Would any of these make a decent low power appliance?

cpk0

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I haven't run any sort of at-home appliance for quite a while – just haven't had the need. But now I'm starting to find some good reasons to have an always-on box that can do some light duty work. I rummaged through the parts bin, and came up with these:

i5 4460 3.2GHz
Pentium G620 2.6GHz
i5 6600 3.5GHz
Xeon E-2403 1.8 GHz

My highest priority is energy efficiency: this machine will sit idle probably 90% of the time, and I'd like to keep idle draw below 20 W. Because of their age, I don't think any of these are good candidates for that, but does anyone see a possible configuration with any of them that may fit the bill?
 
The 6600 is the only sub-80w CPU in that selection, so I would probably run with that. I am guessing there is some new tech in that CPU compared to the other older ones that is likely to draw less power during idle, but there are better CPU people in this forum for sure.

Edit: a quick google showed 25W for the 6600 alone. The Pentium i found with 35W, but that was total system power and reminiscent of the G6505 i once used. The 4460 and Xeon are older and from previous testing with CPUs in that family, they draw more from experience.
 
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None of those will be super energy-efficient.

The Haswell (4460) was badly impacted by Meltdown; it got a microcode patch, but that impaired its I/O speed by a bunch, so it's not a good server chip anymore.

The G620 is the generation after, Sandy Bridge, and would probably be reasonable as a server chip, but lacks many niceties like the AES New Instructions, which can come in very handy sometimes in utility boxes. It's only dual-core, but that would reduce its idle consumption.

The i5-6600 would be perfectly acceptable as a server chip, with the caveat that the idle power will not be as low as a modern one. It has AES and all of the virtualization extensions, so it should be a happy little server for you.

The Xeon would also be fine, but inferior. It's a generation older than the 6600, and doesn't clock very high. Most of the time you'd prefer the 6600, which clocks at close to twice the speed, has the same number of cores, and will be a little more efficient per core. And the 6600 will probably also idle substantially lower.

If your primary goal in setting up a new server is power efficiency, then probably the Raspberry Pi 4 would work well. If you want more I/O power, an RPi5 will burn like 5 more watts but give you substantially more bandwidth. But an RPi5, all in, will usually cost about $120, where you can get fully populated Intel N97 boxes for like $150, albeit with a shitty SSD that you probably won't want to keep.

Those N97 and N100 (slightly slower) boxes are omnipresent, and you can get them in all kinds of configs with different I/O setups. But then you have to know exactly what you want for I/O, and it sounds like maybe you don't.

So: I think I'd probably recommend starting with the I5-6600, if you have a motherboard and RAM for it. That will give you lots of I/O and connectivity, and doesn't cost anything. Get it set up and running, and learn what you want to do with it. Once you know what its actual day-to-day purpose is, then think about replacing it with a more efficient mini-PC, if you can find one that has enough I/O ports to do what you want.

An example: some mini-PCs come with external SFF-8087 ports to drive four SATA drives. That would be very useful for a NAS, but mostly useless if you don't need the storage. Once you know what you're doing with the machine, then you can sort through the many many options and maybe buy a more efficient CPU.

Or maybe not. Say the machine is 40W at idle; at 17 cents per KWh, you're talking $5.06 for a 30-day month. Going to a 20W idle would only save you $2.50ish a month, so it would take a long time for a more efficient machine to pay for itself.

If you live in an area with expensive power, like Hawaii, that could be very different. I'd be very concerned about idle power at the 50-ish cents that Hawaiians pay.
 
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The Haswell (4460) was badly impacted by Meltdown; it got a microcode patch, but that impaired its I/O speed by a bunch, so it's not a good server chip anymore.

The G620 is the generation after, Sandy Bridge, and would probably be reasonable as a server chip, but lacks many niceties like the AES New Instructions, which can come in very handy sometimes in utility boxes. It's only dual-core, but that would reduce its idle consumption.
The Haswell microcode patch is for Spectre, not Meltdown. Sandy Bridge is two generations before Haswell and doesn't have INVPCD so impact of meltdown mitigations will be even worse than Haswell. I doubt however if these impacts are a serious issue for typical domestic light duties.

OP - ignore the TDPs and go with whatever the latest generation CPU you have. CPUs have generally got better at idle effficiency over time. I'm pretty sure that is the 6600.

With regard to idling at under 20W, you might be able to do it. I've an HP Elitedesk Micro PC with a 6500 in it and that idles at ~10W, so it will come down to PSU efficiency and other components in the system.

If it works for your use case, a cron job to shut the machine down last thing and configuring BIOS auto power on can save power for say 6 hours/day (so 25%) even if you allow for the odd late night with the cron job times.
 
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The Haswell microcode patch is for Spectre, not Meltdown. Sandy Bridge is two generations before Haswell and doesn't have INVPCD so impact of meltdown mitigations will be even worse than Haswell. I doubt however if these impacts are a serious issue for typical domestic light duties.

OP - ignore the TDPs and go with whatever the latest generation CPU you have. CPUs have generally got better at idle effficiency over time. I'm pretty sure that is the 6600.

With regard to idling at under 20W, you might be able to do it. I've an HP Elitedesk Micro PC with a 6500 in it and that idles at ~10W, so it will come down to PSU efficiency and other components in the system.

If it works for your use case, a cron job to shut the machine down last thing and configuring BIOS auto power on can save power for say 6 hours/day (so 25%) even if you allow for the odd late night with the cron job times.
Wake-on-lan (including wake-on-wlan) is extremely helpful here.
 

cpk0

Ars Tribunus Militum
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Thanks for all the very useful information, all.

WOL and scheduled shutdowns probably won't work for me, because one of the things I want to do on this box is run some sort of overlay network service that I can use to get into my network when on the road. My need to do that is unpredictable, so if I put this project into service it will pretty much only be useful if it's on 24/7, hence my desire to find a solution that is as efficient as possible.

I'll be honest that money isn't the issue. I would never financially see the difference between a 20 W device running all day every day for the next 5 year and a 50 W device. I also get all my electricity from renewable sources, so there's not even a great argument for saving the planet or anything like that. The production and transportation required for buying something new would overshadow the resources needed to run whatever it is for probably years. I'm trying my best to keep my bar for consumption (both in terms of new things, and resources needed for existing things) very high.

Anyway, that's more than anyone asked for, but just to say I'd feel total fine (better, in fact) walking away from a project like this if it feels wasteful. Being able to check the stats from my bird detector from the other side of the country just isn't that important.

I'm going to build up the 6600 system and see where it gets me. That feels like a very good starting point, and will keep my busy through the holiday week.

A RPi may be a good option, but I may also want to do some things with this box that aren't quite ready for primetime on ARM. We'll see how many of the ideas on my list I get around to. If I don't end up with any x86 workloads, that would be a good longer term solution.
 
A RPi may be a good option, but I may also want to do some things with this box that aren't quite ready for primetime on ARM. We'll see how many of the ideas on my list I get around to. If I don't end up with any x86 workloads, that would be a good longer term solution.
As long as it doesn't need a ton of CPU firepower, most open source stuff runs pretty well. It's usually a matter of recompiling it for ARM, and then the program runs fine. Potential trouble spots are heavily compute-focused things, virtual machine hosting, or video handling; the video chipsets aren't that well supported, and the CPUs don't really have enough grunt to deal with lots of video formats natively. They're usually just barely able to handle 1080p, and not always at that.

But, seriously, an RPi 5 all in is like $120; all the extras are expensive. The N97s start at about $150, with everything you need already in the box. They're so, so much faster, and only burn a little more power. I'd call that the less wasteful option, myself. (edit: well, I'd probably junk an SSD from a $150 unit, and use a quality one instead, so that much would be wasted. My least wasteful option would be buying barebones and then populating the board with my own RAM and drive. I'd probably end up at $200ish, myself.)

Pis have the GPIO ports, though, which can be very useful if you're doing anything with electronic hobbyist projects.
 
With just the CPU and one M.2 drive, Proxmox is idling at about 23 watts, which is close enough to my 20 W baseline to keep going down this path, I think.
Don't forget power profile settings, you can configure the min and max processor usage and this works quite well. Utilities like ProcessLasso and power plan explorer expose extra power profile options also.


Of course limiting the max processor usage will come with a performance hit, the size of which depends on how you configure it, but a 6600 should give you plenty of headroom to work with.
 

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