Most power efficient Ryzen 3000 capable motherboard.

[Totsuzen]

First of all, I have this account since 2016 and I am now making my first post, so hi everyone! 

 

I am planning on building a 3rd gen Ryzen system that is going to be powered on 24/7. Essentially a multi-purpose home server performing non-critical tasks.

I'm aware that none of the AM4 motherboards will idle as efficiently as the intel offerings from the same manufacturer and price range. Having said that, what budget AM4 motherboard (~80 USD) do you guys recommend having power efficiency in mind (especially idle/base clock wattage)?

 

I was looking at the cheapest B450 offering from ASUS (Prime B450) and it looks pretty solid. I want to pair it with a Ryzen 3 3200G and 16GB of RAM (2x8). Looking for total DC power draw measures on all rails if possible so the power supply efficiency is not a variable to account for.

Are any reviewers measuring those values? (you would have to measure the amperage between the power supply and motherboard). I've been looking for any tech blogger / reviewer that compares different motherboard models and makers while using he same CPU but found nothing relevant (maybe I just suck at googling).

 

I'm aiming for ~22W idle from the wall@ 230V AC, I'll be using an older corsair 80+ "White" PSU which has a 75% efficiency on low loads according to its efficiency curve so that would be around 16.5W total DC wattage on idle from all rails.

(Just for the system itself, no peripherals, no storage except for solid state OS drive.)

I'll be running a headless linux-based distro on it. That means no desktop environment, just the CLI.

 

Suggestions/Opinions are welcome. Thanks in advance  

[pbx2]

Pretty much all motherboards with the same chipset use about the same amount of power, If you want the one that uses the least you should look for the one with the least features. (no lighting, no wifi, no 2.5/10gbit ports etc)

Asrock B450m Pro 4 is generally one of the better cheap boards, MSI tomahawk if you want less shitty fan control

[nick name]

6 minutes ago, pbx2 said:

Pretty much all motherboards with the same chipset use about the same amount of power, If you want the one that uses the least you should look for the one with the least features. (no lighting, no wifi, no 2.5/10gbit ports etc)

Asrock B450m Pro 4 is generally one of the better cheap boards, MSI tomahawk if you want less shitty fan control

I think he is talking about the efficiency of the VRMs.  

[Guest]

23 minutes ago, Totsuzen said:

First of all, I have this account since 2016 and I am now making my first post, so hi everyone! 

 

I am planning on building a 3rd gen Ryzen system that is going to be powered on 24/7. Essentially a multi-purpose home server performing non-critical tasks.

I'm aware that none of the AM4 motherboards will idle as efficiently as the intel offerings from the same manufacturer and price range. Having said that, what budget AM4 motherboard (~80 USD) do you guys recommend having power efficiency in mind (especially idle/base clock wattage)?

 

I was looking at the cheapest B450 offering from ASUS (Prime B450) and it looks pretty solid. I want to pair it with a Ryzen 3 3200G and 16GB of RAM (2x8). Looking for total DC power draw measures on all rails if possible so the power supply efficiency is not a variable to account for.

Are any reviewers measuring those values? (you would have to measure the amperage between the power supply and motherboard). I've been looking for any tech blogger / reviewer that compares different motherboard models and makers while using he same CPU but found nothing relevant (maybe I just suck at googling).

 

I'm aiming for ~22W idle from the wall@ 230V AC, I'll be using an older corsair 80+ "White" PSU which has a 75% efficiency on low loads according to its efficiency curve so that would be around 16.5W total DC wattage on idle from all rails.

(Just for the system itself, no peripherals, no storage except for solid state OS drive.)

I'll be running a headless linux-based distro on it. That means no desktop environment, just the CLI.

 

Suggestions/Opinions are welcome. Thanks in advance  

The B450 chipset is 5w. 

1 stick 8GB DDR4 module at 1.2v 2133mhhz is about 3w. x2 6w

The 3200G will be about 25-30w idle. 50w'ish at load.

 

Not counting other peripherals. 

 

You'll be close to your goal I think.

 

[Totsuzen]

57 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

The B450 chipset is 5w. 

1 stick 8GB DDR4 module at 1.2v 2133mhhz is about 3w. x2 6w

The 3200G will be about 25-30w idle. 50w'ish at load.

 

Not counting other peripherals. 

 

You'll be close to your goal I think.

 

Thanks... It will always vary from board to board even while respecting AMDs and DDR4 voltage specs etc. that's why I asked if you guys knew of any specific boards that were "better optimized" for lower idle power consumption, not so much in respect to the hardware itself but "out of the box" bios settings (how it controls CPU idle states and power management)... But yeah I think 30W Idle worst case scenario is a safe realistic bet assuming a proper 80+ gold low wattage psu (for higher efficiency at light loads).

 

So I pretty much just need to prioritize non feature-rich boards but that still have relatively good quality VRMs I assume then, right? The rest is bios controllable...

Would undervolting have a noticeable impact on the power consumption and is it worth at all since I don't plan on overclocking? In fact I want it to run it as quiet as possible while retaining stock performance and boost clocks.

[Totsuzen]

1 hour ago, nick name said:

I think he is talking about the efficiency of the VRMs.  

I'm considering things as a whole (Stock manufacturer bios configs, as well as how the motherboard itself is built) but since you're touching on that, does it make a noticeable difference having higher quality/more phases and VRMs?

 

I ask this because take the X570 chipset for example. This chipset is clearly focused on squeezing as much performance from the CPUs so pretty much every board that carries this chipset SHOULD have reasonable VRMs and a good power delivery system to ensure more stability on higher clocks.... yet its power consumption is so high on idle compared to X470. Is this just because of pcie 4.0 or just poor optimization on the silicon/hardware level?

 

If you or someone else could share something more in-depth on how VRM quality affects idle power usage I'd appreciate it!

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Totsuzen said:

Thanks... It will always vary from board to board even while respecting AMDs and DDR4 voltage specs etc. that's why I asked if you guys knew of any specific boards that were "better optimized" for lower idle power consumption, not so much in respect to the hardware itself but "out of the box" bios settings (how it controls CPU idle states and power management)... But yeah I think 30W Idle worst case scenario is a safe realistic bet assuming a proper 80+ gold low wattage psu (for higher efficiency at light loads).

 

So I pretty much just need to prioritize non feature-rich boards but that still have relatively good quality VRMs I assume then, right? The rest is bios controllable...

Would undervolting have a noticeable impact on the power consumption and is it worth at all since I don't plan on overclocking? In fact I want it to run it as quiet as possible while retaining stock performance and boost clocks.

The more you plug into the board, the more power it'll consume.

Under-volting will not have much impact on idle loads while some cpu cores/threads will be gated during idle anyways. would be of all maybe a couple watt at best.