tips for reducing idle power consumption?

[jpsollie]

Hi everyone,
I have a system with a threadripper 1950, 4x DDR4 8GB ram, a 40-drive SAS storage system (yes, drive, not tb) and an R9 nano to do regular opencl calculations related to MI and AI R&D (not connected to a monitor).
I managed to reduce the power consumption by shutting down all SAS drives after a certain idle time (a feature of the adaptec raid card),
and perform things like Pci runtime power management, LED control, network card downclocking, etc ...
But the idle power consumption of the system stays quite high, even after all those options are set.
Is there any way to further reduce power consumption?
- Does disabling cores help? eg: if I take 12 out of 16 cores offline during long-idle, would it help?
- Any hints on reducing the R9 nano power consumption? even when it's not doing anything, the "sensors" tool shows it's still using 12W ... quite a lot for a device doing nothing!
_________________
The power of Gentoo optimization (not overclocked): [img]https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V10/images/503714802842.png[/img]

[joanandk]

Hi,

What is "quite high" for you?

What I have heard: SAS drives are not designed for shutdown. In the long run, you will not gain anything from saving the power by reducing the lifespan of the SAS drive.

The first thing you could do: Check in the UEFI/BIOS if you have the option for power. Try different settings. On a HPE380 Gen9, I have seen that power regulated by the OS is the best choice.
Then look for the Kernel. I have seen that there was a massive improvement with the newer Kernels (around 10-20W lower power consumption).

Depending on what the purpose of your system is, you could completely shut the system down when not in use. Use low power devices for 24/7 operation and relay-switch to fire the system on demand.
If your 40 drives are 3.5", you could exchange them with 2.5" for less consumption.

BR

[jpsollie]