I’ve got a NAS built in a Node 304 mini itx case that works great, but uses a ton of power. In Unraid (the OS for my NAS) there is some kind of issue with the Ryzen 3900x processor that I’m running that means I have to disable all sleep states - so it’s always at it’s 100W TDP. Power is super expensive where I live so I’d love to find something more power efficient.
Does it make more sense to buy a more recent(ish) 5th gen ryzen in hopes that the sleep states will work, and thus save money by keeping my existing motherboard?
Or I could go with something a bit more interesting. I’ve seen on Aliexpress motherboards with mobile CPU’s soldered which are very power efficient. For example the N100 has an insane 6W TDP and comes on special boards with lots of sata ports and 2.5G networking (link). The worry with the n100 though is that it only officially supports 16G of ram which might not be enough for zfs.
Any thoughts? Is anyone running a power-efficient build who could throw some advice my way? Thanks!
I have MSI Z270-A PRO and intel G3930. With 2 SSDs it was draining 22W, but after adding toshiba 12TB HDD it went up to 35W. Before adding HDD I was testing different PSUs and some were using 35W (instead of 22W on this one). Check if your PSU is overdimensioned like 1000W or something like that (PSU is super unefficient if you use it at <10% of max power)
Note that I dont have GPU
Yeah, the power supply is absolutely too big. I think I used it for a gaming pc before this, so it’s in the ballpark of 800W. I also doubt it was a particularly efficient one to begin with, since I don’t care much if a gaming PC is effecint since I don’t keep it on.
I’ll look into getting a lower-power one for cheap and see if that helps. Thanks!