saving power in a Dell Poweredge 750.

[Peter Jeremy]

On Wed, 2007-Jan-10 09:34:21 -0800, George Hartzell wrote:
>I hooked my kill-a-watt meter up and ran the machine for a couple of
>days and it uses 88 watts (3.90KWH/44.01H).

What was it doing for those couple of days?  If it was just sitting
idle then I would expect the power consumption to be fairly close
to what you get with powerd.  If you want to see peak power consumption,
try running a buildworld, something very FP intensive and something that
is thrashing the disk(s) (lots of seeks and writes), all in parallel.

>Then I kldloaded cpufreq and enabled powerd and it still uses 88 watts
>(8.35KWH/93.47H).

I presume you confirmed that cpufreq/powerd was actually functioning
(ie the CPU frequency was being changed).

>That surprised me a bit, and seems to suggest that it's spending most
>of its energy spinning fans or something.

PSU overheads, fans, northbridge, video, RAM, disk, ...  it all adds up.

I can't specifically help with the Dell.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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