I wonder if anyone can help - without spending too much time cos I’d feel bad!
Are there any boards that are compatible with a 2011-3 Xeon E5-1650v4 (or lower power CPU) and ECC REG RAM that you know of? I’d like to down/cross grade my current Asus X99-E WS board I use as a server. It’s good but very power hungry and these days is massive overkill for my use these days. It’s nice to have the PCI slots, but I only use 1 these days (LSA HBA), though it might be handy to have 3 in total (2 x LSA HBA & GPU).
Your current X99-E WS board is compatible with registered ECC memory. I don’ know why you need changing.
A different motherboard is not going to use less power. The power used depends on the cpu and AIB installed.
I loved my X99-E-10G WS board. Ran four gpus in it for years with a E5-1660v4 overclocked to 4Ghz. Sold it to a friend that needed more horsepower for crunching.
While I mostly agree, at the same time, a more feature packed motherboard with more complex components and traces, RGB lights, something with a lot of bells and whistles could also theoretically have more parasitic power draw and release it passively as heat (or light if it has fancy RGBs). The flip side to this is that a more expensive, motherboard with a lot of features, has nicer capacitors, VRM, more efficient board components.
Then again, this is already marketed as workstation motherboard so most of the non-sense has already been removed and only the crucial bits are maintained.
With this in mind, an ITX form factor motherboard (or smaller), without audio components could be the most power efficient of all. But the only real way to tell, of course, is to buy or borrow another motherboard and measure power.
Thanks for being so understanding, do see my post above in response to Keith.
It’s not very comparable due to the quantity of drives (actually I mentioned 8 above, but it’s 10 in total), but I like my daily server that only uses 30W. It does only have 1 x SSD and 2 x HDD’s though, but if you scale it up, power draw on an equally efficient board should produce a nice low power usage.
