Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.
I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞
I’m gonna ask you the same question I’m asking everyone using office mini PCs, do you know what kind of power draw? I’m really into the idea of cheap, but I’m also getting super into green energy.
No idea, I’m not monitoring power consumption at all.
I’m just assuming that the Intel CPU based system will idle at X Watts, peak as Y Watts, and that an ARM based appliance would idle at X and peak lower than X.
If any thing, I noticed that my UPS batter didn’t last as long during an extended ded outage once I deploy the SFF PC.
Also, TCO, if I save $100 on the price of the device (that draws more power) that is a lot of power savings required to break even.
Different person. But I have proxmox on multiple mini PC (Lenovo and HP600). They max out at 65w but pull less most of the time. I suppose I should check the weekly average, but my power monitor is on the other side of the UPS and there are multiple mini PC, devices, switches, modem, wireless AP… All on the monitor. If I had to guess I’d say the router/pihole pulls <30w and the media rig with its HDDs pulls ~100 but only when it’s read/writing. The full stack idles <100 including AP/switches, way less then my gaming PC just on idle (>700 when the GPU is GPing).
(Power efficiency is nice, but the ROI for a new ARM / RISK system is probably not great now. Better to use a recycled rig pulling 40-100w now and upgrading in a few years. It’s not like you need a server rack pulling over a kilowatt, and the efficiency gain from 5-10 year old x86 vs ARM/RISK is less then swapping out an old incandescent light to an LED.
Thank you that’s EXTREMELY helpful! I agree that maxing out at 65w and pulling maybe 30 the rest of the time isn’t so bad, but I really wasn’t sure what to expect.
That also means if I find I actually hate it and in a year I’m like “fuck it I’m done tinkering” I didn’t spend a ton of extra money on equipment.