My workstation is a Zen 3 Threadripper Pro that mostly serves as a virtualized Spark cluster, an entire virtualized infrastructure stack, and video editing (plu

My workstation is a Zen 3 Threadripper Pro that mostly serves as a virtualized Spark cluster, an entire virtualized infrastructure stack, and video editing (plus occasional games). Wife lives in CAD tools on similar hardware with a bit less CPU and less memory. We already have real power. - - - - - However, we mostly prefer to have those off when we’re not doing work that requires them (I’m mostly on an iPad), plus there’s stuff that the entire family benefits from with the lab. Considering their performance the workstations are actually very power efficient setups for their capability, but they can noticeably change the temperature of a room in an hour when they’re under load, and both of them combined add about $35-40/mo to our electric bill (we pay ~$0.50/kWh in the Boston area) just for light loads, sometimes quite a bit more. - - - - - I will never suggest building something new JUST to reduce power consumption of existing stuff. ROI never makes sense. But when you DO build something new, I DO suggest looking hard at power consumption. There the savings can be quite material. Plus never having to hear any of the equipment EVER (barring the workstations going flat out) is a great thing. Silence is golden. You’ll also learn a lot more about your hardware.