Have you run a power measurement on it? That would be your best investment, about 40/50 bucks and it will tell you exactly how much power the server consumes.
Then you can calculate with your electric costs how much it costs to keep it running.
A server that costs 125 and uses 400 per year in power is a lot more expensive than a machine that costs 1000 and uses 100 per year if you want to use it more than 2 years.
If you are using it for experience, how about just turning it off when you don’t need it?
I bought a device to measure it as a wall plug for 12€ here in Germany. Also has recording function to measure kW/h over time. Good, simple and cheap.No need to spend 50$.
Seriously consider cloud hosting if its for work related experience/lab stuff.
If not, I’d get a small form factor Ryzen with 4-6 core 65 watt CPU with a pair of NVME SSDs. Think B550 board, 3000 series. Could probably even passively cool that and SSD make no noise. 64 GB will be $$ if you need it, but do you need that much or will 32 suffice? It won’t be $125 though.
But again, cloud hosting if/when you need it will give you valuable cloud experience, and you can turn it off/pay only a monthly fee rather than pay for hardware up front. Also, if it (your cloud instance) gets hacked (heaven forbid) its not on your home network as a launchpad for fucking your other stuff up.
Also, my +50% was a LOT more power than my stuff usually uses. 6900XT at idle or just 2d desktop is sub 5 watts. Way less. Ryzen 2700X at idle is a handful of watts. I haven’t measured with a meter, but a typical desktop PC sitting mostly idle 24/7 will be in the order of 50-60 watts or so. Which is what… a few light bulbs. less than one if you still have incandescent.
+1 to that.
I’d also suggest measuring your desktop to get an idea of how much it uses and how much you can tune it for. You may be surprised. Unless properly loaded, desktops do not consume a heap. And even gaming, you’re not gaming 24/7 - usually a few hours at a time.
Modern chips really aggressively gate/turn off parts of the chip (Navi2 is insane in how much the power drops) to save heat (to have headroom when it IS required). Also saves power during low usage.
Right now it’s principal day job is as VPN endpoint (pfsense/OpenVPN.) Other than that, it plays homelab to various projects that come and go. Right now I’m trying to focus on picking up RHEL and some ESXi experience. I’m old school, like having the hardware to tinker with as well as the software stack. But if it really is running up the power excessively than maybe I need to reconsider.
Fair enough similar to what I used my home lab stuff for a while ago.
Maybe keep the R420 for lab stuff when actually doing it and move your VPN to something smaller to leave running? Could probably run a linux VPN service off a Pi quite happily and that way just power up the old clunker when required for ESXi
If you’ve got enough RAM in your primary machine you can actually virtualise ESXi inside of Workstation too, but that obviously needs a pretty beefy primary machine. But,… to get the most out of ESXi you really need vCenter which means multiple ESXi hosts.
Primary machine has 48GB. But…vCenter alone takes up 12GB of RAM…complete pig. A long time ago I set up ESXi on my main machine and had a Windows VM autostart w/ GPU passthrough for gaming. But my current motherboard is a poor choice for GPU passthrough due to a crappy PCie Rev 2.0 x4 secondary GPU slot. And of course the primary slot is needed for the ESXi console.
The neat thing about the old Dell workstation is it can take huge amounts of RAM - 9 slots of DDR3 ECC, at up to 16GB per slot. But the old CPUs limit gaming performance severely.
Yeah you aren’t going to get vCenter and a bunch of usable VMs under it. But you can use it to learn the basic features with some real small non useful workload.
Eg play with vmotion and shared storage with some basic Linux VMs
While I don’t have a Kill-A-Watt, I did realize that I do have an iDRAC with power monitoring on the Dell R420. According to the power monitoring tab, over the past week it has been drawing an average of 88 watts. That really does not seem excessive.
When I first got it, I took measures to make sure the fans remained somewhat tolerable. That seems to have also helped total power draw.
Of course the question remains whether or not I can trust those power readings…
Aside from the WiFi card (which will work by default once 5.16 is mainstream), it sounds like the Asus Zephyrus M15 does not have greater compatibility with Linux
But I suppose it also depends on which version of the Omen you go with. The AMD stuff just works out of the box.
If it were made in the early 00’s, probably. But the rest of your hardware is going to be the major contribution to power draw if you’re using modern & efficient power supplies.
Just like your desktop, clean it out, and repaste your components. and don’t abuse your hardware by shoving it in situations where it can’t breathe.
Hell, I’ve still got a MSI GS73VR-7RF working just fine after years of use, but tons of wear and tear from all the abuse anything takes that’s moved frequently.
It’s always going to be, this is your trade-off for portability. Or go buy something else that’s larger, and heavier. Such as the System76 Kudu laptop. It’s chonky, heavier than any Zephyrus, but gives you more expansion.
“Don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose.”
or… learn how to fix the problem that made it “die.” / find someone who can fix it.
Not to discount the disadvantages that optimus brings but:
At this point, i’ve done more installs than i can shake a stick at regarding muxless laptops to know that it’s only a PITA if you don’t know what to do or refuse to use tools to make it easier.
Been poking about on a Zephyrus G15 for a month now, (Ryzen 9 5900HS + RTX 3070) and as far as Arch distros go, Envycontrol has been a life saver for easy (but not flawless) GPU switching. Plus, a cheeky reset script to fix mismatched display refresh rates from sleep when using Manjaro KDE.
Personally been perfectly content with that setup, but there’s really little point in jumping ship to a laptop if you can’t accept the trade-offs of such a switch.
But will it replace my NAS? will it replace my VM tower? nope… but it does give mobility… that’s really the whole point of going for a laptop right?
I know the WiFi card in the Zephyrus G15 still has a lingering reset bug over on 5.15, which occurs when performing a normal reboot instead of shutting down the machine. Resulting in no WiFi connectivity.
-1613712138578.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)