Supermicro SC846/X10DriT reduce power consumption

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trumee

Member
Jan 31, 2016
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Hello,

I have a X10DriT motherboard with dual cpus (E5-2650V4) populated. I want to reduce the power consumption. One of the tricks i did was to reduce the core count from 12 to 6 and disable hyper-threading,



Also, set APM to 'Energy Efficient'.



The PSU is PWS-920P-SQ and the system has a mix of SAS/SATA drives.

Power consumption is as follows:
Code:
# ipmitool dcmi power reading

Instantaneous power reading: 220 Watts
Minimum during sampling period: 216 Watts
Maximum during sampling period: 299 Watts
Average power reading over sample period: 238 Watts
IPMI timestamp: Sun Feb 27 05:12:04 2022
Sampling period: 00000565 Seconds.
Power reading state is: activated
Is there any other recommended BIOS setting to reduce power?
 
Last edited:

spicysnow

New Member
Mar 12, 2022
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I'm not an expert but why do u want to do this :? If u want lower power consumption, there's xeons like E5-2650lV4(or similar) which would bring down power consumption quite a bit. I think there's no reason to cripple those cpu's on purpose just to save a little bit on electricity bill, as it defeats the purpose of owning such cpu :D.
 

Satan023

New Member
Oct 15, 2023
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disable all not used devices, like:
sata controller、usb controller

enable ASPM

ASPM Support
Use this item to set the Active State Power Management (ASPM) level for a PCI-E
device. Select Auto for the system BIOS to automatically set the ASPM level based
on the system configuration. Select Disabled to disable ASPM support. The options
are Disabled and Auto.
Warning: Enabling ASPM support may cause some PCI-E devices to fail!
so make sure there is no device plug in pci slot
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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With a filled 846 I wouldn't expect to save a lot of power for a fileserver through bios settings as most of the power will be consumed by the hdds...
 

SnJ9MX

Active Member
Jul 18, 2019
114
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I did my best to reduce power in a 1U server and measured an AsrockRack EPC612D8 w/Xeon e5-2690v4, 2x32GB, 1x 480GB SSD at 46W at the wall. With a couple more SSDs (not particularly low power ones either), power was in the 54-58W range. This was with an Athena Power (?) 400W PS.

Pulling an entire CPU should do more to reduce power than cutting the activated core number in half.
 

bellocarico

New Member
May 20, 2015
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You are actually not required to disable cores as they can be parked automatically.
You are not saying what OS you are using; pretty much all the modern OS have a power saving feature.

ESXi has a power saving option

Windows can have the power options triggered directly or via external utilities like process lasso or Quick CPU (see example here below for the latter)
1697789762607.png

Linux you can try this in the crontab:
@reboot echo "schedutil" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor &>/dev/null