[dave.nasty]

So here is my dilemma add or advise where you can.

So I used to be a gamer so I built a nice gaming PC. Well as I got old and lame I stopped gaming. I decided I would take this gaming PC and put it to some use. So I took out my two gaming video cards and replaced them with a video card that would better handle straight HDMI. Now I have a behemoth of a PC that acts as a server and HTPC. It has 8Gigs of ram a 750W Power supply a SSD for windows and 7 HDD for storage. The problem is with the server software running all of the time and all my other installs of XBMC (iPad, Original xbox, and a HTPC) using this one PC for storage i can't turn it off ever. I tried setting up magic packets and some automation but for some reason I cannot get them to work with this PC. So I am averaging about 165+ or - few KwH per month so I am spending about 17$ a month just to run this PC. Any ideas on how to save a little bit?

Thank you in advance.

[davilla]

Turn it off and read a book

It's a real dilemma, it's the CPU or drives spinning all the time. Down clock the CPU and sleep the drives.

[particleman]

A lower power more efficient platinum PSU will probably help. You won't need a 750W PSU for a file server.

[fvtalon]

You don't mention what is on the 7 HDD or if they're regular or green versions or what kind of configuration (RAID, JBOD, etc). One option would be to look into Unraid for the server side of things. It'll only spin the drive up as it's accessed and only the drive that's accessed not all the drives all the time like a striped RAID. To do this I would think you would get a new smaller HTPC case, a MB & CPU & RAM (either for the server or HTPC) a PSU and a thumb drive for the Unraid OS should be all you need. Only other problem is assuming all the drive are full you need at least 2 or 3 bare drives to start the Unraid array.

If you don't want to split the computers I'd look first at a newer more efficiently rated power supply, probably with a lower wattage. 750W should be tons for 8 drives and a CPU/iGPU. I know on the Unraid forums assuming all green drives a 400-500W PSU is recommended for 10-12 drives. For some free stuff can you underclock your cpu? Or run it in cool and quiet mode or something similar? Maybe turn down or disable some of the case fans if they're still setup for cooling two graphics cards and a hardworking cpu?

The other option is save it elsewhere. I've currently switched out 10 of my regular lights for 6W LED bulbs I ordered online for about $8/ea. 60-75W down to probably 8W as fast as you can change a light bulb. I started with the outside lights where the heat produced is a total loss, then moved onto the most used inside lights. Depending on your place, especially if it's a little older and if you have electric heat a little weather strip, caulking and the like can do wonders too.

[Dougie Fresh]

Buy a Kill-a-Watt, measure the power usage and then get a new efficient power supply sized to the task. You want the normal power consumption to land between 20-100%, preferably 50% of maximum load.

[wsume99]

I would do as suggested above but also take a look at your CPU. If you built a beast of a rig for gaming you may want to replace the CPU with a lower power one. Perhaps pick up a used one off e-bay.

So just to recap you need to look into the following:

1. HDD config - i.e. are your drives being spun down when not in use? If not, then this wastes maybe 5-7 watts per drive.
2. CPU power use - consider a low power dual core
3. PSU size & efficiency (I would not buy another PSU until you tweak the other two items above)

[davilla]

2nd on that Kill-a-Watt, they are quite inexpensive and very handy measuring the actual device power consumption.

[DavidT99]

If your goal is to save money then you don't want to be spending anything on new kit as the cost is likely to outweigh any potential energy saving cost! Do you have any spare parts you could reuse or can you underclock the CPU and shutdown drives when not in use.

David

[dave.nasty]

Wow thanks for the responses.

Davilla: haha What is a book?

To all:

1) My drives spin down after 15 minutes.
2) I will have to look into underclocking. Any suggestions on how to determin a low? I have Couchpotato, Sickbeard, subsonic, airvideo, Sabnzbd + XBMC that I run on this PC.
3) SSD=OS, HDD1=Movies HDD2=more movies HDD3=Music HDD4=PC/Phone Backups/XBMC Backup HDD5=TV Shows HDD6=Small drive that servers sort downloads from. HDD7= Temp Empty about to expand to movies 3
4) 5 of the drives are WD Green drives.
5) No RAID anymore.
6) I do have a Kill-A-Watt just finished its first 30 days and I ended up with 166KwH at the end of 30 days.
7) I have CFL throughout the whole house except the outdoor bulbs as they do not light up fast enough. Can you tell me where I can find the LEDS for 8$. ( I will search as well)
8) I have 450w Power suppy I can swtich out. How do I test to see if this is enough?
9) Off the subject but I just installed a timer on my hot water heater too see if I can see any savings there.

Thank yout everyone for the responses I will post again when I tweak these things to see what i can get down too.

Also just got my Raspberry pi today. I am going to test XBMC on this see what I can do as far as maing that my xbmc install and using this PC as just a NAS possibly using Google musi instead of subsonic.

Also this project is less about saving money than it is just playing arounf and tweaking my house to see what I can get my energy costs down to.

I dropped a little over 200Kwh last month compare to last year by turning down my water heater and switching to all CFL. Having a hard time playing with tempuratures in my house as I have a 5 month old baby that I have to keep comfortable.

[mh77]

Perhaps most will know this, but since in my experience many don't, I'll say this anyway. The power rating on a power supply is the max power it can supply. It doesn't use this all the time. If it's not efficient, however, it will use more than an efficient PSU to supply the power the system needs.

Theoretically, iIf you want to save on power usage you will either need to reduce the power needed by your system, or increase the efficiency of your PSU, or both. The only way to increase the efficiency of your PSU is by replacing it. A picoPSU, if its capacity is enough for the system, could reduce the power consumption when idle by 20%, says this review. But if you need a lot of power still, a picoPSU won't work for you. If you want to reduce the power needed by your system, your CPU and GPU are the most power hungry components to look at.

Regular drives could easily be using 7-8 Watts power when idle, your WD Greens will probably do around 4. If you had 7 Greens, you'd still be doing 30 Watts just for the harddisks when idle. And when are they idle? Perhaps SABnzbd or other programs are writing to their logs every now and then, preventing your disks from spinning down.

If you're going to look at underclocking, look at undervolting as well. You'll want to be careful with that, but it's something else that can reduce the power needed. And in the past, I've bought a motherboard that had onboard video, even though I got a dedicated video card for gaming. If you had something similar, you could probably just take out the video card completely, and use the onboard graphics chip. More power saving.

Sorry if my post's a little incoherent, it's late here (1:47am).

Good luck!

[Tragic]

166w seems like a lot for a server that isn't doing much. What CPU / GPU are you running?

Regarding the PSU, from memory they are at their most efficient at around 80% of their capacity. So 160w on a 750w PSU it isn't going to be very efficient. Throw in the 450w PSU and that should help you out. As you have a way to measure the power your best bet is to take the engineering approach, change one thing then measure the change and see the difference.

Underclocking / undervolting can help. here is some info I put together 5 years ago when I was running Media Portal. (http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/thread...duo.33098/) Under clock/volt is just like overclocking. Start slowly working your way down a piece at a time. Start with underclocking to see the minimum speed you can run the CPU at, once that is determined at that underclocked speed start undervolting until the system is unstable. Once unstable go back to the last stable setting... then bump it up one just to get a buffer.

Regarding replacing your stuff, while normally the power savings are not worth new equipment it does depend on the case. If you can sell a higher spec CPU and MB then you might be able to cover the costs of a lower spec and thus power equipment.

[Mars]

Wow! 165kWh / month is about 1980kWh on a yearly basis for just a server! That is just below my TOTAL annual power consumption!!!

You are lucky you don't live in Europe where you pay around €0,22 / kWh . With 1980kWh you would pay € 435.-- each year.
As a comparison: my server (Intel DH77DF, Intel 3570K, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD and 4x3TB WD Greens) with all data disks in standby consumes 16-20W in idle; less than € 40 / year!

You could spend almost €400 on a new MB, CPU and RAM and earn that back within one year

But, lucky you, you only pay around $0,10 for each kWh. Still, a 20W system is 10 fold decrease compared to your current system!

[GortWillSaveUs]

Buy a Kill-a-Watt, measure the power usage and then get a new efficient power supply sized to the task. You want the normal power consumption to land between 20-100%, preferably 50% of maximum load.

Just be careful,................because once you measure your PC,....you'll start to check your refrigerator, the stove, the air conditioner,......

[Vertigo]

Obvious solution is to sell the rig on ebay and buy something thats more suitable for the task. But if you must, some things that will help:

- Bios allowing, undervolt and underclock the CPU. Particularly undervolting can make a tremendous difference.
- Disable anything you dont need in the bios. Eg, if you are not using onboard audio, disable it. Same with legacy ports (serial, parallel, IDE,..), USB controllers you might not be using, etc. It wont amount to much, probably no more than a few watts total, but every bit helps, right
- do you need 7 disks? If you are reusing a few old 100GB disks just because you can, well, consider removing them. They use a fair amount of power. Rearrange your drives and use as a few as needed.
- as others mentioned, a more efficient PSU might help. It isnt so much about the wattage as it is about efficiency, particularly at light loads. 160W is a light load for a 750W PSU, it will therefore most likely be running very inefficiently. What PSU do you have?

[wsume99]

I do have a Kill-A-Watt just finished its first 30 days and I ended up with 166KwH at the end of 30 days.

Well then by my calculations your PC has an average power draw of ~230 watts [166,000/(24*30)]. For a server, that seems like a HUGE power draw. To put this in perspective, if I built a 7-disk server today my idle power use goal would be 40-50 watts.

Can you list all the hardware in your PC?

Also you need to switch your kill-a-watt to watt mode and meaure it's power use during different conditions. I would start with idle.