efficiency worth the upgrade cost?

[Justintoxicated]

I have an C2D e7300 in my home server, it is run 24-7. Would upgrading the CPU to something more powerful and more efficient pay for itself over the next 4 or 5 years?

I'm going to upgrade my other PC so I could just pop in a Q9450 for an upgrade, but I'm having second thoughts with my $240 a month power bill. (California here so power is expensive). It is 28 cents per kw in the highest tier when I always hit, and will increase by 6% per year.

 

[Battleneter2]

From a electricity point of view its fairly marginal call in your situation and here is why.

Lets say you save 50 watts per hour on the brand new Mobo and CPU and ram etc (a bit optimistic but nice round number).

24x50 watts = 1.2 kWh per day

365 days x $0.28 per kWh = $102 total saving per year.

Home PC's use piss all electricity excluding discrete graphics, most systems will only average around 100-130 watts ish idling with monitors off. Your Aircon/Heating, Electric water and fridges are by FAR the biggest suspects with high power bills.

So yes you may save $300-500 on electricity over 5 years, but you may save MUCH more money by speeding that maybe $300 on LED Lights, more house insulation, etc over a PC upgrade. In other words PC upgrade to only save Electricity would be the near bottom of my list.

 

[dandragonrage]

Lets say you save 50 watts per hour

Sorry to sound nitpicky, but watts aren't "per hour". A watt is a joule per second, where joules are a measurement of energy. When you calculate kilowatt hours, you actually multiply by an hour, not divide, which brings it back to being energy and is what your utility company charges you for, energy. 1kWh = 3.6 million joules of energy (1J/s * 1h * 1k = 1J/s * 3600s * 1000). When you do conversions, you cancel out units just like you do with numbers.

On a more useful note, I have a Baytech managed PDU that measures current draw. With my Motorola SB6121 cable modem, a Woven LB4 48x1Gbps+4x10Gbps switch with like 10% port utilization, and a C2D E8400 + Intel 3200 chipset board with an IBM M1015 RAID card and 6 HDDs, the Baytech tells me I'm pulling 1 amp of current or 120 watts. So I bet my server is probably around 80-90 watts tops at idle since the cable modem and switch are included in that figure. This is with the server running VMWare ESXi with 2 VMs that are both mostly idle. If I upgraded my server, I doubt I'd save more than 10-20w at idle. Worth it? Not at this time. It would also depend on how long I'd keep the upgraded components, of course.

 

[Battleneter2]

Sorry to sound nitpicky, but watts aren't "per hour". A watt is a joule per second, where joules are a measurement of energy. When you calculate kilowatt hours, you actually multiply by an hour, not divide, which brings it back to being energy and is what your utility company charges you for, energy. 1kWh = 3.6 million joules of energy (1J/s * 1h * 1k = 1J/s * 3600s * 1000). When you do conversions, you cancel out units just like you do with numbers.

.

hrrrrrrr good grief of course you are technically correct, this simplified easy to understand method is still very close, you can use one of dozens of online calculators to be more accurate.

Check my math
http://www.citytrf.net/costs_calculator.htm

type 50watts (as per the stated and we both agree optimistic difference)
type 24 hrs per day
type 28 cents

states $122 a year.

 

[Tsumi]

There have been significant steps in reducing idle power consumption since the Core2Duo days.

Based on some quick googling around:

The i7 920 uses about the same as the Core2Duos at idle (numbers on the internet are all over the place but relatively close).
The i5-2500k uses a good 10-50 watts (numbers are kind of all over the place, some saying a 75 watt difference) less than the i7 920.
3570k idles about the same as the 2500k.
The A8-5600k idles about 10 watts less than the i5-3570k.

Looking at some of the reviews on the internet, the idle power consumption of the AMD APUs are a good 10 watt lower than their Intel counterparts, which is somewhat of a surprise to me. Combined with a more efficient power supply, he has the potential to save up to 60 watts, and at minimum ~30 watts.

OP, keep in mind you would need to buy a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, and possibly PSU. Efficient PSUs are not cheap, but you can keep them through many builds.

If you want to go really cheap and low power, an AMD E-series might be what you're looking for.

 

[westrock2000]

I have an C2D e7300 in my home server, it is run 24-7. Would upgrading the CPU to something more powerful and more efficient pay for itself over the next 4 or 5 years?

I'm going to upgrade my other PC so I could just pop in a Q9450 for an upgrade, but I'm having second thoughts with my $240 a month power bill. (California here so power is expensive). It is 28 cents per kw in the highest tier when I always hit, and will increase by 6% per year.

The question I have for you is, what does the server actually do? Does it just serve up data or does it actually do some type of processing? Are you using it to encode or transcode videos?

If all it is doing is serving data then I would get a processor that is more centered on low power consumption then processing strength. Instead think about putting what you can on an SSD. The operating system, pictures, music. Videos will probably have to stay on platters due to costs. But that will make serving data instantaneous at all times.

 

[Justintoxicated]

It's mostly for serving up data, but as I record video (which probably does use some light encoding) from my security cameras I watch as the CPU usage goes up with the more cameras I add. I think the current CPU is plenty capable of handling additional cameras, even in it's current configuration. I was going to go ahead and toss in the q9450 though, when I upgrade my gaming / work PC, maybe bump camera frame rates back up to 30 just because I'll be able to replace the 1TB HD's with 4TB drives once I get off WHS v1.

10TB+ of SSDs would be nice but not realistic.

 

[Bobnova]

I seriously doubt it'd pay for itself.
Unless the CPU is at full load constantly it's likely idling along at 10w or less, you aren't going to drop that much on a new platform.