Kinda curious what people’s power draw is. Mine sits at about 50-60W at idle.
I’m kinda new to self hosting but I have immich and jellyfin severs. And then a little LLM role-playing game I made running locally on an older gaming laptop. It spikes up to like 170W for like 30 secords when playing when the “Dungeon Master” responds.
Idk just like to hear what other people got going on! I’ll probably still tinker to get my power draw down even more if possible
About 220W on average with peaks around 280W. I’ve got 8 Optiplex micro PCs, 5 upcycled thin clients running smaller services, fiber ONT, another micro Optiplex as a router, a storage server, main switch, and a 5 port PoE switch for my 4 access points around the house.
Before I downsized everything to the USFF PCs, I was running 3 old enterprise rack servers that were about 220W each.
It’s currently running from solar from about 7am to 4pm with my small solar setup, but I’m in the process of installing a whole house PV system.
Yeah, I’m feeling the pain from my old enterprise gear but moving away from it has been hard. Right now I have an old 720XD for storage (12, 6tb spinning rust, 2 smaller SSDs for cache), an old Intel server with shitloads of RAM, an old R610 (at this point it’s only there for a service or two that I could surely migrate), a couple old HP MicroServer gen8’s, and an old HP SFF desktop. There are months my power bill looks like a mortgage.
I feel that.
Before I downsized, I was running 3x HP DL360 G6’s with dual Xenons and 96 GB RAM each. Way overkill for my needs but I got them cheap. Unfortunately, they and my air conditioner competed to see who could use the most electricity each month. 😆
The only thing I really lost in the scale down was the ability to spin up dev/test VMs for every little purpose. I’ve mostly just started using Docker containers for things like build environments.
The one with shitloads of RAM has 768GB and a pair of Xenons… My default VM gets more RAM than my desktop, but it’s great for the rare occasion I need a big-ass ramdisk or something. I was going to build a small jbod and get a couple USFF systems (possibly thin clients) to host my docker containers… Then disk prices went through the roof.
Ugh, yeah. My “temporary” spinners that were an emergency upgrade became permanent when I went to buy the new ones and prices had skyrocketed. I’ve got one cold spare left, so hopefully there’s a price break in the near-ish future
How’s that working for you? I don’t need 8 of them but after doing some passive research, the Optiplex seems to be a favorite in the homelab/selfhosting arena.
I personally have a better experience with the lenovo tiny, but I have a mix of tiny/mini/micro, and all of then make for a great low wattage server solution IMO.
They’re super common in corporate deployments, some larger companies will just give old (3-5 ish years) boxes away to employees when they do upgrades. I don’t have any running right now but I’ve gotten a few over the years that way. IMO their main virtue is that they’re easy to come by for cheap, but I don’t think I would seek one out specifically.
Not op, but they are great little machines if you don’t need a GPU. I have 2 as proxmox nodes and I want one more so I can have my more critical services running on it instead of my main docker machine.
Their Intel graphics work great for transcoding, but yeah, not much else. I’ve got Emby one one of them, and the QuickSync hardware acceleration works well even with multiple simultaneous streams.
Works pretty great as long as you keep your expectations realistic. Easy to upgrade and pretty reliable. Only annoying thing with any of those micro PCs is the cable management is a pain because of the power bricks. I got some USB-C PD adapters and Dell-style cables and that’s made a huge improvement.