpu and pretty much any intel cpu and get them ridiculously efficient without having too much performance loss. The power consumption of these cpu's increase quadratically if you overclock because while overclocking you also need to raise the voltage of the vcore rail.
Say you have a 4 ghz cpu, You overlock it to 4.4 without raising the voltage (that's pretty unrealistic but let's say it's somehow still stable). You suddenly increased the current draw from 100 amps to 110 amps, so if your vcore voltage is say 1.2 volts, you were pulling about 120 watts of power. Now you're pulling 132 watts of power. But suppose it's not stable because it needs more voltage. Say you increased the vcore voltage to 1.3 volts to get it back to being stable, Now congratulations you are pulling 143 watts of power. But the cpu is now running hotter and it's dissipating the heat to the power plain as the power plain is a nice chunk of copper and thru the inductors which are also made of copper, those run hotter now, as they run hotter, their resistance increases so there's a voltage drop and you need to increase the voltage even more to make up for that. You finally sat up the vcore to 1.35 volts so now the cpu is stable finally. But now it's 110 amps * 1.35 volts and that's 148.5 watts. You have successfully gained 10% performance at the cost of 23.75% power increase. These numbers are made up but this really is how overclocking works.
But you can potentially go the other way around. Undervolt the vcore power and underclock it a bit. Like from 4.0 to 3.8 and reduce the vcore from 1.2 to 1.1. It'll likely be very stable even leave some room for more undervolting unless the motherboard is an utter junk. You can reduce the 120 watts power consumption to 1.1*(1-(3.8/4.0))*100amps 104.5 watts. That's about 15% less power for 5% less performance. A pretty good deal. You can even go further but there's a limit how low you can set the vcore, but I'm guessing you can still increase the efficiency by like 30-40% while only giving up about 10% performance. And this is not even considering the decrease of resistance of the power plain thus less power losses in the power plain and the vrm.
Concerning the last section, you are absolutely right. I tested DietPi, Debian, and Ubuntu on my SBCs and low-power consumption devices. DietPi is more efficient regarding memory use, for sure, but in my experience, it won't save you significant power.
low power price to performance goes to the i5-6500T and i5-8500T tinyminimicro's on ebay. J4105 thin clients are next best. For a basic raspi replacement the ultra-tiny wyse with the atom x5 in it is great, 2W and hosts as many micro-services as you need.
I've been tinkering with an old AMD 6400k computer I have lying around to turn it into a proper server, but can't get it to drop below 40w at idle. I've tried undervolting and underclocking, but still can't manage it. I am just using Windows 10 though for now, that could be why. In comparison I have a 2014 Mac Mini (sadly with only 4gb RAM) that uses 6w at idle.
Since Cyrix CPU era, I know so old, I've never been Intel fan. AMD is and will be my choice. But Wolfgang you are addressing great points. Power consumption on the low utilization levels. So much of it is wasted just because of bad server or desktop designs. Another excellent video. LOL thx
As to the Ryzen Freezes: I myself suffer from the same problem, it's a 1600 as well and I did just the same. Disabling C-States works, but yes it uses 60W with 5 drives. That's really unfortunate... At least my second nas runs at 36W with a 5600G and does not suffer from that problem. Enabling the power stuff and limiting the TDP to 45W actually does make a noticeable difference in idle.
Editing off your NAS only "references" the files used. It is non-destructive. It is only when one "delivers" or "renders out" the final project that the original files come into play.
pulled out of storage an old celeron g3900 and h150 with one 4gb ram stick with integrated gpu ssd it runs around 8 to 12 watts. not too bad. my new dual band wifi router is eating 6.5 watts... mybe should build openwrt router/nas/webserver...
In my opnion i dont think you need CMR drives for Unraid. ZFS hates SMR sure and i think the whole CMR debacle centered around rebuilding parity in RAID & RAIDZ. since Unraid does not use parity in traditional RAID, i dont think buying cheap SMR is necessary. SMR has nasty writes, but can be fixed with ssd cache in Unraid. please do correct me if im wrong.
I design and build High Performance, Sustainable, Net Zero Homes. I’m looking into wiring as much of the house as possible with 48v DC. I need power distribution, but i figure putting smart controls into it just makes sense. Your work you discuss in this video falls in line with a Passive House principle of reducing energy consumption. Is there a way i can contact you directly?
How important are CPU security features (like Secure Boot, Anti-theft Technology, OS Guard, etc.) when building a desktop, router, or server? If they are, which ones are the most essential depending on each use?
Re: staggered hdd start
This used to be a much bigger deal but not as much now as hdd power usage is many times less than they used to be.
5 1/2 full height SCSI drives sounded like a jet engine starting up and used almost as much power (slight exaggeration)
for interest, a 5 port unmanaged 2.5gb switch draws 5w average, also an ubiquiti nanoHD with ppoe adapter draws 6w ive found
Unless you reboot very often
Reboot have nothing to do with HDDs spin up
Already spinning HDD have pretty much zero difference in power consumption on reboot
Can you do a video on UPS and 4G fallback? Many smartphones collapse today if internet/power goes out. But most snart devices are battery powered. I know tp-link has an option and some have done it with openwrt
Great video! Would you please talk more about how to make VMs more power efficient, espacially a VM with passthroughed HDD or GPU
Most of it he already explained from the previous video, or at least I understood that much. Some were interesting suggestions. One comment completely missed the point of a NAS and if you want to build it with latest cpu and 4090 go for it! You can probably afford it along with the power bills too!
My power consumption is not tied to cost. It is tied to battery capacity which I have in the house. I experience power outages frequently for 0-5 hours a day.
2:51 1999 I worked at a school with 100 computers and whenever the power came back after a blackout 100 computers turning on at the same time blew the fuses.
I switched to a couple small, 1 liter, enterprise PCs and they payed them selves of in 2 years!
(accounting for subscriptions and power costs on my old setup)
I also suffer this freeze constantly with a ryzen 7 1700 on linux, really anoying :S
I've enjoyed both of these videos. Ignore the naysayers. Well done sir. Thank you.
Biggest misconception about ECC is thinking a home server benefits from ECC
I love this video and the one prior. I think you're doing a phenomenal job and the information is extremely valuable Thank you very much for posting. I've been on a quest for low power consumption server hardware and the spreadsheet that you provided is gold.
Why do I like Wolfgang’s channel ? Because he actually sound interested in the things he talks about.
Have you experimented with the new "efficiency core" CPUs to see if they are actually power efficient at idle?
Just found your channel. Amazing content, love your voice and so on!
5/5!
How did you add your Tasmota data to the Unraid dashboard? Great video covering ways to economize energy and save costs.