Lower Power

[LunarMist]

My computers are heating up the joint something awful this summer. uke-l:

The main machine with 6 HDs spinning and 2 SSDs is using about 180-200W, fluctuating. The odd part is that the backup computer only has two hard drives, one SSD and optical drive, yet uses almost the same amount of power. What is normal for your computers? Is there anything to do for the backup system? Should I consider building a more basic, low-powered system for internet usage?

 

[BingBangBop]

180W-200W is quite normal for a desktop machine without a high-performance video card.

Since the backup machine is used intermittantly, power it off, except when you need it. You may find it worthwhile to set it up to automatically power up and down on a schedule.

There's nothing wrong with getting a notebook with a dock (or a notebook with a port for an external monitor) for low powered internet usage. I'm assuming here that a notebook screen isn't what you'd choose to use.

Then there's the concept of air conditioning or even just a fan placed in a window.

 

[LunarMist]

Of course there is AC. I notice a large difference in temperature between being home all day with computer(s) on (+3-6 °F) and returning from work when they have been off (+1-2 °F). My notebooks are 1.2GHz. I suppose I should not worry about it. Winter will be here soon enough if I'm still around after August.

 

[Santilli]

Funny I was just thinking the same thing. I've got two old 2.8 ghz, 70w Xeons running 24-7, with three SSDS, a ATI 4670, and one SATA drive. Seasonic 550W. 5 fans total all stealths, IIRC.

I was thinking more of the power angle then heat.

When this machine went to server/backup 24-7 online, the SCSI SCA box came out of it. I might have made due with one SSD, and one SATA for files download, or two, in a mirror.

Also removed one of the optical drives.

I guess that brings up what processor and motherboard combo gives you the most bang for your energy dollar?

I could get an i7 920 130w to replace this motherboard and duals, but, it would be just sitting there, most of the time, idling.

Do the newer processors do a better job of limiting power consumption at minimum loads?

How much PG and E would I really save?

 

[LunarMist]

Modern CPUs don't use too much power at idle. Running 24/7 is probably the biggest waste. Does your UPS show the power drain?

I wish computers were more compatible with instant on mentality, so there would not be the need to keep them on all the time.

 

[Santilli]

Modern CPUs don't use too much power at idle. Running 24/7 is probably the biggest waste. Does your UPS show the power drain?

I wish computers were more compatible with instant on mentality, so there would not be the need to keep them on all the time.

Mines doing stuff 24/7. And no, just 118 volts on the UPS.
I do have a tester somewhere around.
CPU usage right now is 7%, though sometimes it does go way up. Also running the phone off that computer, and that saves 30 dollars a month.

Unless something breaks, it's unlikely that I would be able to rationalize replacing the stuff, unless as a tax write off.

Again, this does bring up the point:

What is the most cost effective combination of computer components for a work station computer?

Fast enough to run current software, but with minimum power required.

 

[LunarMist]

Well yes, that is what I am asking.

 

[Santilli]

So, go to new egg, look at CPU's, and look at thermal design power in the advanced options:
So, I start with the same 140W the two Xeons are rated at, and come up with AMD Phenom X 4 9550 Black Edition. Not bad price, 157. 2152 on passmark, but, figure you buy that to overclock, which means eating more power.

Back to the drawing board.

Lets try one cpu, at 73W.
290. Intel Core i5-670 Clarkdale 3.46GHz 4MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 73W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80616I5670
passmark:
Intel Core i5 670 @ 3.47GHz 3163 113

Better numbers:Intel Core i3-550 Clarkdale 3.2GHz 4MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 73W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80616I3550
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115065
i3 550 for 150.00
Passmark
Intel Core i3 550 @ 3.20GHz 3393 98
Also at 73W

That's kind of the search pattern. I look at the W on the processor, figure it has to be at least half to be worth doing, and, the performance should future proof the machine a bit, so I figure 3 times the speed, minimum, of the dual setup, which is about 1000 on Passmark.

The i7 870, @ passmark Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93GHz 5866 and 95W looks pretty good, except for the price, 580.

The i5 750 is tempting Passmark:Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.67GHz 4202
95W 200 dollars.

AMD Phenom II X4 945 3588, fast, 95W 140.00.

With a lot of research, the Black Edition X4's look like they might be an alternative, since they appear very reasonably priced, and, if they can be overclocked without messing with other settings, for 100 bucks you can get into top 50 speeds.

From there it jumps pretty severely to 125W, which while increasing speed a lot, doesn't do much for power consumption.

That's what I've been doing to look at this, and, that doesn't even get to sockets, ram, and motherboards.

My end conclusion is for me, I don't see a cheap upgrade that would justify the cash outlay. YMMV.

 

[time]

180W-200W is quite normal for a desktop machine without a high-performance video card.

Horseshit.

With onboard graphics, low-power desktop CPU, single HDD and efficient 300W power supply, I've consistently measured around 60W (@240V) at idle. Adding a low-to-mid range ATI card bumps it up to 70-80W.

I can confidently predict that each additional HDD will add less than 12W at idle, up to 17W while seeking. SSDs obviously need less.

Conversely, the easiest way to increase power consumption is with an old mid-to-high range nVidia graphics card, a Pentium 4, oversized or inefficient power supply, and lastly an inefficient motherboard. High-speed fans can add a little bit as well, after all, they're motors under load.

So Lunar, yes, you should bin your old platform. The only real floor on your power supply is to support the startup current of 6 HDDs, about 12A.

 

[LunarMist]

How much inefficiency is in the PS? I'm wondering it that is why the older one with fewer HDs is using a similar amount of power to the main PC, which is understandably more power hungry.

 

[ddrueding]

All 3 of my home systems and support hardware (including 14TB of storage) combined are currently drawing 210W.

It is very easy and relatively inexpensive to build a fast and energy efficient workstation.

 

[Bozo]

How much inefficiency is in the PS? I'm wondering it that is why the older one with fewer HDs is using a similar amount of power to the main PC, which is understandably more power hungry.

The newer power supplies, 80+ and up are much better. I noticed a drop in my electric bills after switching to Antec Earthwatts.

The older models wasted a lot of electric generating heat.

 

[time]

Purely hypothetically:

140W output @70% efficiency = 200W input
140W output @85% efficiency = 165W input

So it's an important factor, but probably not the top one.

Note that efficiency tends to decline as you drop below 20% of max load.

 

[Handruin]

Modern CPUs don't use too much power at idle. Running 24/7 is probably the biggest waste. Does your UPS show the power drain?

I wish computers were more compatible with instant on mentality, so there would not be the need to keep them on all the time.

They are. I use the sleep function within windows 7 during these hotter summer months. My 3rd floor office gets pretty warm, so I put the computer into sleep mode. When I press the space bar it wakes up and is ready to use in probably 5-10 seconds tops. While in sleep mode it produces almost no measurable heat, no drives are spinning, and the only thing I believe is powered on is the motherboard/RAM to keep the state of the system in memory.

 

[Santilli]

Seasonics tend to be very good as well.

That's my choice.

 

[LunarMist]

I have Seasonic 700W in the main computer. The second computer has the 430W PS included in the Antec Soldana II case. I think it is an Antec, but probably a cheap one.

 

[ddrueding]

Just ordered a few of the following. Should be reasonably low-power, and plenty for office work. I'll let you know how it does.

MB - GIGABYTE GA-H55M-S2H
CPU - INTEL CORE I3 530 2.93G 4M
RAM - 2x 2GB OCZ DDR3
SSD - 40G INTEL SSDSA2MP040G2R5
CASE - ANTEC NSK2480
DVD - LITE-ON | IHAS124-04

 

[LunarMist]

That is the case I used here. Come to think of it, that system with C2D @ 3.5 only used 66W sans monitor. I built it as a gift and it was rather difficult to part with. It is very quiet and has a sturdy base for a monitor. There are only a few minor quibbles, such as the power switch. I don't like the low USB ports on the front as they are blocked by the keyboard.

 

[Sol]

I always have a look at AMDs E series CPUs when I'm looking for efficiency, they are mostly 45W TPD parts, newegg doesn't seem to stock them.

It's hard to know how much difference it really makes though. CPUs are much better at keeping power consumption down while idle these days so is it better to have something a little slower which uses less power at full tilt, or something insanely fast that gets to spend more of its time idle...?

I guess it depends a bit on usage, if you have a machine that will always be doing something but never heavily loaded then a lower wattage CPU would probably be a good plan. A machine that gets used in fits and starts would probably not save as much as long as it was good at getting itself in to a low power state quickly.

 

[Bozo]

You also need to check the BIOS. Some of the power saving features can be disabled in the BIOS.

 

[mangyDOG]

My server consists of a Supermicro tower chassis & 645watt PSU, with a Tyan AMD serverboard and one of the AMD E series CPUs (BE-2350), 4Gb ram, 8 * 1Tb WD Green drives connected to an Adaptec 5805 controller and 2 * 320Gb Black drives connected to a Highpoint 3120 controller.
At idle doing mail serving and light file serving it only uses 110 to 120 watts, under load this increases to a maximum of 180watts (running backup or virus scans with all drives running flat out).

Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[LunarMist]

They are. I use the sleep function within windows 7 during these hotter summer months. My 3rd floor office gets pretty warm, so I put the computer into sleep mode. When I press the space bar it wakes up and is ready to use in probably 5-10 seconds tops. While in sleep mode it produces almost no measurable heat, no drives are spinning, and the only thing I believe is powered on is the motherboard/RAM to keep the state of the system in memory.

I was never able to get all the hard drives back on line after sleep and the video lost calibration. (Of course that was with an old OS.) Which RAID controllers are you using?

 

[Handruin]

My workstation has no RAID controller in it. I have three SATA drives on the onboard SATA controllers running as standalone (JBOD). My motherboard is a Gigabyte P55M-UD4 with an Intel 5 series/3400 SATA AHCI controller . I don't have a problem with the video or hard drives after coming back from sleep mode. I suspect it's greatly improved over windows XP when combined with newer hardware.

At some point I could try the sleep mode with a Dell Perc 6i to see how well it handles it. I have a second one kicking around and a few extra drives.

 

[LunarMist]

My setup does not have functional ACHI. I need 17 SATA ports so there are a multitude of 2- and 4-port add-in controllers occupying the PCI and PCIe slots. :alb:

 

[Chewy509]

My setup does not have functional ACHI. I need 17 SATA ports so there are a multitude of 2- and 4-port add-in controllers occupying the PCI and PCIe slots. :alb:

Why didn't you look at an entry level SAS card and use port expanders? Or don't all SATA HDDs support or like being used with port expanders?

 

[LunarMist]

Is the port expander for SAS similar to a port multiplier for SATA? I tried the latter and it does not do well when some drives are powered on and off.

 

[Chewy509]

Is the port expander for SAS similar to a port multiplier for SATA? I tried the latter and it does not do well when some drives are powered on and off.

They're pretty much the same. From what I've read, some SATA drives just don't like being connected via a port expander/multiplier. So was interested in your case.

 

[LunarMist]

The problem was that when some drives were running on the PM and others were powered on, at least one of the running drives was kicked out of the system, resulting the dreaded delayed write failure. I had no issues when all drives were powered at boot. Normally I have only the 6 HDs, 2 SSDs and optical running. The others are on hot swap capable ports powered on/off by remote control.

 

[LiamC]

Are you sure the Delayed Write failure was related to the drive/Port expander?

Q? Do you have any motherboard attached to your network with using a Marvell gigabit port? My experiences with Delayed Write Failure was with the Marvell NIC/gigabit network rather than the drives.

If you are using Marvell, get the latest drivers from Marvell's site. Asus/Gigabyte are well behind the curve on this one.

 

[LunarMist]

It was a long while ago, but the systems all used the Realitek or Intel chips.

 

[LunarMist]

My computers are heating up the joint something awful this summer. uke-l:

The main machine with 6 HDs spinning and 2 SSDs is using about 180-200W, fluctuating. The odd part is that the backup computer only has two hard drives, one SSD and optical drive, yet uses almost the same amount of power. What is normal for your computers? Is there anything to do for the backup system? Should I consider building a more basic, low-powered system for internet usage?

It reaches 267W under the CPU loads.

 

[ddrueding]

Just ordered a few of the following. Should be reasonably low-power, and plenty for office work. I'll let you know how it does.

MB - GIGABYTE GA-H55M-S2H
CPU - INTEL CORE I3 530 2.93G 4M
RAM - 2x 2GB OCZ DDR3
SSD - 40G INTEL SSDSA2MP040G2R5
CASE - ANTEC NSK2480
DVD - LITE-ON | IHAS124-04

42W Idle, 71W Load.

Running Windows 7 Pro with no optimizations.

 

[time]

Excellent! I was hoping you'd get below 50W with the i3 and SSD, and you did it easily. It's worth reminding people that this configuration will out-perform most Core 2 Duo systems, and with far superior onboard graphics capability to boot.

 

[ddrueding]

Indeed. The Win7 performance index was bottlenecked by the GPU at 4.8; a very respectable score. It absolutely rocks at basic office and web tasks.

 

[Will Rickards]

What is the cost of that configuration?

 

[Santilli]

Indeed. The Win7 performance index was bottlenecked by the GPU at 4.8; a very respectable score. It absolutely rocks at basic office and web tasks.

Found my Kil a Watt.

Just got done running The Beast doing Call of Duty 4 at about 30% processor power.
It was in the 450-500Watt range. At idle it's about 221w.
This with two Sata drives installed, and the others listed in the sig.

 

[LunarMist]

That's awful. Are you sure that it is accurate?

 

[Santilli]

42W Idle, 71W Load.

Running Windows 7 Pro with no optimizations.

Appears that adding a SATA drive would add about 15 WATTS, at least on the
Dual Xeons it did. It booted at 135 Watts, and went up 15 WATTS when the removeable drive was put in. Define "load" on your tests, please.

 

[CougTek]

It's in line with his configuration. The GeForce 295GTX is very power-hungry. With an i7 920 operating at 3.33GHz, 3x2GB DDR3 RAM and a single Intel 80GB SSD, Anandtech's team posted 189W idle and 460W under load. That's only slightly below Greg's numbers. Add some 10-15W for his additional RAM, a little difference in the power supply efficiency and a little more stressful gaming session and his numbers are within the expected range.

 

[Santilli]

Testing the 2.8 ghz xeons, running about 56-70 % and its running about 200-220 Watts.Thats with 3 vertex turbos, one SATA drive. 4670 ATI card, and one DVD burner, plus Magic Jack. Seasonic 550W power supply.
At 5% processors, it's running 135 WATTS. At 15%, and this is what it usually is running at, it's 136 Watts.

Trying DVD Shrink, even though I don't use it on this machine, just to see what it runs at 100%.

Transfering files running Decrypter, typing this is about 40-60% and around 190 Watts.

Appears the i3 would be 150% faster then the dual Xeons.

What is 100 Watts, 24/7, per month, in Kali PG&E costs?

With Gigabyte file transfer done it drops down to 150 Watts, while still ripping. I'm waiting to see what it does at 100% processor use.
At 100% processor use, the Server runs at 230 Watts.

So most of the time it's between 135-150 Watts. About what I figured.