Lowering idle power consumption

PaulCa

PaulCa

PaulCa

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So I am building a new gaming system and thinking of making my old system a NAS/Media server.

The thing that bugs me is how much electricity it might use compared to a smaller dedicated NAS box.

So lowering the power consumption... can anyone add to this list?

* Remove/sell the GTX970, replace with a super cheap passive cooled card.
* Disconnect most of the case fans
* Put remaining fans under mobo control with a silent profile
* Remove any overclocking profiles for CPU and memory

For reference the old system is:
FX 9590 8-core
16Gb Ballistix DDR3
(Currently) GTX970
Asus mobo
Antec Gamer 900 case
A shed load of spinning SATAs.

Ideally I would like to get it well under 100W idle power.

Over time I can consolidate the spinning media collection down to 2 or 3 large SATAs with ZFS and decomission the old/smaller drives.
 
Underclock and undervolt it. Make sure all power saving options like cool n quiet are enabled in the bios too.
 
Higher end motherboard needed to endure that electric heater likely has all kind of useless in server stuff.
Also that CPU itself isn't as good at idling than modern CPUs
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...66-amd-fx-9590-review-piledriver-5ghz-17.html
https://uk.hardware.info/reviews/51...o-the-high-end-market-energy-consumption-idle
So no matter what you do that's certainly going to draw good amount more power than purpose built NAS.
(for example you would want low end CPU with integrated GPU)


For drives you should look for 5400/5900rpm drives.
Those can go down to ~3W idle consumption.
 
Sadus said:
Try BananaPie or RaspberryPie ;) much cheaper and uses much less energy.
Click to expand...

Have you tried to use a PI as a media server?

It just doesn't work. There is a perception that a media server is just a file server and if it can stream an HD movie it's good to go.

However when you point a smart TV at the DLNA server it typically opens a window with 30 files on it and immediately sends dozens of requests for thumbnails. This absolutely clobbers the PI to death as it has to open each movie file, scan and grab a thumbnail.

Even browsing MP3s over NFS caused the PI to bog down and overload if you kept flicking next, next, next due to the NFS threads building up.

This is even before you get to transcoding.

My tests were done on a PI 2 though, however I do not see the PI 3 doing all that much better.
 
You could also use just 8gb of ram and disable some of the cores, as someone already mentioned under clock / under volt, also disable onboard audio
 
Get a second hand cpu for that board that is a lot less power hungry. Less cores and lower clock speed ect.
 
A mentioned above the CPU is quite inappropriate for purpose in this case. Next culprit I'd say is disks, go fewer and slower. And the GPU is not necessary, power wise.

So my suggestion is to sell the board, CPU, some RAM and the GPU. Then buy a lower end, efficient Intel like a 2nd/3rd gen i3 or even Celeron/Pentium. Integrated GPU and incredibly low power consumption.

Plus you'll be left with a bunch of cash. New drives maybe?
 
Fair enough. Sounds like it's just going to waste electricity running it 24/7. However I will use it, as is for a while as a file server until I can start to organize the disks in it. The new system is obviously completely separate with it's own M.2 and SSD. So once it is fully up to speed I can delete the OS(es) bar the main Linux off the old one, delete a bunch of rubbish and try and clear the older smaller disks so they can be binned and tidy the large >1Tb drives and see what I have from there.

I'm not convinced the PI3 can actually cope with proper media serving, but what about something like a Gigabyte Brix? Ideally something with a Celeron rather than an Atom to make it easier to install Linux (though I believe Linux supports Atom). The downside I can see though is that I would limited to USB3.0 speeds and need external enclosures for the drives.

I don't really want to buy a prebuilt NAS as I do not want to be stuck using their clunky OS. They are just too expensive for what they are as well.
 
USB3 is theoretically faster than SATA2. Latency though.

I've never had issues with Linux on any Intel platform, Atom or otherwise.

Still, I think the Brix/NUC route isn't ideal. They're pricy for what they are, you could get a similar setup in a standard case which then houses all the disks and stays immensely cooler and quieter.
 
LuckyBenski said:
USB3 is theoretically faster than SATA2. Latency though.

I've never had issues with Linux on any Intel platform, Atom or otherwise.

Still, I think the Brix/NUC route isn't ideal. They're pricy for what they are, you could get a similar setup in a standard case which then houses all the disks and stays immensely cooler and quieter.
Click to expand...

Sorry I was thinking about ARM chips not Atom. Of course linux supports them but they are not known for their high power computing like the standard x86 platform such as the celeron.

Building a custom system is an option, but tricky to price on OC as all their older lower end stuff is out of stock. Might try ****** or even eBay to price a minimal system. I can always reuse the Gamer 900/1200 case I have.
 
So what about buying a Micro-ATX motherboard that supports DDR3 so I can reuse some of the RAM. A Socket LGA1150 for example an a dual core pentium or celeron 2.xGhz? A mobo with build in Intel HD graphics would do.

Normal ATX cases support MicroATX don't they, I should just need to move the stand offs?

The only trouble is finding older 1150 chips. The only ones I can find outside of ebay are Zeon's and top of the line i3s at £120+

The other trouble is getting a board with at least 4 SATA 6.0Gb/s although I suppose I could settle for 2x3.0 and 2x6.0

The 650W Cosair PSU should be okay, shouldn't it?
 
PSU is well above what you should need, so fine. Plenty of 1150 chips about, though I never see many i3s. But the D/G series ones are about for £15 I think. H81 boards should be £30-40 but might only have two SATA3.

And yes uATX will drop into ATX standoffs, you probably won't have to move any. :)
 
As I said before, just underclock and undervolt it and it significantly lowers the consumption, especially with cool n quiet enabled. In my server, which is using my 9 year old phenom II x4 955, the raid card and disks use more power than the rest put together. IIRC, it's running at 3GHz using 1.3V, where it should run at 3.2GHz at 1.35V and when it powered my main system it was running at 3.8GHz using 1.5V. I could probably shave some more off it but with cool n quiet on, it idles around 800MHz and 1V anyway.

I'll be upgrading it to an FX8320 I have spare at some point in the next couple of weeks which will receive the same treatment.
 
Well as the current box will be hanging around for a while until I can tidy up the mass sprawl of storage I have collected in it over the years I will put a wall plug power monitor on it and see how low I can get it to go. If I can get it down under 100W it might just do.
 
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