More efficient system

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badsimian

New Member
Mar 13, 2017
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My current setup is below but I am not utilising it as much as I thought I would. I want to downgrade to a more power efficient rig, sell the graphics card and just run dockers and the odd VM. My current system idles at about 100W.

Intel Xeon E5-2695 v3 unlocked allcore 3.2GHz
ASRock X99 Extreme 6
80GB DDR4 ECC RAM
3x3TB + 4TB parity drive
1TB Samsung PM951 NVMe
500GB Crucial SSD
Phanteks Evolve ATX case
EVGA G2 850W PSU
Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB
unRAID 6.6.5

So as I see it my approaches are (1) just change my 14 core E5 processor to a lower power v4 one and see if I can tweak BIOS settings etc, perhaps implement sleep hours during the night and so on to lower general running costs. Alternatively (2) replace the motherboard, CPU and memory with something else like a modern Pentium Gold or 8th gen i3 (for Plex hardware transcoding)
Any ideas? I don't think I can re-use my memory with a 1151 motherboard and i3 so would need to sell that and buy some more. My E5 is one where I have BIOS unlocked it to get an all-core boost of 3.2GHz across all 14 cores. It would be nice to have hardware transcoding as I share my library with friends and it often transcodes. Is my PSU too high powered? would a lower power one be more efficient?
 

DavidB

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Aug 31, 2018
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Your chipset + CPU is the bulk of the power consumption, typical X99 platform with (non-Xeon) will idle around 75-85W with your Xeon V3 idling a little higher due to it's allcore overclock. Your power supply could be smaller to be more efficient, but this change will be <5W difference.

If you really want to go the power efficient route you will either have to underclock/undervolt your CPU or go with a power efficient newer platform such as X470 (Ryzen) or C242/C246 With an i3. This would idle around 35-40W in your spec but probably not have the same total CPU performance when fully loaded. Any newer generation Intel Extreme (X299 etc.) will have the same power characteristics.

Your most power efficient option if desired is using Fijutsu D3644-B (for example) as those are famous for being very power efficient.

I can't say how much your power costs per Watt, but at typical US prices lowering your power consumption by 1W roughly equates to 1$/year. This means your power has to be quite expensive before it pays off to buy completely new HW to reduce your idle power consumption with ~65W.
 

badsimian

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Mar 13, 2017
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That is a good point, when I plug my electricity cost into a calculator, it is looking like about £10GBP per month, so about £1.20/year for each reduction of 1W. Probably not worth spending all that much on solving it if I can do things like going to sleep overnight and waking up automatically as well as perhaps turning off some of my cores in the BIOS (not sure if this would actually reduce power consumption)
 

sovking

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Jun 2, 2011
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Another approach is separate the functions that need to stay running 24h a day (like nas with some syncing sw and/or multimedia and/or video-surveillance, etc.) from the hw you are using for making your work (or leisure) for some hour a day. The former should not consume more than 30-40W a day, while the latter can be your actual workstation without the 3 spinning disk that can be moved to the nas.
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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My system

Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 unlocked allcore
ASRock X99 Extreme 6
64GB DDR4 ECC RAM
8 x 8TB WD disk
2TB Samsung NVMe
2 x 1.9TB Samsung sata SSD
EVGA G3 550W PSU
Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB
Windows server 2016 with snapraid ,

Sytem is running 24 x 7 , 2 Ubuntu VM , 2 Ubuntu vm for docker ,
2 Qbittorent windows VM , Windows 8.1 Emby VM , Windows 10 Office 2018 vm ,
1 Virtual Fileserver with disk pass thru, Windows update server WSUS

Other VMs are running on demand such as few Music network player VM , Scanner VM .

The system is always never idle ,
At the moment, Emby VM with 4 core vcpu is busy transcoding .
I just took a peak at the UPS display, it is showing 106 watt.

add:
The E5-2683 v3 14 cores rarely hit all-core turbo 3.0 GHz, most of the time is below 2.0 GHz
 

badsimian

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Mar 13, 2017
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That's a remarkably similar system :) One thing I can't work out is if you get a large saving moving from say a largely idle 14 core like I have to a lower clocked say 8 core v4 chip instead?
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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What is your CPU idle speed in GHz?

Currently , with all my VM running , CPU is showing 1.3 GHz to 1.8 GHz. When it is "idle" , CPU is at 1.2 GHz.

When I built the system, I checked the system Idle power consumption, I couldn't find my record.
In my memory , it idles around 80w with all drives spinning

I do not believed there is much power saving between v4 and v3 to replace the CPU.
 

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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Northern California
...One thing I can't work out is if you get a large saving moving from say a largely idle 14 core like I have to a lower clocked say 8 core v4 chip instead?
I believe that, generally, the idle power draw difference between the various E5 26xx v3 (and v4) models is pretty minor. Haswell and Broadwell were, as a family, similarly efficient at idle. Where they really differ, of course, is under load. If your system is idle much of the time, it would take you a long time to recoup the cost of a 6 or 8 core CPU that saved you maybe a couple watts an hour over the 14 core.

On the other hand, depending on the work you need it to do, having a more powerful system that gets you back to idle faster can still save you money.

My main workstation has an 8 core E5-2667 v3 and idles at about 60 watts (I only have 2 SSD and an RX560 in it. If I had a lot of mechanical disks and a GTX 1060, the idle would probably be right up there where yours is). Another system has an E3 and less RAM, and idles at about 20 watts less. But, a job that takes the E5 system 45 minutes at about 40% CPU load will take the E3 system 4-5 hours with all the cores flogging away at 100%, and wind up "costing" more.

Is this also your main PC/Workstation? I have my networked systems set to Wake on Lan and power down when idle for a period of time. So they are only running when I need them to. I must admit though, that this is less for power savings than heat, as all the equipment is in my home office and I live in a hot area of California.
 

badsimian

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Mar 13, 2017
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No I normally have a laptop plugged in whcih I use as my main desktop. I used to do a fair bit of fiddling with KVM base hackintoshes, WIndows gaming VMs with hardware passthrough etc but really all I need is a NAS with the ability to run a couple of WIndows VMs on occasion. Current system is a bit overkill for that.

I want to avoid spending money if I can, not sure how much I would get if I sold the X99 mobo, CPU and memory and then bought a coffee lake i3 with mobo and ram, probably come out evens if I was lucky and an indeterminate reduction in power usage.

I am beginning to think that the easiest hassle free way of getting a reduction is to unplug the 5th stick of RAM, make the box go to sleep for 8 hours a night and maybe even try undervolting the CPU a bit in the BIOS.
 
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Markess

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May 19, 2018
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Northern California
but really all I need is a NAS with the ability to run a couple of WIndows VMs on occasion. Current system is a bit overkill for that.
What kind of network connection do you have? Are you using the onboard 1Gb NICs? For NAS, your system only needs enough RAM to keep the network connection completely saturated. For a Gigabit connection, you should only need a gigabyte or two of RAM. You'd need a bit more for transcoding, but not too much.

I assume you've got 16GB DIMMs installed? You can try pulling all but one and see how it performs. You'll lose quad channel, but that isn't really an issue for most of your purposes. 16GB is still more than enough to do some transcoding and saturate a Gigabit connection when functioning as a NAS. Probably enough for VMs as well, if they aren't too resource heavy. Even if you're still going to game, most games have pretty modest RAM requirements, as they focus on CPU/GPU.

Even though its a pain to do, you could also remove the turbo core exploit and enable all the CPU power saving technologies in the BIOS. You'd probably want to do that first before undervolting in any case.

Modern mechanical drives are rated for 10s of thousands of spin-up/spin-down cycles. If it doesn't impact your array's stability you can implement idle time spindown on the drives. Its a small savings, and for an array it can be an issue though. So maybe only if you really want to shave off a last few watts. Taking the whole system down at night is much easier and will definitely save you some power.

Lastly, you can pull the GTX 1060 for a lower power GPU. If you aren't doing GPU passthrough, you can use pretty much anything. On my headless systems that didn't already have onboard Matrox graphics, I used Nvidia Quadro NVS 300s, which max out at 17 watts, idle at almost nothing at all, and are cheap on eBay. Not an option if you'll still need higher performance GPU Passthrough for gaming etc.
 

badsimian

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Mar 13, 2017
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Yes I have a gigabit connection. I currently have 5 x 16GB DIMMs installed. I tried pulling out the gfx card, a USB 3 card I had for VM pass through, wifi card for the same, an NVM drive and it didn't have all that much impact on the power usage. So I am left with either replace the processor with a lower core one or just get sleep working so it isn't running for 8-10 hours a day.
 

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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Northern California
Yes I have a gigabit connection. I currently have 5 x 16GB DIMMs installed. I tried pulling out the gfx card, a USB 3 card I had for VM pass through, wifi card for the same, an NVM drive and it didn't have all that much impact on the power usage. So I am left with either replace the processor with a lower core one or just get sleep working so it isn't running for 8-10 hours a day.
The Gigabit connection is a the limiting factor. So, for NAS functionality the rest of the components only need to powerful enough to keep up with the Ethernet connection.

You can still try pulling some RAM sticks. You have way more RAM than you need for a NAS if won't be running a lot of VMs on top of it. I bet most of it sits unused all the time. Not sure how much it will help your overall numbers if the rest didn't help, but its easy to test so you may want to try. EDIT: I just tested my own system by pulling 3 of the 4 16GB RDIMMs. It cut the idle by about 4-5 watts.

A lower core CPU probably won't help much. All those CPUs of the same generation idled pretty similar.

What may help more, is undoing the BIOS changes that locked the CPU in turbo mode, and then re-enabling all the CPU power saving modes in the BIOS. As @DavidB said above, Chipset and CPU are a lot of the power used at idle. You can't really do much about the chipset, and X99 wasn't designed to be very power frugal. But, you can bring the CPU power draw down. I don't know much about the turbo core exploit you have running, but if it doesn't allow for idle cores to slow or shut down for example, then I suspect your CPU is drawing a lot more power at idle than an unmodified one.

Concerning sleep, if its really hard to get it to suspend properly, you may want to consider having it shutdown on a schedule and then boot the next day when you need it, either by physically turning it on if you're physically there with it, or issuing a Wake on Lan (WOL) command from your desktop/laptop when you want to connect. I do that with my NAS. Some days, I don't need it till much later in the day or at all, and it stays off till then. That may not be a convenient option for you if you have lots of users or need remote access from the web though.
 
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