Wouldn’t a v4 have better power efficiency than a v3?
Ahh only 10$
You can get a 2608L v4 for about 50$ but only on AliExpress
It’s 50w, you get a little more freq out of it vs your v3 and a few more cores
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The very first thing I did was search for the CPU you mentioned, as it sounded great. Alas there’s none in my country (UK). Which means I have to go further afield. China had some v3’s for £150-200 ($185-246), and that’s a little too much - also, there’s no guarantee that after waiting for weeks, that it’ll be a real one.
Looking to the US, there are more affordable one, but again, I’ve experienced the used market from other countries and I wasn’t too impressed.
Thank you for taking a look at AliExpress , really kind of you, but you know what their delivery times are like!
Please be assured that I still appreciate your help nonetheless! 
I’m not sure how interesting this will be, but here’s a video I did that shows the BIOS/UEFI options:
I’ve just been reading over the thread and thought I’d share my setup as a reference.
I’ve got a System with the following specs:
- Xeon E5-2620V4 (20% less single core, 20% more multi-core performance than E5-1650V4)
- 4x16GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM
- Supermicro X10SRM-F (not a full-size board!)
- 2 NVMEs, 1 SATA SSD, 3 HDDs
And my Idle Power Consumption on that System is around 50W give or take a few watts.
I really think it’s your Motherboard that’s the culprit here.
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You have a lot of options for undervolting
I would try a negative offset on the core voltage, I wouldn’t go past -0.100(-100mv) but -50mv should be doable
You have a lot of overclocking options which leads me to believe it has a pretty high LLC default setting, so you might be able to get away with even more undervolting
If you run a test windows install you can use Intel extreme tuning utility to see how much watts your CPU is using and how it differs when undervolting
This also lowers heat output and how much power you’d need to offset it with the AC
Take a look inside tweakers paradise for LLC settings and switching frequency settings
If you see any options about switching frequency in bios you can lower the switching frequency, this lowers the CPU over clock headroom but also increases the power effecincy and lowers VRM heat output
Gamer boards having high LLC and high switching freq is probably the culprit of your high idle power usage
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Hmm 200w at idle does seem way off.
Few things to check:
- take some RAM out, see if the power drops significantly or not
- if not already done, reset bios to defaults, ensure all over-voltage/overclocking/etc. is off.
looks like that according to the link to the mobo its an overclocking capable board
200w at idle is nuts though.
If there’s a bios update for it, maybe you’ve got a bugged bios?
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Thanks @thro , @GigaBusterEXE & @felixthecat
Before I go on, a little power usage update!
Now, I’m not sure if some changes take a few re-boots to take place, but during my most recent fiddling seems to have changed things:
E5-1650v4 server with NO HDD’s or SSD’s: 95W
E5-1650v4 server WITH HDD’s or SSD’s: 132W
So, is the above a bit more reasonable do you think?
Just a few direct notes:
Switched from 4 to 6 cores (still no HT)
With just network gear: 45W
With 1 server on, hard drives disconnected: 140 (So 95W excluding network gear)
With 1 server on, hard drives re-connected: 177W (So 132 excluding network gear)
With 2 servers on: 234W (So Server 2 uses 57W - deducting network gear and server 1)
Thank you for doing that mate, and supplying your system spec/power, very useful for comparison
Out of interest, do I see a molex connector ON your motherboard?
Thank you Really helpful instructions - out of interest do you think I can gain a worthy saving with the specific tweaks? I only ask because I’ve made minor tweaks before and although it could have been coincidence, it killed 2 sticks of RAM (luckily old ones).
So it could be the situation that both the CPU and Motherboard are to blame for the excessive power usage 
I guess I’ll find out for sure when I fit the new low power CPU!
Thanks Thro, I will try this as a last resort…RAM install on this board is a hit and miss affair for some reason!
I have done that relatively recently (within the last 6 months), I will do that as a second to last, last resort!
There is indeed, when I definitely don’t need the server I might do that. Cheers for reminding me about that
Some notes and things:
Current BIOS version: 3601
BIOS Update available: 4001 (so 5 versions out of date)
I looked at the EZ Tuning Wizard, looks like it’s not active
Oh, and here’s Emby transcoding with 6 instead of 4 cores if anyone is even the slightest bit interested! 
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Haha yes, it’s a smaller form factor board so they also use it in very small 1u Systems.
It’s there to power hard drives from.
This still seems high to me. I know you have more RAM.
And maybe my board is just exceptional, but I’m at 51W with Hard Drives and SSDs.
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Ahhh, that’s a pretty decent feature really, I wonder how many drives it can power?
Oh Yeah I only have twice as much RAM, I’d have guessed it wouldn’t make much difference?
I guess it’s just a case of wrong hardware for wrong purpose, your proper server board is going to be more efficient, server places liking to save money and all. Your average gamer (who this board was originally aimed at), don’t care about such things…cos bank of mum and dad probably paid the bills! 
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You might lose 5-10w of power consumption from just undervolting
The other setting you want to explore is “tweakers paradise” not “tuning wizard”
Sounds like they do same thing I know but it’s different, take a picture of what’s in there and I’ll tell you what to change
That might have more substantial gains depending on how stupid set the defualts
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Yeah if there’s one thing I’ve learned with PC bios over the years though, what the settings say and what they do are maybe two completely different things for one - amongst the myriad of other BIOS bugs you may encounter.
e.g. (not bios, but AsRock software) my x470 Taichi clocks higher when the software tweaker is set to “power save” rather than “performance”.
It’s like the settings are opposite to what the software says. Its not thermally limited, its under a big AIO and temps are fine - and I’m not overclocking otherwise.
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Cheers @GigaBusterEXE Next time I get a second, I’ll take some pics. I’d definitely pursue it seriously if we were talking more like 20-40W…ever hopeful
They are very strange things aren’t they, and lack consistency at times!
I am beginning to accept that the board, and possibly the CPU are to blame for power usage…guess we’ll see when the lower power CPU comes in the post!
I kinda remember similar issues with CPUFreq in Linux. Is it possible that playing around with that could yield better power consumption? I have a vague memory of playing around with that and getting lower idle power consumption using CPUFreq set to performance on one of my machines. This was a while back with a different architecture, but might be worth a look.
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Cheers for that. Unfortunately I don’t think TrueNAS has any tuneables for power usage, only drive spin up/down.
I’m just waiting for the spare CPU, I’ll see if that makes a big difference…if it doesn’t, that does mean the board is the culprit and like @GigaBusterEXE mentioned, it is a high performance board, so I’ll just have to shell out for a more server orientated board.
And the results…
Hardly any change (well, around 15W)
May be I’ll re-check the bios for any CPU specific changes that somehow reverted.
Poo.
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OK, so it’s time to get some perspective.
I would like power to be around 70W. Right now it appears to be around 125, that’s a 55W too much. So at 125W it’ll cost around £300 to run per year. If it was 70W it would cost around £170 per year.
Right now it seems the board that could be more power efficient is around £300, so ultimately if I completely ignore the time spent installing and re-testing, I would see a return on the new board after around 18months…is that really worth it? I don’t think so.
I’m doing a self-check on this situation, perhaps I became a little obsessive about the cost. So I’m just going to re-set the bios and re-config as best as is reasonable. I might put the HDD’s in spin down mode after X hours, but I’ll have to slowly tweak that. My final intention was to have 8 drives rarely used, mainly cold storage, while 2 drives would be in regular active daily use. So in theory the power consumption should be even less and may even be near my target wattage.
Hopefully this thread is now over for all concerned, thank you so much for commenting and contributing!
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To be honest my first thought was to get a good 4 core or 6 core Ryzen + B550 deal, maybe a $225 Ryzen 5600G + $115 motherboard.
The reason I didn’t is because you would have to sacrifice half your RAM and Ryzen would run as unregistered RAM, but you could get as low as 50W power at Idle.
Anyway, just throwing that bone out there. Good luck in your future quest! 
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That would be perfect, but like you say I’d have to buy brand new memory (my stuff is Reg), and after slowly building the RAM up to max during 2 years, I’d be a bit sad to start again! Saying that, I might take it down to 32GB, as I’ve just checked and the quantity of RAM I have is potentially equal to 48W!
I think if this board or CPU goes pop, I will be going Ryzen route!