So ive never really paid attention to the power I consume running various servers over the years but now that ive cleaned up and consolidated im trying to gauge my power draw compared to others.
I run a Proxmox host with 13 HDDs, 6 NVMe drives and 2 U2 NVME drives, a Quattro P2200, RTX A2000, RTX 4070, Epyc CPU, HBA for HDDs, NVMe Card 4x4.
A Synology 2422 with 4SSD, 2 HDDs
A Synology expansion with 8 HDDs
I run about 500 watts off the wall for all this stuff and I think this is the lower end as I wasn’t using the GPUs. That includes a couple switches as well. Very silent runs very cool.
What do other people consume?
All these comments are making me think about how I’d create the minimum power-use homelab. Was looking at 3 year old servers but now I’m thinking just building a low power but powerful system that uses very low power at idle but when in use I’m less worried as it’s more about getting the job done.
Running network equipment to include 4 POE cameras, a Unifi UDM Pro, 48 port poe switch, fans and 2 APs.
On the Server side I run a dell r730xd with 2 x m1200s in standby as I don’t have disks yet and I pull about 300w on avg.
~550w Nexus 9k 48p 10g 6p 40g 3x dell r630, 2x 10c e5 2640 v4, 384gb ram, 1x 960gb nvme ssd and 5x 1.92tb sata SSDs
Though it may change soon… not for the better
4100 VA or about 2650 W…
Not including my office setup, that’s just what’s in the rack. MX7000 chassis with 7x MX740c blades, redundant 40G core switches, a fiber channel SAN, two 48-bay NAS with 10TB drives, and 240v power with a 5000W UPS.
Not including the AC for the garage that the rack is in.
And no, I am not a masochist.
I just calculated this would cost me £8272 p.a. ($10160) to run.
Ouchies.
Power costs me $0.09 kWh where I live, so it’s far more affordable for me to run.
Or €15111 little tiny bitty coins in chocolate/beer country.
2650 W
My whole flat uses less yearly
How on Zod’s green earth were you able to get your power factor to be that awful?!
Xeon processors in my case
Follow up question: how is your hearing? An actual blade setup would be loud as bombs inside a house.
Actually, the MX7000 is not terrible on noise comparatively. Not silent, obviously, but no worse than a typical 1U server.
Now, having that many compute modules may make that thing loud…
Yep. It’s not so bad. I typically only have 4 or so blades powered on at a time, so it’s not so bad. The MX9116N IOMs I have though require more cooling. Had I gone for the lesser ones, it’d probably be a little quieter.
How did you got an mx7000?
50 Watts
What are the specs of your server?
I draw about 150 watts at idle.
1x pve server (ryzen 5, 32GB ram, 2x SSD, 8x HDD)
1x HP T620+ firewall
1x rpi2 backup pihole
1x switch
1x UniFi AP
1x spectrum modem
About 2.9e-7 gigawatts.
for PVR (1 HDD), server(4 HDDs), and all those wall warts, standalone clocks, switches, CPE, battery chargers I left plugged in, TV and monitor standby power,…
looks like a steady 330, single storage host 7 spinning disks, 4 SSDs, 4 rpi-4 with SSDs running k3s and the network stack (edgerouter 8-xg, 2 8 port poe switches and a 24 port es-24).
Changes I should make are to reduce drives / upgrade storage host in a couple of years and switch out to a single, larger poe switch (2.5G 24-48 ports), again in a couple of years.
I sit around 5kw average… Depending what the GPUs are doing
Two small Synology units (DS120J and DS218+ with attached usb drives for backup), five-port gigabit switch and a modem router, in addition to a Proxmox host (HP 800 G3 mini) runs at about 40W with spun down hard drives, and somewhere around 50W when these are being accessed.
The Synology units automatically shut down at night, at which point the power draw drops to 24W.
It all comes down to about 0.85-0.9 kWh per day.
Assuming a price of 30c/kWh means that even this comparatively small power use comes up to 10€/month or so.
850 watts is my normal server rack load, however, with cameras and other switches I’m at 1100 watts 24/7 currently.
Add another 600 watts if I turn everything on in the server rack.
15-20W at idle for my all-SSD Ryzen server, 10W or so for networking (2.5GbE router), and around 10W for my personal machine at idle, so around 35-40W total for my stuff.
Mind sharing some details on that ryzen server? It sounds cool
It’s a simple machine - Ryzen 3 2200G, 48GB of DDR4-3200 running at 2933MHz, B550 mATX motherboard (most power-efficient AM4 chipset + has built-in 2.5GbE and PCIe 3.0 for all chipset lanes), with a mix of NVMe and SATA SSDs along with a few 4TB HDDs that are currently always off.
I went with the 2200G because I already had it, but you could easily get much better performance using a 5600G or 5300G, or a 4600G if you can find one.
Handles all my tasks no problem (PhotoPrism, Jellyfin, and general file server duties for the most part). I’ve got a big fat tower cooler on the CPU and I can’t hear it even under full load.
It used to be a 3900X machine when I had much higher compute requirements but I swapped out the CPU when idle power became a bigger concern.
It used to be a 3900X machine when I had much higher compute requirements but I swapped out the CPU when idle power became a bigger concern.
What was the idle power consumption on the 3900X machine?
I have a 10drive unraid system with a 3900x – pulls total 300-350w Rack with switches and networking stuff pulls another 200ish
Total 500ish :)
Around 50-60W, but that’s including a 1080Ti.
1.21.
Tom, how am I going to generate that kind of power? It can’t be done!
This is the only correct answer to this question!
Great Scott!
That’s heavy
Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull?
Wait a minute, Doc, are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me?
^1.21 ^jiggowatts!
Dell T20, 2x Wyse 5070, Optiplex 3000 thin client. HP 600 g3 that total about 85 watts. A couple gigabit switches for about ten watts.
Trying to keep it under a hundred watts, but I go well over the T20 and/or the HP have heavy load. Luckily none of my workloads use that much CPU so it’s under a hundred watts.
I have crazy expensive California power so with A/C each watt costs about $4 a year.
Server (Ryzen + 3 HDDs + 2 SSDs) - 50W
Networking (USG + Unifi AP + Mi router as a second AP + switch) - 20W, maybe a bit less
70W in total