Power needs...
This weekend I was moping around a bit, so needed some project to occupy myself. DIY is always a good way out I find. Numerous trips to B&Q/Homebase/Wickes later I had bought myself a clamp meter. It wasn't the only thing I bought, but was the most fun.
You see I have a server which I leave on 24/7. I have never known how much power it draws. It has a 2.4 GHz Celeron with 9 hard drives in it. I have built it into a big box to make it quiet (and hopefully cool), but it still sits there churning out heat. The room it is in noticably warms when you are watching things off it. I have a Athlon M I'm intending to replace it with, but at present I don't know how much better that will make things.
The new Athlon 64s are much better than before - read this review to see how much, but I have an older generation Athlon - albeit a low power one. Now most of the things the server spends its time doing is sharing some files, running VNC and playing video as a sort of homebrew media centre. Different programs use more or less CPU, but not much needs a whole 1800MHz. The Athlon M is multiplier unlocked, so I can set it all the way down to 600MHz. Unfortunately the motherboard doesn't properly recognise its clock shifting abilities, so I have to set it to the desired frequencies. I am guessing about 1 Ghz should do the trick.
Now for my clamp meter. My current box draws .8 amps when on and mostly asleep - running background tasks, so quick bit of math: about 190 watts. The TV draws about .4, so 90Ws. The Hifi, cable box, switch router etc that lives with it draws about .25 so 60 W. Now I know that it actually all sits closer to 500W when you have been watching for a while, any harddrives have spun up etc. My plan over the next couple of weeks is to measure the power at various points in the day. I am measuring at house source, so obviously kettles, irons, and lights have to be accounted for.
Already I am getting a good picture of what is efficient and what isn't. The server uses up to 300W if all the drives are spinning. The hardest thing is working out what the machine is doing. So I am going to write a tool to work it out. I did a bit of googling and could find nothing that actually reported back the power state of drives. If anyone knows of any please shout. There are also a bunch of APIs to set power state, which I'd like to play with. I suspect they will not be that useful as most of the more advanced features are not well covered by the standard functions - leading to all those wierd little apps that start on almost every laptop out there - methinks they should improve this bit.
I now know my server costs me around 500 quid a year in leccy - more in fact than my cable that it sort of replaced, so it seems to me to be a worthwhile thing to cheapen!
When I have the results of the Athlon M I'll post a follow up to say how I got on.
You see I have a server which I leave on 24/7. I have never known how much power it draws. It has a 2.4 GHz Celeron with 9 hard drives in it. I have built it into a big box to make it quiet (and hopefully cool), but it still sits there churning out heat. The room it is in noticably warms when you are watching things off it. I have a Athlon M I'm intending to replace it with, but at present I don't know how much better that will make things.
The new Athlon 64s are much better than before - read this review to see how much, but I have an older generation Athlon - albeit a low power one. Now most of the things the server spends its time doing is sharing some files, running VNC and playing video as a sort of homebrew media centre. Different programs use more or less CPU, but not much needs a whole 1800MHz. The Athlon M is multiplier unlocked, so I can set it all the way down to 600MHz. Unfortunately the motherboard doesn't properly recognise its clock shifting abilities, so I have to set it to the desired frequencies. I am guessing about 1 Ghz should do the trick.
Now for my clamp meter. My current box draws .8 amps when on and mostly asleep - running background tasks, so quick bit of math: about 190 watts. The TV draws about .4, so 90Ws. The Hifi, cable box, switch router etc that lives with it draws about .25 so 60 W. Now I know that it actually all sits closer to 500W when you have been watching for a while, any harddrives have spun up etc. My plan over the next couple of weeks is to measure the power at various points in the day. I am measuring at house source, so obviously kettles, irons, and lights have to be accounted for.
Already I am getting a good picture of what is efficient and what isn't. The server uses up to 300W if all the drives are spinning. The hardest thing is working out what the machine is doing. So I am going to write a tool to work it out. I did a bit of googling and could find nothing that actually reported back the power state of drives. If anyone knows of any please shout. There are also a bunch of APIs to set power state, which I'd like to play with. I suspect they will not be that useful as most of the more advanced features are not well covered by the standard functions - leading to all those wierd little apps that start on almost every laptop out there - methinks they should improve this bit.
I now know my server costs me around 500 quid a year in leccy - more in fact than my cable that it sort of replaced, so it seems to me to be a worthwhile thing to cheapen!
When I have the results of the Athlon M I'll post a follow up to say how I got on.
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