I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

  • phanto@lemmy.caEnglish
    26·
    11 months ago

    I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there’s someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.

      • stevehobbes@lemy.lolEnglish
        13·
        11 months ago

        Go tweak your power and fan settings. 100w at idle is way too much unless it’s 15 years old.

        Fans, especially small ones are very sneaky energy hogs. Turn them waaay down.

        • nezbyte@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          11 months ago

          Depends on what your server is running. Multiple GPUs, HDDs, and other fun items start to add up to well over 100W. I justify it by using it to keep my 3d printer filament dry.

          • stevehobbes@lemy.lolEnglish
            4·
            11 months ago

            If you have multiple GPUs in your home server you’re probably doing it wrong. But even then, at idle, with no displays connected, the draw will be surprisingly low.

            Most systems with some ssd/NVMe, 2-4 DIMMs and maybe a drive or two should idle closer to 50w-60w.

            • nezbyte@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              11 months ago

              Agreed, don’t do what I do if you value your power bill. To be fair, my network switch pulls more power than my cobbled together server anyhow.

            • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
              2·
              11 months ago

              If you’re getting two gaming PCs out of one hypervisor, you might be doing it right.

        • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          11 months ago

          Newer CPU’s tend to use a good chunk more power under low loads than some older ones. Going from 1st Gen. Ryzen to 2nd Gen. got me about 20 watts higher total system power draw with my use case. And 3rd Gen. is even worse.

          Intel is MUCH worse at it than AMD, but every Gen. AMD keeps cranking up those boost clocks and power draw and it really can make a difference at low to mid range loads.

          My Ryzen 3000 based system uses about 90 watts at “idle” with all my stuff running and the hard drives on.

          • stevehobbes@lemy.lolEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            It’s probably more about aggressive default bios speeds. Tweak your c states / bios overclocking / pcie power management / windows power management features. Idle power has gone down on most chips.

            The Ryzen 3000 should truly idle closer to 20-30w.

            • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              That is after tweaking bios settings. Originally I was at around 100 watts, now I’m closer to 80.

              Keep in mind that’s with a bunch of hard drives, and it’s not a 100% idle, more of a 90% idle which is where modern “race to idle” CPUs struggle the most.

      • krash@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Holy crap! I have a n100 SFF that consumes 5-6 w idle (with WiFi on) and I have an old i5 (gen 6 I think) that consumes 30 at idle. Your rig is defiantly not meant to act as a server (unless you want to mine bitcoons or run boinc…)

    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      My x86 Proxmox consumes about 0.3 kwh a day at around 15% average load. I’ve only had the Kill A Watt on it for a day, so I don’t know how accurate that is, but it shouldn’t be too far off.