Any new informations about the t740?
I would like to buy a 730 or 740 for pfsense and would like to see some troughput benchmarks with cpu utilisation and power consumption if you dont mind
.
cheers
Eh, you know that I have an
entire thread dedicated to the t740, right? The t740 is a very different beast from the t730, up to 3x more powerful, and since it can do limited SRIOV, it's more useful as well.
As for pfsense - are you looking for numbers with it running bare metal or virtualized? My only pfsense instance is running as a VM within Proxmox 6.1.8 (don't run ESXi, it's not great for low wattage consumer home labs - I am pretty much giving up on VSphere at this point) with 2 Mellanox 40GbE VFs assigned to it via SRIOV. Since my Arista 7050QX-32s is back in my office (and NYC is not fully coming out of quarantine until July), I can't tell you how much throughput I am getting out of it on the 40GbE VF side. I would not be surprised if the Ryzen can sustain 40GbE bandwidth - of course, I would have to setup something in my house to consume 40GbE for testing. iperf3 between pfsense and the hypervisor itself using the built-in NIC via virtio (paravirtualized NICh is 2.5GBps, and it's 1GBps to the NAS on the other side of my living room (which runs on Gigabit fiber/copper anyways).
As for numbers, let's see, I just upgraded the Elekcity Voltson smart plugs in the house, and I can only take screenshots on my iPhone, but here's the rough numbers read from the Voltson smartplug on "what you see is what you use off the wall" mode.
t740 Thin client, 8GB of RAM, 256GB Intel SATA SSD, Proxmox 6.1.8, Mellanox MCX353A-FCBT (ConnectX3 VPI), 6 VFs active on boot - Only thing connected is the power lead and Gigabit ethernet.
2 minutes after startup: 20w
4 VMs started (3 Linux, 768MB RAM each, 1 pfsense, 2GB RAM, ~5GB RAM in total allocated) , 3 grabbing 2 VFs each, idle - 24w
4 VMs (2 running stress -c 3, 1 idle, 1 pfsense) - 27w
4 VMs (2 running stress -c 3, 1 idle, 1 pfsense) + stress -c 6 -m 2 --vm-bytes 1G on Proxmox itself - 31w
I have no idea why the wattage is so low - my suspicion is that it's thermally limited since the temp reading is around 98 C, and return-to-idle is roughly the same usage (25w, 1w from the fan cooling the system down). It might also have to do with the fact that the Vega 8 GPU Is not being used whatsoever. The Vega 8 can be a power hog when pushed hard. Note that most of the VCE magic only works on Windows.
That doesn't seem like much - but going with the notes since I booted it earlier to Windows 10 IoT 64 to do efficiency testing for HTPC competitiveness:
t740 Thin client, 8GB of RAM, 64GB eMMC+256GB Intel SATA SSD, Intel X520-DA2 10GbE adapter on but not used, DP->HDMI connected to 4k TV (running 1080p), USB mouse/keyboard combo, Gigabit ethernet
On boot: 41w (everything powered up)
2 minutes after stabilized boot: 25w (GPU on and displaying on HDMI, CPU idle)
Dolphin NGC/Wii emulator + Super Mario Galaxy, 2x native resolution @ 98%: 41w (45% CPU load, 85% GPU load avg)
Dolphin NGC/Wii emulator + Auto Modellista, 3x native resolution @ 100%: 28w (35% CPU load, 75% GPU load avg.)
PCSX2 PS2 Emulator/Star Wars battlefront 2: 27w (15% CPU load, 45% GPU load avg.)
Playing 1080p H264 - 30w (VCN half engaged)
Playing 4k H265 - 33w (VCN fully engaged)
Playing 4k VP9 via Google Chrome (Youtube UHD content) - 44w (VCN1 does not have 4k accelerated playback for VP9)
Transcoding 4k H265 to 1080p H264 via Handbrake - 83w (the CPU and GPU are both hammered due to VCE not being all that efficient)
Oh yeah, and
here's the equivalent numbers for the t730 - that t730 does have 32GB of DDR3 RAM and no secondary SSD. The t740 is much more power efficient as a server. But as an HTPC? Hmm...I'll need to compare it to something like a Skylake NUC, especially for VP9/H265 and Quicksync transcoding. It's not really fair comparing it to the t730 since it's a GCN4.2 GPU that barely accelerates modern video codecs.