Comment on Planning build: Power efficient headless steam machine, and later upgrade for AI tasks
thelittleblackbird@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Some tips here:
- get a platinum rated power supply, if you can afford it go for a titanium. The efficiency in the power supply is half of the efficiency of the rig
- reduce the number of the modules to the minimum
- get a platinum rated power supply ;)
- get big passive coolers, you want to idle the fans
- reduce the number of usb and connectors to the minimum. Their converters are not the most efficient. Try not to connect enything on them.
- NO mechanical parts (including fans or water coolers)
- set schedulers to conservative or power efficient. You don’t want to spike the power just because a task is 2ms longer than expected.
- pick a power efficient CPU/gpu (I think we can discard this one based in your choices)
- use the latest amd adaptative undervoltage technology to ensure to reduce the wattage of the cores
- try to reduce to the bareminimum the number of background tasks /services running.
And that’s all. Sometimes there is a component of trial and error because sometimes the curve performance / power is not entirely linear and you don’t want to hit exponential-non-linear zone.
Good luck and if you can post you build with numbers and some lessons learnt would be great
Good luck
rambos@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Just to add my experience about PSU efficiency: for low power consumption (20-50W) you need PSU rated for minimum power your system needs. So if you are idling at 30W on 700W PSU your efficiency will be super bad because that PSU was made for higher loads and you are using <10%. No matter what PSU class you choose, efficiency will be better if your usage is at 40-70% of PSU max power. This is based on testing multiple desktop ATX PSUs for my small homelab
thelittleblackbird@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Definitely.
I forgot to add that it would be necessary not to overdimension the set up. Any extra power is something that needs to be powered.
But with the chosen cpu and GPU there is not a lot of room here.