Looking to save some power

[Shad]

I've currently got 3 servers running that I would love to save a little bit of power from. I'm using about 600W at the moment. I'm aware that the hardware is old and not as efficient as new kit, but I'm hoping that for a small cost I can make a decent reduction.

My PowerEdge 2950 (II) has dual 3.0 GHz Xeon 5160 chips which are rated at 65W. For less than £15 I can replace these with a pair of 2.33 GHz Xeon 5148 chips which are rated at 40W each, potentially a saving of 50W? But, what's the real world performance drop from making that kind of change?

The other Dell unit is an R200 which I'm not sure what CPUs I can fit? It currently has a 2.33 GHz Xeon 3065 which is a 65W part again, but all of the Xeons in the 30XX range seem to be 65W parts too. Not sure what I can replace it with, any thoughts? The system is also running ESXi with pfSense and vCenter.

Lastly I have a white box AMD unit currently running a Phenom II X4 965BE, which is a 125W part. The board is a recent AM3+ board which runs all the latest compatible chips but not having looked into AMD chips for a long time I don't know what would be a good upgrade to keep similar performance and lower power. The box runs ESXi with about 8 VMs, including SQL Server and TFS.

Any suggestions (other than junk the lot) welcome

 

[[Darkend]Viper]

Well i've got a poweredge 2950 (III) and that has 2x quad core xeons 3ghz with 32gb ram, and 5x 450gb 15k sas drives which pulls 231w running 5 vm, and i've got a poweredge r710 that is more efficient.

The 2950 has xeon X chips where the r710 has xeon E ones, and this is where I think the difference comes from.