I’ve purchased a 2nd hand gaming rig 2-3 years ago and over time re-purposed it as a server appliance first, and then to NAS.
Here’s what I have now:
ASUS x570 gaming-e mobo
Ryzen PRO 5650g
2x32 ECC Kingston RAM
2x16tb HDD
2x1.9 TB Samsung SATA SSD + 256gb kingston SATA ssd for boot
2 NVME gen3 2tb SSD
Hypex x m2 gen3 ASUS RAID card with 2 NVME SSD (same as previous ones)
10Gb ASUS PCIe card
1000w seasonic (I think it’s 80plus gold)
3 case fans + Noctua nh-d15 with a single fan
You can see some mismatch of components (gaming mobo, 1000w psu and nh-d15 for this cpu) as I swapped out components over time. I went from 5950x to 5650g for power efficiency, and I was under-utilising 5950x
I am very happy with this build overall, but idle power consumption is a bit on the high end.
I am currently idling at 55w, and while it’s not the end of the world, I wonder what else I could do to optimise it a bit further? Is this the absolute floor in terms of power use that I can achieve?
This motherboard has 8 sata ports which is pretty amazing for my use case, I could sacrifice 2 sata ports, if I could shave off another 15w with b550 motherboard, but I am not sure if it’s worth it considering lifespan of another 5-7 years for this system that I have in mind.
Curious about similar builds power draw from the wall and see if I have potential optimisations on the table (I am not very experienced with undervolting and I am not sure how I can do there)
the b450 is the most power efficient, feature rich series of AM4 chipsets. it is probably a 15w savings over x570 by itself. while a b550 is probably around 5w in power savings.
The main contributor to your idle power consumption is the mobo, specifically the x570 chipset. The more features on the mobo, the higher the power draw.
I have a ASUS TUF Gaming B550M (mATX) mobo, that consumes ~20W idle with a 5700g CPU, two sticks of RAM, and a single m.2 nvme. Obviously, the more devices you plug in the higher the idle power consumption.
Depending on second hand market offers I may snag some b450 board, but I need to research pcie layouts to ensure all my devices will still be getting adequate bandwidth.
15 watts (an optimistic estimate b450 vs x570 consumptin difference) will cost me EUR30 a year. If it lasts me 5 years, than in 2 years the mobo will have paid for itself, and I make an extra buck off x570. It maybe a worthy pursuit if all else is equal it terms of features I need.
Probably unlikely to save any reasonable amount compared to the cost, the chipset itself is like 2-3W more. Given the downgrade in PCIe support and lines I’d say not worth it also working ECC memory support is worth taking into consideration.
To optimize the power consumption, try undervolting the CPU, spinning down HDDs when idle, optimizing fan speeds, and ensuring SSDs use low-power states. Switching to a B550 board might save 5–10W but sacrifices SATA ports and may not be worth it. Fine-tuning settings can likely shave off a few more watts. However, I truly don’t think it’s really a big game changer.
Yeah. Current gen low power AMD based NASes I know mainly use V3C14. Gives ~2.5 W sleep but active power’s like 35-70 W depending on the number of drives to spin.