Limiting CPU Power consumption

[driver1848]

My dad wants a new NAS for our home because our current WD garbage keeps crashing over and over again. He is planning on buying a Synology-Nas primarily because of its power efficiency. Is there a way to throttle a desktop pc in such a way that it ideally would only or as use 7w (thats the power consumption from our current nas) when it idles? I've looked into underclocking but unfortunately from what i read you can't underclock while keeping the boosting (also why can't i go lower than 2.8ghz in the asus bios?). Because I didn't find any power limit settings that would decrease the limit in my b550e bios I'm also going to guess that this isn't an option. Does anybody here have any idea? 

 

thx

[OhioYJ]

I don't think 7 watts is a realistic target. That's lower than many Intel NUCs. Heck my NAS idles at over 70 watts (I also dont let it run all the time). 30-40 watts is likely more reasonable goal. 

[xc3ll]

Hi,

 

as far as I do understand: You do want to use a desktop at low power state instead of specialized synology hardware as a NAS?

 

If so, there may be options. However, please elaborate on your available hardware and what exactly you want to achieve. Lowering the power of a typical desktop to a few watts is generally rather inefficient, as x86/64 is not the most efficient low power architecture and desktop PSU's have almost no efficiency at the <<20W operating point.

 

So, a low power ARM synology will be always more efficient. But so may be a rasberry pi based home made NAS. And the initial investment for a Raspi is lower than a synology.

 

In my opinion, you should not buy synology for the hardware. You should for the software, though. They are the "apple of NAS" - It is quite easy to use, but very powerful (if you want). But, you can do the same (and better) yourself for a lower price, if you want to put the hours in.

I do like tinkering, but for my NAS I've bought a low-end synology. After setup, it is running with minimal maintanance since 2015. It is one of my favorite pieces of HW, because it is relentlessly doing it's job - At avg. of <5W for a single bay!

[mariushm]

You could make a couple systems with the money you'd pay for the Synology.

 

No matter how much you underclock cpu, you'd not go below 20-30w .  A ryzen 4-6 core cpu  could probably go as low as 5w, but you also have the b550 chipset consuming 3-5w, you have each stick of ram consuming 2-3 watts , you have the cpu cooler consuming 1-2 watts, you have onboard audio (which you could disable) etc etc

 

You could get a cheap Ryzen 2200ge or something similar, put it on a b450 chipset board (because you want to still have ECC support), put a couple plain 2400-2666 Mhz ram sticks with ECC  and boot from a small 64-128 GB ssd.  Install unraid or truenas, or whatever you want and you have a system that will consume maybe 15-20w

 

Another option would be to get something like this :

ASRock J3455-ITX Intel Quad-Core Processor J3455 (up to 2.3GHz) Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU Combo - Newegg.com

Add a couple DDR3 / DDR3L so-dimm sticks (asrock says it supports up to 16 GB of memory, but intel specs for J3455 says max 8 GB) and a power supply and you're good to go.

You have 2 native sata 6 gbps ports and 2 sata ports created by an Asmedia controller.

Such system should consume under 10-15w at idle.

 

There's a newer version with DDR4 (but still limited to maximum 8 GB due to Intel's stupidity): ASRock J5040-ITX Intel Quad-Core Pentium Silver Processor J5040 (up to 3.2 GHz) Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU Combo - Newegg.com

The J5040 is about half as powerful as a Ryzen 2200ge / Ryzen 2200g cpu.