17 ms·

Yes! I am shocked that almost no one seems to comment on power consumption for these units. Sure, they cost $200 while being just as fast as $700 machines, but

by hak8or 7y ago

Yes! I am shocked that almost no one seems to comment on power consumption for these units. Sure, they cost $200 while being just as fast as $700 machines, but they can easily pull $50 a month in power, assuming 25 cents per kwh. Not only is that a waste of money for power, it is horrible for the environment. These machines are obscenely inefficient power wise. It's likte folks who buy a r720 for $150 that comes with 32GB ECC ram and dual cpu's, but it pulls $75 per month in power. Even if you don't pay for electricity directly (you do in rent then), it's still terrible for the environment.

cheerlessbog 7y ago
And loud as well - servers aren't as optimized for noise as desktops are. I use ThinkPads from Ebay - I get the high end model from 4-5 years ago. Coming off lease they can be in great condition often loaded with RAM and just need an SSD. The build quality is great, and they're cheap.
- LeonM 7y ago
  I looked into buying a server to harvest the CPU and RAM, then building a desktop machine using a regular cooling components to keep it quiet. I found the real problem of a re-purposing server is not the noise, but rather that the motherboards are completely unsuitable for desktop work. And buying a new workstation motherboard that would take the Xeon(s) and ECC ram would make the build more expensive than just buying a new desktop machine with consumer grade hardware.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Couldn't you just use the server MB in an (e)ATX case, and use a different heatsink/fan?
    - Elv13 7y ago
      Those motherboards have nothing to do with ATX. The rackmountable "blades" are 19" wide and ~24" long. They use redundant custom "jet engine" PSU with custom connectors. Even their PCI-E isn't standard. They are custom built for each generation of servers and mass produced. Even higher end workstations like the various HP "Z" series and Proliant are custom. (disclaimer: I have my (large, ~120 Units) homelab/self_employed_datacenter on ATX Rackmount 4U cases with watercooling. I am used to buying servers for the CPU and RAM as others do in this thread. I use consumer gears too, but they die young under full C++/C embedded CI jobs 24/7. I use 4U cases because of the unbearable noise of the blades)
      - mceachen 7y ago
        Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab, what your electric bill is, and how loud your racks are?
        Elv13 7y ago
        > what your electric bill is, I am in Quebec, power is cheap to the point of this being irrelevant. Heating is also required a large part of the year (including until yesterday because the weather has been horrible so far this "summer"...). Plus, well, tax credit for business expenses make that "less than free". > and how loud your racks are? Watercooling and passive PSUs makes it silent. I hate noise. > Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab Beside all the usual services for a small business (phone, email, storage, backup, routing, etc), it is mostly an oVirt (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization) private cloud running Docker VMs used by the CI to compile C/C++, build embedded device firmware images and run tests. The extra horse power (and least power efficient) nodes are woken up use wake-up-on-lan and boot a template using PXE from the GlusterFS distributed NAS. They are shut down when the load goes down. Only the big 7U case with the double1 140mm watercooling fans is open all the time. It is the "head" of the cloud cluster (but in theory is configured to auto migrate in case of hardware failure to the dual 120mm 4U case, but honestly I never tried the automatic migration). Not very pretty, but good enough. https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz (yes, there is some overlap between those 2 pictures because I moved some units between taking them, some units have been traded for others too).
    - LeonM 7y ago
      Like Elv13 already said: the form factor is totally different, so it won't work in any desktop enclosure or with a standard power supply. But apart from that, server boards sometimes don't have a storage controller, no audio, only a few USB2 port. Most have onboard VGA graphics that you can't turn off, or the BIOS won't support outputting video with a different graphics card. And then there are usually few Windows drivers and you could get into heaps of issues with (the lack of) UEFI if you want to run a desktop version of Windows. Server boards are custom build for datacenter application and just aren't suitable for workstation use.
- StillBored 7y ago
  My 26 core lenovo/xeon workstation is quieter than my T450s. The former is exactly the same noise level 100% of the time regardless of idle or compiling code. My thinkpad spins its fans up to a nice hum when compiling code. Some rackmount server hardware is fairly quite these days too. Variable speed fan profiles and a cool room do wonders to keep the fan speeds fairly low. Probably the noisiest think in my rack at home these days is the Ethernet switch.
izzydata 7y ago
I bought a house a few years back and quickly realized that leaving my computers on 24/7 was terrible for my electricity bill. Now I feel bad for doing this while living with my parents all those years.
- Redoubts 7y ago
  Heh, as a kid I always wondered about this. My parents hated if someone left the lights on, but my computer has a 600w power supply... how many bulbs is that!
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    Unless you were cranking everything to the max 24/7 (like maxing out your GPU while reading/writing to a database while doing a bunch of floating point calcs for something?), it probably idled at around 100 watts. Not great, but not something I'd worry about.
    - cbsks 7y ago
      Like running SETI@home? https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ I certainly had that running 24/7 when I was in high school.
      - organsnyder 7y ago
        If it makes you feel better, those older machines probably didn't have much in the way of power management to throttle back at idle.
        dillonmckay 7y ago
        What? Mine has a ‘Turbo’ button!
  - LeonM 7y ago
    That 600W is the maximum power it can supply. You'll only come close to this figure when the PC is under full load (like gaming). But while idle, a (modern) PC draws about 30-50 watts.
ramraj07 7y ago
How about you buy these machines and only run them in the winter? Heck, mine coins if you want! It's just going to heat the house!
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Because if you normally heat your house through cheaper means (wood, natural gas, etc.) like most Americans, then it's still going to add a lot to your power bill.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dylan604 7y ago
    But in the US, the time of year for heating your house with wood,natural gas, etc is the cheapest time for electricity.
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      Do electricity prices vary throughout the year? I don't remember that being the case when I lived in the US, and it's not the case in Ontario. We have time-of-use pricing that swaps the mid-peak and on-peak rates, but that doesn't affect the total charge very much.
      - dylan604 7y ago
        Utility companies offer a product of supply and demand. During the middle of the day in the summer in Texas, demand is at its peak as everyone runs their A/C full tilt. That's the most expensive unit of electricity, so the pricing reflects that. Everyone knows that you don't run your laundry/dishes during that time. Winter time, most places are heating with gas, so electricity demand is just never as high so the prices are cheaper. Yes, some pricing options claim they are giving "free nights and weekends", or avg billing that "lowers" the summer rates while "raising" the winter months to keep it on average the same per month. That doesn't actually change the rate per KWh at the time. It's like buying car with the squeezing the balloon analogy, squeeze the price on one end the numbers bulge somewhere else.
tjoff 7y ago
It costs a lot yes, but bad for the environment? How much energy and pollution goes into producing new hardware? Not so sure buying new is at all better for the environment. That and that we have even more obsolete hardware to take care of in the future.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  I suppose the question is old desktop, old laptop, or old server. Depends on your compute needs.
- gowld 7y ago
  In a competitive industry, dollar price is a good approximation of energy usage, which is an approximation of pollution.
  - micheljansen 7y ago
    Too bad pollution is externalized to future generations or foreign countries, so not included in the economic equation.
    - the_jeremy 7y ago
      OP is saying that there is pollution for both options, and the total cost of that pollution is proportional to the total cost of ownership of the product. He doesn't provide evidence, but it seems at least plausible.
      - mikepurvis 7y ago
        A lot of it depends what's happening to that Xeon machine if you don't buy it. If it's otherwise going to the landfill then you using it a little longer to defer the creation of brand new hardware is absolutely the greener option. Same logic that applies to driving an older car— it may not be the most efficient, but especially if you're low usage, extending the life of something that already exists is almost certainly greener than using something new.
runjake 7y ago
While I agree with the premise, you're exaggerating far too much. If an R720 pulls anywhere near $75 a month [1], you got some sort of major problem. In reality, these things pulls closet to anywhere from 120 to 180 watts on the higher end. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_power_watt_consumption_on_a_dell_r710_2x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...
- Retric 7y ago
  He said dual CPU’s using the worst case of 27.5 cents per kWH in Hawaii. 2 * .18 * 0.275 * 24 * 30.4 (days per month) = 72$ per month + whatever the rest of the machine uses. Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7.
  - Leftb 7y ago
    > Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7. While I agree a rate similar to that isn't all that uncommon in for instance Europe, from that perspective it's a relevant calculation. On the other hand the prices of old hardware tend to very between markets as well so that would still impact the break even point.
  - nisa 7y ago
    It's more like 25€/month for our R720 at work (with 128gb ddr3 memory and dual xeon e5-2690v1) - if you run with powersave governor in Linux and enable lower C-states in BIOS. I'm not joking the included iDrac7 reliable shows 110-130W. How course if you number crunching at 100% cpu are you more like using 300W.
rarecoil 7y ago
Power consumption is somewhat irrelevant if you live in a place where there is hydro or solar power - eWaste recycling is a huge environmental problem [1], and manufacturing has its own environmental footprint [2]. Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware. IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary. [1] https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-the-environment/ https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-t... [2] http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/wheres-the-harm-component/ http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/whe...
dillonmckay 7y ago
What if the electricity is generated via hydroelectric or solar?
pnutjam 7y ago
I ran a core2 duo for years as a server, it was more efficient then any of the newer stuff I could find. I just upgrade to an I7, which costs more energy annually. Granted it's faster and maybe less likely to break. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6500U http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-...
- dgacmu 7y ago
  It's probably also more energy-proportional. newer CPUs and hardware in general do a much better job of scaling power use with demand. so if you're not running flat out 24x7, you're probably using less power in practice, even though your max may be higher now.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    Good point, it certainly seems to run cooler.
JaimeThompson 7y ago
I have multiple r720's that idle at between 130 and 155 watts according to iDRAC. The system has 8+ SSDs, 10 gig fiber, infiniband, and 160GB of RAM. Under load it goes up but typically it uses less than 200 watts.
albandread 7y ago
And heat; I have some computers I just don't run for the hot three months of the year; and I live in a temperate climate. In the winter though; they are nice room warmers.
icedchai 7y ago
You are probably seriously over estimating the actual power requirements. I have several servers running, some are 5+ year old Xeon towers, and they aren't costing anywhere near that.

by hak8or 7y ago

cheerlessbog 7y ago

And loud as well - servers aren't as optimized for noise as desktops are. I use ThinkPads from Ebay - I get the high end model from 4-5 years ago. Coming off lease they can be in great condition often loaded with RAM and just need an SSD. The build quality is great, and they're cheap.

LeonM 7y ago
I looked into buying a server to harvest the CPU and RAM, then building a desktop machine using a regular cooling components to keep it quiet. I found the real problem of a re-purposing server is not the noise, but rather that the motherboards are completely unsuitable for desktop work. And buying a new workstation motherboard that would take the Xeon(s) and ECC ram would make the build more expensive than just buying a new desktop machine with consumer grade hardware.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Couldn't you just use the server MB in an (e)ATX case, and use a different heatsink/fan?
  - Elv13 7y ago
    Those motherboards have nothing to do with ATX. The rackmountable "blades" are 19" wide and ~24" long. They use redundant custom "jet engine" PSU with custom connectors. Even their PCI-E isn't standard. They are custom built for each generation of servers and mass produced. Even higher end workstations like the various HP "Z" series and Proliant are custom. (disclaimer: I have my (large, ~120 Units) homelab/self_employed_datacenter on ATX Rackmount 4U cases with watercooling. I am used to buying servers for the CPU and RAM as others do in this thread. I use consumer gears too, but they die young under full C++/C embedded CI jobs 24/7. I use 4U cases because of the unbearable noise of the blades)
    - mceachen 7y ago
      Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab, what your electric bill is, and how loud your racks are?
      - Elv13 7y ago
        > what your electric bill is, I am in Quebec, power is cheap to the point of this being irrelevant. Heating is also required a large part of the year (including until yesterday because the weather has been horrible so far this "summer"...). Plus, well, tax credit for business expenses make that "less than free". > and how loud your racks are? Watercooling and passive PSUs makes it silent. I hate noise. > Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab Beside all the usual services for a small business (phone, email, storage, backup, routing, etc), it is mostly an oVirt (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization) private cloud running Docker VMs used by the CI to compile C/C++, build embedded device firmware images and run tests. The extra horse power (and least power efficient) nodes are woken up use wake-up-on-lan and boot a template using PXE from the GlusterFS distributed NAS. They are shut down when the load goes down. Only the big 7U case with the double1 140mm watercooling fans is open all the time. It is the "head" of the cloud cluster (but in theory is configured to auto migrate in case of hardware failure to the dual 120mm 4U case, but honestly I never tried the automatic migration). Not very pretty, but good enough. https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz (yes, there is some overlap between those 2 pictures because I moved some units between taking them, some units have been traded for others too).
  - LeonM 7y ago
    Like Elv13 already said: the form factor is totally different, so it won't work in any desktop enclosure or with a standard power supply. But apart from that, server boards sometimes don't have a storage controller, no audio, only a few USB2 port. Most have onboard VGA graphics that you can't turn off, or the BIOS won't support outputting video with a different graphics card. And then there are usually few Windows drivers and you could get into heaps of issues with (the lack of) UEFI if you want to run a desktop version of Windows. Server boards are custom build for datacenter application and just aren't suitable for workstation use.
StillBored 7y ago
My 26 core lenovo/xeon workstation is quieter than my T450s. The former is exactly the same noise level 100% of the time regardless of idle or compiling code. My thinkpad spins its fans up to a nice hum when compiling code. Some rackmount server hardware is fairly quite these days too. Variable speed fan profiles and a cool room do wonders to keep the fan speeds fairly low. Probably the noisiest think in my rack at home these days is the Ethernet switch.

izzydata 7y ago

I bought a house a few years back and quickly realized that leaving my computers on 24/7 was terrible for my electricity bill. Now I feel bad for doing this while living with my parents all those years.

Redoubts 7y ago
Heh, as a kid I always wondered about this. My parents hated if someone left the lights on, but my computer has a 600w power supply... how many bulbs is that!
- cr0sh 7y ago
  Unless you were cranking everything to the max 24/7 (like maxing out your GPU while reading/writing to a database while doing a bunch of floating point calcs for something?), it probably idled at around 100 watts. Not great, but not something I'd worry about.
  - cbsks 7y ago
    Like running SETI@home? https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ I certainly had that running 24/7 when I was in high school.
    - organsnyder 7y ago
      If it makes you feel better, those older machines probably didn't have much in the way of power management to throttle back at idle.
      - dillonmckay 7y ago
        What? Mine has a ‘Turbo’ button!
- LeonM 7y ago
  That 600W is the maximum power it can supply. You'll only come close to this figure when the PC is under full load (like gaming). But while idle, a (modern) PC draws about 30-50 watts.

ramraj07 7y ago

How about you buy these machines and only run them in the winter? Heck, mine coins if you want! It's just going to heat the house!

frosted-flakes 7y ago
Because if you normally heat your house through cheaper means (wood, natural gas, etc.) like most Americans, then it's still going to add a lot to your power bill.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 7y ago
  But in the US, the time of year for heating your house with wood,natural gas, etc is the cheapest time for electricity.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    Do electricity prices vary throughout the year? I don't remember that being the case when I lived in the US, and it's not the case in Ontario. We have time-of-use pricing that swaps the mid-peak and on-peak rates, but that doesn't affect the total charge very much.
    - dylan604 7y ago
      Utility companies offer a product of supply and demand. During the middle of the day in the summer in Texas, demand is at its peak as everyone runs their A/C full tilt. That's the most expensive unit of electricity, so the pricing reflects that. Everyone knows that you don't run your laundry/dishes during that time. Winter time, most places are heating with gas, so electricity demand is just never as high so the prices are cheaper. Yes, some pricing options claim they are giving "free nights and weekends", or avg billing that "lowers" the summer rates while "raising" the winter months to keep it on average the same per month. That doesn't actually change the rate per KWh at the time. It's like buying car with the squeezing the balloon analogy, squeeze the price on one end the numbers bulge somewhere else.

tjoff 7y ago

It costs a lot yes, but bad for the environment? How much energy and pollution goes into producing new hardware? Not so sure buying new is at all better for the environment. That and that we have even more obsolete hardware to take care of in the future.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
I suppose the question is old desktop, old laptop, or old server. Depends on your compute needs.
gowld 7y ago
In a competitive industry, dollar price is a good approximation of energy usage, which is an approximation of pollution.
- micheljansen 7y ago
  Too bad pollution is externalized to future generations or foreign countries, so not included in the economic equation.
  - the_jeremy 7y ago
    OP is saying that there is pollution for both options, and the total cost of that pollution is proportional to the total cost of ownership of the product. He doesn't provide evidence, but it seems at least plausible.
    - mikepurvis 7y ago
      A lot of it depends what's happening to that Xeon machine if you don't buy it. If it's otherwise going to the landfill then you using it a little longer to defer the creation of brand new hardware is absolutely the greener option. Same logic that applies to driving an older car— it may not be the most efficient, but especially if you're low usage, extending the life of something that already exists is almost certainly greener than using something new.

runjake 7y ago

While I agree with the premise, you're exaggerating far too much. If an R720 pulls anywhere near $75 a month [1], you got some sort of major problem. In reality, these things pulls closet to anywhere from 120 to 180 watts on the higher end. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_power_watt_consumption_on_a_dell_r710_2x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...

Retric 7y ago
He said dual CPU’s using the worst case of 27.5 cents per kWH in Hawaii. 2 * .18 * 0.275 * 24 * 30.4 (days per month) = 72$ per month + whatever the rest of the machine uses. Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7.
- Leftb 7y ago
  > Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7. While I agree a rate similar to that isn't all that uncommon in for instance Europe, from that perspective it's a relevant calculation. On the other hand the prices of old hardware tend to very between markets as well so that would still impact the break even point.
- nisa 7y ago
  It's more like 25€/month for our R720 at work (with 128gb ddr3 memory and dual xeon e5-2690v1) - if you run with powersave governor in Linux and enable lower C-states in BIOS. I'm not joking the included iDrac7 reliable shows 110-130W. How course if you number crunching at 100% cpu are you more like using 300W.

rarecoil 7y ago

Power consumption is somewhat irrelevant if you live in a place where there is hydro or solar power - eWaste recycling is a huge environmental problem [1], and manufacturing has its own environmental footprint [2]. Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware. IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary. [1] https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-the-environment/ https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-t... [2] http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/wheres-the-harm-component/ http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/whe...

dillonmckay 7y ago

What if the electricity is generated via hydroelectric or solar?

pnutjam 7y ago

I ran a core2 duo for years as a server, it was more efficient then any of the newer stuff I could find. I just upgrade to an I7, which costs more energy annually. Granted it's faster and maybe less likely to break. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6500U http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-...

dgacmu 7y ago
It's probably also more energy-proportional. newer CPUs and hardware in general do a much better job of scaling power use with demand. so if you're not running flat out 24x7, you're probably using less power in practice, even though your max may be higher now.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  Good point, it certainly seems to run cooler.

JaimeThompson 7y ago

I have multiple r720's that idle at between 130 and 155 watts according to iDRAC. The system has 8+ SSDs, 10 gig fiber, infiniband, and 160GB of RAM. Under load it goes up but typically it uses less than 200 watts.

albandread 7y ago

And heat; I have some computers I just don't run for the hot three months of the year; and I live in a temperate climate. In the winter though; they are nice room warmers.

icedchai 7y ago

You are probably seriously over estimating the actual power requirements. I have several servers running, some are 5+ year old Xeon towers, and they aren't costing anywhere near that.