I have a Proxmox server running two Opteron 6272 CPUs on an Asus KGPE-D16 (chosen because it was the fastest computer that supported Libreboot, although I haven’t gotten around to installing it). Using normal BIOS settings, it’s drawing just under 100W at idle, measured via smart plug reported in Home Assistant. With aggressive efficiency settings (PowerCap to P-state 4 and disabling CPU 2 entirely) it idles at 70W. It’s a server, not a gaming PC, so it doesn’t appear to have any options for underclocking or adjusting voltage.
Anybody know of any other ways (maybe software-based) to get the power draw down further?
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If you’ve optimized your BIOS settings (balanced mode or power saving wherever possible), the only other option is removing extraneous hardware. All hardware power use (disks, HBAs, other adapters and controllers) adds up. I managed to get idle power consumption of an HP DL-380 G9 down to about 60w (started at 210w) by removing the disks, RAID controller and battery, fiber channel adapters, and extra Ethernet adapter. Each SAS disk I removed saved me 10w. I used one M.2 drive in a PCI adapter instead.
Like you mentioned, these aren’t designed to save power. That Opteron (and the chip set) hales from a time before “performance per watt” was a thing.
Opteron, what year is this?
I dunno about Linux, but on Windows I used to use something called K10stat to manually undervolt cores with no access to such via the BIOS. The difference was night and day dramatic, as they idled ridiculously fast and AMD left a ton of voltage headroom back then.
I bet there’s some Linux software to do it. Look up if anyone used voltage control software for desktop Phenom IIs and such.
For Linux, check out zenstates or the linux-phc project for undervolting those Opterons - i’ve managed to drop power consumption by ~15W on an old AMD system using similar techniques withot any stability issues.
Even if you could shave off 50% at idle, you’re talking about like $0.10 per day in power savings. Is it really worth spending any time on that?
I mean, at the USA average price of electricity of $0.13 per kWh, then for a halving of 70 Watts, it’s about 11 cents per day, or $40 per year. But at the California average price of $0.35, then the savings is 29 cents per day, or $107 per year.
That’s not small money, especially if it’s free to make these gains by ripping out unneeded functionality. But the point is taken that it’ll be hard to find savings from older hardware, which simply didn’t prioritize energy efficiency.
Tangential question: What kind of server apps require that kind of processing power? I run a server on an Intel N200 laptop with multiple apps and services and it rarely uses more than 12% CPU and 15 watts. I’m wondering if I’m going to eventually run into something that needs a more powerful platform.
Nothin’ I’m running, that’s for sure!
It’s not really that there are services that require that much processing power for a single request; it’s that it’s designed to handle normal requests for hundreds or thousands of users at once.
I suppose that supporting 0.5TB of RAM means it could deal with quite a big LLM, but any sort of halfway-modern GPU would absolutely run circles around it in terms of tokens per second, on any model that fit in their VRAM.
Sounds like my laptop will be plenty fast for some time to come.
This platform doesn’t use much power to begin with, but I do run TLP using a battery profile despite the fact it’s always plugged in. My intent is to lower the power consumption a bit further and extend battery run time if the AC fails. There’s no noticeable impact on application performance. If you’re running Linux maybe it will work on your hardware.
God I miss my old opteron box.
If you’re running anything more than about 5 years old you’re just going to chew through power for the sake of chewing through power. You can make little reductions here and there but the entire architecture was all wrong for power savings.
A 10th gen intel i3 on a desktop motherboard will absolutely beat the pants off of older server boxes, that and getting away from spending media or the two biggest savings.