(5800X + 64GB)
I can enable Eco Mode in the BIOS, which will bring down the CPU to about 65W max although its still at about 100W total system.
I'd love it if I could turn off my systems for when I really need them.
It's surprising because reddit (and HN) would make you think you're throwing away tons of money unless you go with some tiny ARM board and that's not true.
The main issue for me is the heat. I've got it next to me and 130W of heat adds up in the summer.
Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35627107 - April 2023 (237 comments)
In in the end I just went the whole hog and set up a PiKVM, so now if I mess up the machine's networking (or even completely break the OS) I can still recover it remotely even though it doesn't have a proper BMC or anything like that.
In general this approach seems ugly in principle but I really like it in practice. It lets you retrofit solid remote capabilities onto consumer hardware. That way you have such a broader market to buy from.
I know a lot of sysadmins / platform engineer types. A lot of them really enjoy the mix of hardware and software integration challenges.
Anyway it's not about the money for me it's any the aesthetics. Burning power for nothing is yucky.
Edit: just been Googling around. OP is running one of these HP mini PCs. They are pretty efficient! Some go well below 10W. So yeah I would say for the specific use case it's unlikely to matter very much. But still it's a useful thing to be able to do in general.
(For example, imagine a big home GPU server that is needed only intermittently, and you want it to spin up automatically on network traffic from family's various devices that you can't modify.)
Of course, if you have simpler needs, and you're willing to send a WOL magic packet from the using devices, you can do in a few lines of shell script. It's a 1-line ssh-to-something-that-can-etherwake-on-that-vlan script, then wait in a loop for the service you need to appear, then 1-line ssh-to-server-to-shutdown when you're done.
Crunched the numbers for mine - about 150 bucks a year in potential savings.
I always choose “make more money” over “pinch pennies”.
no need for a standin
You could set a calendar schedule for waking up itself and backing up the clients, and at night the server would go into standby only if no clients were running anymore since X minutes.
antov825•4h ago
Spooky23•3h ago
ryandrake•18m ago