Hi everyone,
for 20 years now i run servers in my own home to host my stuff. Because i am living in europe with quite high price tags for electricity i am always searching for ways to make my servers more power efficient.

But finding a power efficient ATX PSU with performes well in ranges around 20-25W, where my server idles most of the time, is quite challenging.

Dont get me wrong, the Server has an very efficient PSU, a Super-Flower SF450P14XE Golden Green Pro but thats now 14 years old (but serves me well). I bought it for 55€ back in the days.
Over the years i tried various budget insider tips regarding efficent PSU’s (for example the Cooler Master MWE400) which all were also good but not better than the 14 year old Super Flower, which i think is kind of sad.

Just yesterday i tried a 160W PicoPSU combined with a 150W DELL DA-1 powerbrick (which should also be quite efficient), but it was the same. My Server used 1-3W more than with the Super-Flower.

Long story short: are there any efficient PSU out there that you can recommend for loads around 20-25W, that dont have a price tag like a kidney on the blackmarket?

I also have seen people trying to mod old Dell Server PSU with are 750W with platinum rating an are cheap on ebay, but thats another story.

  • glitching@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    do you have a ballpark figure of potential savings in $/€ per annum? and for what hardware? I remember calculating something similar and I don’t think I broke $20 in total, so promptly forgot about it.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    I have an older (2017) Dell SFF OptiPlex 7050 that idles about 12w, with 3 drives (each 1 TB, spinning disk).

    It peaks about 80w when I’m doing conversions, but I can keep that down by limiting cpu usage for handbrake (it doesn’t convert faster above 4 cores anyway, just uses more power).

    I was surprised by the low idle power, I would’ve been happy with upwards of 40w since my previous machine idled at 100w.

    So I think very low idle is possible, I’m just not sure why this box idles so low.

      • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        Device Manager shows i7-7700, 3.6ghz, 8 cores

        Maxes at 3gb 32gb of ram, unfortunately, since I run some vm’s on it.

          • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            I have no explanation. Really shocked me that idle was that low, and I ran the meter on it for a week with it mostly just sitting there, and some file copy action. I could see in the power chart when I copied files, then it would fall back to 12w. Nuts.

            I have to make a config change soon (add a drive and a fan), I’ll put the meter back on for a week.