CPU Power Consumption - NAS Build

Hello everyone, good day.

I will like to get your recommendation regarding CPU upgrade for my FreeNAS to an AMD Ahtlon 200ge ? Should I upgrade or not? Does it makes a difference? Take into consideration that Power Consumption is vital. Currently using AMD 2200g.

AMD 2200g and Athlon 200ge have a 65W TDP. If I understood correctly, TDP is not the power consumed by the component. This makes me believe that I could get some Watts saving by changing the CPU. Please confirm, I am just a normie. :yum:

Background:

  • I live in a country outside US and my electric bill is killing me. I pay around $150.00 USD every 2 months from the electric bill. :sob:
  • I own several computers, but only 1 turn on 24/7 (PFSense).
  • After work, I turn on my NAS (FreeNAS) and it draws 120W. It has a Ryzen 3 2200g. 64GB RAM. 12 HDD 4TB. 1 SSD. 1 NVMe.
  • NAS Turned on 5 hrs per day.

I appreciate your help. Thanks. :yum:

According to Anandtech the 200GE uses 2.45 watts less than the 2200G at full load. If you are using the NAS for 5 hours per day it maths out to 0.01225 kWh less to run per day, or 4.47125 kWh less per year.

With my electricity cost ($0.163/kWh) the 200GE would cost $0.73 less to run per year.

1 Like

That power consumption seems pretty decent for the hardware, but if you want to lower the power consumption as is, you undervolt and underclock the CPU to save some additional power. Something like setting the voltage to 0.75/0.8 and setting the allcore clock to about 3 Ghz “should” work, but you’d likely need to do some testing with it

Ryzen is extremely efficient already. Just by making it slower you are not really gaining anything. I basically did the reverse.


Now, what you could take a look at is the PSUs in your machines.
And also monitors and other stuff connected.

1 Like

Thank you all for your insight. It would seems that there is no much gain in changing the CPU for reducing power consumption.

There are E skus for some of the apus… I think they are 35 watt tdp

How are your 12x 4TB drives set up?

Might be able to save a dozen watts or more by going with fewer larger drives.
6x 10TB drives instead of 12 drives.

Yes those are slower and as a result consume less power when under load.
Not sure about efficiency though.