I am currently running an RPI 4b+ for a home server.
I was able to obtain a small PC with an i5 4690 in it. It has a 300W Be Quite! PSU and a Gigabyte GA-H97M MOBO. I would like to move my stuff from the RPI to this machine, as it has much more slots for HDDs.
For the sake of argument lets imagine I plug 4x4TB HDDs and 1 500mb SSD for the OS and run an Ubuntu LTS on it.
How much average electricity usage am I facing per month in kW/h? How much more would it be compared to the RPI which now has an external 1 TB HDD attached to it over USB?
Thanks a lot!
Going for an OS without a UI, no monitor mouse and keyboard. All HDDs idling, I would say less than 20W.
HDDs generally idle at 0,3W, spinning and writing/reading around 6W and from idle to spinning around 12W for a peak.
I just nabbed an amazing deal on eBay, a Dell Precision 3420 with a Xeon e3 1270v6 for $90. Gonna make it a headless server and hoping to get it idling around 30-50 watts. For comparison my gaming rig idles at a whopping 90-120w.
With xeon it is a bit more difficult to have lower power consumption, they aren’t made with power consumption in mind but performance 24/7. But 30/40W I think it’s likely possible. L variant can idle a bit lower but not as good as desktop CPU.
The problem with gaming PCs is that generally they have a lot of RGB, fans and VRM, mine too idle around 80W, even if I tweak it very well, and fun fact I can lower my 9900k to 6W and my 2080 is around 12W, but I’ve 6 fans, RGB on the motherboard and ram, I’ve 32gb of ram too, and my motherboard have tons of VRM for good OC. Not only, I’ve a 850W PSU so the efficiency curve is around 450W, at 60W load the PSU takes 80W from the grid, and generally efficiency is around 80%.
Yeah it’s crazy how it all stacks up. Back when I had all my RGB on, 2x pumps, 11 fans, with the monitors on my power draw at idle was almost 200w. Power prices here aren’t great so running my gaming pc 24/7 costs me almost $100 by itself each month. Planning on cutting that down greatly with this new server.
I have my gaming setup almost always on, like 12 hours a day, in fact I was thinking about getting another Lenovo Tiny and doing a hackintosh, and use it for general purpose like watching anime and browsing, but would be a pain having to share all 3 monitors, keyboard and mouse with two system. So, amen, when I build my next gaming PC, I would remove all RGB and go MITX.