Hi there,
I am just surprised this machine I got from a refurbished sale has quite high power draw. Even when I remove all of the peripheral parts and just leave one CPU in the chassis, so remaining just:
- 1x Xeon Gold 6132 (14c/2.6 GHz, 140W TDP), 2x 32 GB RAM 2400 MHz
Even then, idling (no OS, just in UEFI mgmt.), the machine draws at least 112 Watts from the socket from which 64W go to the processor and 6 to the RAM (says iLo). The remaining 40 or so Watts are lost in the system.
When I install the 2nd CPU the CPU draw rises to ca. 120W, so I already got a good saving here.
Nevertheless I find this a bit too much, also considering some other testing labs results which seem to be significantly lower. For ex. see here, which supposedly not only shows CPU but the whole system consumption.
Do you have any explanation for this?
Thanks and cheers
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STH were probably using a testbench, not a server chassis with 3.3A fans.
UEFI doesn’t have proper power management so your CPU’s will run in highest C states throughout, explaining the power usage.
Install an OS or boot from a linux live cd and you should get much lower idle power usage.
Adding to this, I’m assuming the PSU is around 1000watts, and there’s two of them. Operating a power supply at lower loads reduces the efficiency, having two would decrease the load more, making them less efficient. That missing 40 watts is 20 watts per PSU, which seems acceptable.
Even then, idling (no OS,
And how would power management work without a proper OS? If you buy enterprise hardware honesty you need to educate yourself first.
hmmm, was thinking about this, too. Let me check!
Apart from that - I need this thing kinda job-wise and it has been purchased with several future tasks in mind. Will be a Proxmox server for Windows/Linux on ZFS. So the choice of hardware type is no accident.
But it was indeed difficult to find out about power draw in advance. I researched it but did not get any great results. Servethehome was a source but for ex. it was even impossible to find out what happens if you pull out one CPU. The opinions about savings went from 0% to 50%. The board servethehome uses is this one
Thanks anyway for the (unforgiving) comments ;) At least good to know it is not that much for a server of this type. I’ll get back to this post after installing Proxmox and updated power draws.
It’s a 14nm tech that Intel polished and polished, but remained 14nm tech. If power is a concern, look into Optiplexes , Ryzens, the new Intel CPUs, etc.
It is a meme post?
It’s an enterprise server, with dual sockets, a lot of cores and ram. Not built with power saving in mind. And not built to be used on a home.
Have you done any research before buying it? Probably no.
That is normal power consumption behavior. And you are lucky that it consumes not that much for what it has.
PSU have an efficiency curve, you would gain more efficiently with a load.
This part is often overlooked for sure.
If planing on running it for a while picking up a pair of lower wattage psus will often recoup its cost + help reduce noise.
Plus 10G LANs can be 10w each on older kit.
My brother in christ why didn’t you run an OS to make sure the acpi can be controller properly?..
Well, now I did … after Proxmox install, we’re heading the right direction: 1 CPU installed, 2x32GB RAM (as above) plus Raid controller P408i, 8x SAS backplane and 2x 10Gb Eth. NIC it idles at 74W out of which 15W go to the CPU. With 2 CPUs we get 87W in total with 19W on the CPU.
That’s a completely different story. Was not aware of this …
What I want to see is this thing fit 7 Nvidia Tesla T4 16GB cards in it. HP says it is possible in the data sheet.
Have you gotten into the RBSU and changed the power profile to “Minimum Power Usage”?
I set it to optimised for virtualization originally … have to play around with this some more. Let’s see.
As mentioned you need to install an OS/ hypervisor, anything to have proper power consumption. I run HPE stuff at home and it is idling between 90/100W. But don’t expect those machines to be power bill friendly. It’s designed to run full load 24/7/365 in a datacenter and it is “power efficient” in this case only (power per watt is very good at full load).
One thing to note, the fans in these servers are very power hungry.