Old workstation as a daily used server - power concerns UK - eviltoast

Hi all, with the dreaded your bills are going up as always come January, I’ve been looking at an old workstation to purpose as a all in one server. Mainly storage, VM’s and my play thing, which has led me to something like a Dell T5600 or HP Z640, some offering 2x Xeon’s for little price difference.

Does anyone know how hungry these are on power during low use compared to a modern Ryzen system?

  • citruspers@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    My ballpark figure would be 100-150W idle for the dual xeon setup. Taking out one CPU would probably drop you 30-40W.

    Modern Ryzen still isn’t very efficient at idle (at least not for me).

    If you’re really concerned about power cost: get a used SFF business PC like a Prodesk G4 or something. That’ll get you idle draw around 10-15W (and chances are the CPU actually beats the Xeon at most tasks).