Intel Coffee Lake Xeons and boards - Rec's / experiences?

[Karl Denninger]

BTW.... if anyone is interested.

Drop in idle (not doing much) power is about 40 watts (!!); that is,
1.90 amps to 1.50.  That's quite material.

And it's a LOT faster too....

Now is 40 watts material?  I dunno.  Depends on what you pay for power.
Maybe $3/month?  But... you also get much faster, so what's that worth?

Hmmm.... I think it's a good deal.

On 12/2/2019 13:23, Karl Denninger wrote:
> Anyone used them yet?
>
> E21xx/21xxG series?  Board with a built-in IPKVM is preferred (of those
> there are only a few) and I'm particularly interested in idle power
> consumption and such.
>
> I currently run a few X5650s (hex-core and HT) and while they run well
> they're power-hungry monsters, and not just the chip.  The various
> frontside and interface chips on the Supermicro boards pull a crap-ton
> of power too and generate their fair share of heat; best I've been able
> to manage with power management (powerd), a HBA (LSI SAS-2116) and a
> mixture of SSDs and spinning rust in the cabinet (with those not mounted
> spun down) is right around 2A @ 120V, so figure ~250 watts -- and that's
> IDLING.
>
> Put load on it and it really ramps (I've seen well into the 300s), but
> that's ok if I'm asking it to work.
>
> The reason this looks interesting is that I have a Coffee Lake
> **desktop** processor and Mobo for it (not suitable for a server as no
> ECC support, of course) that idles WITH a Nvidia PCIe graphics card in
> the box (GTX-1060, 6Gb) running 4 LED monitors connected to it at ~50-60
> watts!  Of course if I start up a video render its power consumption
> goes through the roof, but again, when NOT working hard it sips power --
> and that's with a PCI/e video card in there.
>
> Now it's probably true that ~6-7 watts, more or less, is per-spinning
> rust drive in the box that is not spun down (those consume almost
> nothing) and there's 5 of those in the server box while the desktop has
> just one, and that one is spun down most of the time.  But both have
> SSDs; the desktop's is nVME, the server box is 2.5" SATA, but a
> half-dozen of them.  Nonetheless they don't pull much power compared
> against spinning disks, even when active.
>
> While the cost in dollars the power isn't huge in the summer I pay twice
> since I have to run the A/C more to pull the heat out of the room,
> obviously, and in the winter resistance heating, while "free", is
> expensive on a comparative basis.
>
> What I'm curious about is if anyone has experience with these under
> FreeBSD yet and what sort of power consumption you're seeing with a
> "mostly idle" system, whether they're stable -- and what combination of
> CPU/Board/RAM you're using..... or should I stick with the Kaby Lake
> E3-v6 CPUs and boards for them?
>
> Thanks!
>
-- 
Karl Denninger
karl at denninger.net <mailto:karl at denninger.net>
/The Market Ticker/
/[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]/
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