Hi folks,

I currently have a HP ML10v2 with Xeon E3-1265L v3 in it (4c/8t) and 16GB DDR3 ECC. At work, we disposed of (and I now have in my wardrobe) a dual socket Xeon E5-2680 v4 (14c/28t each) and 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM.

Now this is obviously a massive jump in horsepower, and I very much doubt that I have any use case for a total of 28c/56t, so I was considering removing one of the Xeons and keeping it spare. I currently use a 1050TI for transcodes and that will be moved across.

It’s all built on a ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard, so I’m just looking for anyone else using similar gear, and any tips you might have to reduce power consumption. I haven’t yet gone diving through the BIOS to see what options are there, but I’m hedging between trying to screw down the power consumption, and just seeing if I can sell off the bigger machine and get a more modern Core i5 or similar…

As is, on the HP I’m running Unraid with a dozen docker containers, and that’s about it. I would like to start playing with Ansible, so the bigger system would be good in that regard, but I’m not 100% sure if I want to keep this machine or not.

For reference, my power costs are AUD $0.8087/day supply charge, and AUD $0.2299/kwh. I’m renting so have no options for solar etc.

Thanks!

  • StetsedBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Okay so currently my closest matching server would be my R730XD which is running dual E5-2650v4’s which should have a similar power profile(the only diffrence with the 2680 is the number of cores however this shouldn’t make much of a diffrence for low use workloads).

    So currently with 2x SSD’s, 2x2650v4’s, 128GB RAM, 6x18TB HDD drives, 3x16TB HDD drives my power consumption sits around the 225-250W which over a month for me costs me about 50-75 euros a month in power(welcome to dutch power pricing…). However alot of this consumption comes from the drives, because before I put the HDD’s in and just had the SSD’s, the RAM and the CPU’s it had an idle of around 80-100W. But this is in an enterprise server with some chonky drives so I assume those account for 5-15W as they have a base speed.

    Generally I would say unless you specifically need functions that the board provides(alot of PCIE lanes for example) just get a consumer CPU and you’ll be much better off as it will have better efficiency, performance and you’ll be on a modern platform. And if you go for AM4 it will be really cheap cuz of the introduction of AM5.