="Performance on the cheap cpu looks great, idle power not so...
Yes, I agree with this. Some of the new Supermicro X11SDV boards could have been very nice, but the idle power consumption is really huge.
For comparison, I am using an X10SDV-TLN4F, with an 8-core D-1540, which is faster for most tasks than D-2123IT and it is equipped with 64 Gbyte of RAM and 6 Tbyte of SSD (2 TB NVMe + 4 TB SATA) and with an extra Gbit Ethernet.
That system is used 24/7 and its average power consumption is 49 to 51 W (the average power consumption includes the losses in the 80 PLUS Platinum ATX PSU and in an APC UPS, i.e. the power is measured before the UPS). Because it has from time to time peaks of power consumption between 70 and 80 W and it is never completely idle, being connected as firewall & router to the Internet, from where the firewall rejects continuously at least a few hundreds packets per second, the X10SDV-TLN4F idle power consumption must be very low to attain such an average, probably no more than 20 W.
There are a lot of services collocated on that server, two DNS servers, one DNS proxy & cache, a web proxy & cache, 2 HTTP servers, a mail server, a file server and others. All its 5 Ethernet interfaces are connected to other computers, which are active most of the day.
So even the small Mini-ITX variant of X11SDV, with the slowest CPU, has an idle power consumption that is larger than the *average* power consumption of a fully-loaded X10SDV server.
If I would replace the old X10SDV, I would need the FlexATX X11SDV, as only that has enough Ethernet NICs. But that board would certainly have an even higher idle power consumption, so the upgrade would not be acceptable.
A Goldmont / or future Goldmont Plus board would not be acceptable, as I need AVX on the processor.
So it seems that I should wait to see the power consumption of Snowy Owl, or maybe I should try an underclocked Xeon W, if I verify that its motherboard has an idle power consumption that is low enough.
