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?
I went down the same path as you. I’m based in the UK to. I ended up getting a Ryzen 5 5650g, an ASUs tuf mainboard, 64gb ecc memory on it. It has 2 12tb spinners that never spin down, 4 500gb ssd and 1 256gb Nvme boot drive. Idles at 55W running windows server 2022. When it does something it jumps up to 100W, so what I did was set the cpu to never exceed 50% cpu speed. The cpu clock goes no higher than 2.6ghz. I have a opnsense vm running which provides the internet to the whole house, bt 900 down 110 up. When cpu is running that slow I can still Speedtest at the expected line rate.
I’d say all in all the build cost me around £400, I had the drives and ssds already.
Im very happy with it. I have a NVIDIA p1000 (gtx 1050 equivalent) and I game on it from time to time. When I do that, I set the cpu to use 100% and it is a great little machine. Very happy.
Best thing I noticed with it was the IPC improvements considers to the Xeon v4 system I had before, and at a lower power consumption.