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.
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35w, powering 12 threads, 2 spinning disks, 4 ssds, no GPU, proxmox host with 4 guests.
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.
50 Watts
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.
around 350W at the moment, but I'm in the middle of a data migration.
i7-8700 whitebox VM host
2x HP N54L with 4x 8TB SAS drives, one of them also has 2x 500GB SSD and 2x 500GB HDD
TPlink 24 port switch
a couple of UPSes
Huawei LTE router
probably some other stuff that I've forgotten
Will likely be adding a Dell Optiplex mini PC soon
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.
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.
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.
I sit around 5kw average.. Depending what the GPUs are doing
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.
How did you got an mx7000?
How on Zod’s green earth were you able to get your power factor to be that awful?!
I just calculated this would cost me £8272 p.a. ($10160) to run.
Or €15111 little tiny bitty coins in chocolate/beer country.
Ouchies.
Power costs me $0.09 kWh where I live, so it's far more affordable for me to run.
2650 W
My whole flat uses less yearly
~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
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,...
My wife says I produce 100 gigolo watts a day but I think she's just being nice
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
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.
1.21.
Tom, how am I going to generate that kind of power? It can’t be done!
^1.21 ^jiggowatts!
This is the only correct answer to this question!
~200 kWh during the day, ~700 kWh during the night. I stress load at night to heat up my room, literally.
Dang, my entire house (including my lab) uses about 1100 kWh a MONTH. You have serious consumption going on.
Jiggawho?
45-50W during the day at home, 20-25W during the night as I shut down my server. Swapped the PSU in that server which reduced the load by 10W, the previous one apparently was way oversized.
200-300W at my parent's basement permanently where I keep my storage servers with 36 HDDs in total. They have PV on the roof, a large battery in the basement and don't want to put excess power back into the grid so I was allowed to move my large servers there.
274W currently.
But I have an Intel Arc A770 and 2 extra Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe disks in an ASUS Hyper M.2 waiting to be installed when I get the time. I will be decommissioning a server when I do that though, so we'll see what the running costs end up being. Probably slightly higher overall.
300w
The Z620 is incredibly quiet for as powerful as it is. I have one I use running ESXI to virtualize network equipment for study
I have a Dell T620 tower and an R720 rack mount. The full rack consumes an average of 12 KWh every day.
Proxmox on both, but I use the T620 mostly as it has 12 x 3.5" bays, and I have 2 x NVME drives on PCI card. It also houses the Nvidia Quadro P2000 GPU.
Consequently, the tower is more useful, quieter, and under utilised.
This Christmas break, I plan to move any VMs I have on the R720, move some RAM to max out the tower, and sell the R720. It has 16 x 2.5" bays and an H720 in IT mode. It will keep 64Gb RAM, 8 x 200Gb SSD, and 8 x 1.2Tb HDDs (and 240Gb SATA SSD boot drive where the DVD used to be) for the new owner.
The plan is to recoup some cash and lower the power draw of my rack significantly.
Anywhere between 250W-1000W depending on load. Daily average is about 400W right now.
As in average? 1491W 30 day average according to the power meter. Fully loading everything is around 5kW iirc though that doesn't really happen. Highest in last 30 days is 3774W peak and I think that's when I accidentally shut down the UPS so everything was booting at the same time after. I don't think I ever go over 3kW in normal circumstances.
Using 5 storage servers, 2 of which are storinators and 3 supermicros. And then two compute nodes which are Proliant DL380, g10 and a g11 that I just bought last week. Plus ofc some network gear which isn't really anything too fancy, it's just two routers, which while they do do PoE, I don't use it so they're not really high power or anything.
My entire rack idles around 160W, which includes switches, router, 3 cameras, 2 hotspots, and a server with a Xeon 2680 v4, 100GB of RAM and 50TB of storage, along with a 1650 Super for transcoding etc.
Idle ~1.2kw underload reasonably 2.5 to 3kw? Haven't really stress tested everything to see where I sit at 25% intervals yet. Still rebuilding my rack, office, and support pcs right now. Will have a better idea of exact figures later this week. Averaging 85kwh/day for the house. Everything either has extremely specific low power tasks such as home assistant or truenas or handles vm, production environments, game servers, or gaming for the most part.
2x7551, 128gb, 10 sas, 1 ssd, 1 nvme 2x2699v4, 512gb, 12 sas 7950x, 64gb, 3090ti, 4 nvme, 2 ssd 13900k, 64gb, 1070, 1 nvme 9900k, 32gb, 1 nvme, 6 hdd X6 1100, 8gb, 1 ssd 2600k, 16gb, 1 ssd, 6 hdd Elitedesk g3, 16gb, 1 nvme, 1 ssd, 4 hdd external Mac Studio
Networking Arista dcs-7250qx-64 40gbe Dell x1052 Asus router and mesh
Disk shelves, both filled with various flavors and sized drives Netapp ds2246 IBM ds3524
About 50 watts. I downsized a few years ago, got rid of the unnecessary larger servers, moved to Intel nucs and a 4 disk nas for centralized storage. Was no need to run large servers at home, I play with them at work.
I run proxmox on the nucs with my servers in vms, each nuc has 16gb of ram and performance is fine
My entire rack is currently idle'ing at around 180 watts. That includes a 10 drive Unraid server with Ryzen 7 3700X. Plus I have a Dell mini-PC, HP EliteDesk G3, A older Apple Mac-Mini running Ubuntu server and a Lenovo m720q (OPNSense).
Of course I've never looked at how much the network stuff is using such as 2 switches, 4 x Access points, 2 x Raspberry Pi 3s (DNS/Pihole) and ISP provided fiber gateway box.
42*10^-6 MW for NUC, two drives, modem, switch, router and ap.
eh, around 500w average.
Got a couple SFFs. Got a couple Micros.
Got an 2730xd loaded with over 128T of storage, tons of NVMe and 256g of ram.
Got 6 switches total. 10G ran everywhere too. Lots of POE stuff.
Around 90-100W typical for the part of my lab actually powered on. That is my NAS (60W typical) that has five 12/14 TB hard drives attached to a C2750 and my VM Host (35W typical, but bounces between 20W and 40W), which has a couple of SSDs attached to a R7 1700.
I'm hitting just under 5000 watts or 40 amps at 120v. Winter will be warm this year 😎
about 60W for my server with 384gb ram
2 thin clients for various purposes so about 15-20w there
so about 75-80w for servers
80W for me in R730 running various VM and most of the time are just idle.
Network stack: UDM-Pro, USW-Agg, USW-16-PoE, Raspberry Pi for DNS, VPN & monitoring, U-LTE-Pro, USW-Flex, G4-Bullet, 2x UAP-AC-Mesh, 2x UAP-AC-LR, 1x UAP-FlexHD sitting on a 500 VA UPS pulling ~100W.
Homeserver (24/7) is a Ryzen 3700X-system with 13 HDDs usually pulling around 150W on it's 1000VA UPS.
Power is quite expensive here in Germany, but the cost of small solar-setups is dropping, so I might setup a little PV-installation to offload costs. Would probably allow me to run more servers again^^
At any given time? Up to 234 kW but that's only because I don't have anything with more wheaties than a 5.3 L LC9. Less than 500 W for the lab though.
Have dropped from 500w (2 x R710) to 50-60w (5600X, 32Gb, 2 nvme drives, 3 sata SSDs, Coursir Platinum PSU, Gigabyte Mobo
Plus in the lab, I have a ONT and a small network switch (replacing a managed one saved 20w or so), and a work laptop, which brings the at the wall consumption of the entire lab to around 80-90w
Id be interested to see how folk with the Athlon processors are getting so much less power usage than me