I love this community, I used to rant about efficiency all the the time on reddits self hosting community and everyone thought I was insane. If the damn thing is going to run 24/7 for 5+ years then put a little thought into its power usage!
I personally love old Dell optiplex micros on eBay. Cheap, plentiful laptop hardware in a cute little box which allows modest upgrades. My primary server in a full sized case is just a laptop CPU, Ryzen 5600g. It brings me joy that my network has four servers and still is under 75w idle for everything including networking gear.
lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
This should be a well know, but often misunderstood thing. Lots of reddit selfhosting threds urge people to buy a new mini-pc for its “low power draw” when usually its the same or 1-2watts less then a laptop from 2012. However performace to watt is much higher, so if you need massive preformance new is much better, if your system is idling most of the time anyway, theres been little improvement in the absolute minimums
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
You just can’t buy too old or the inverse happens and the performance per watt drops. I think you’re right that 2012 is about the cutoff. Maybe 2007 for certain items, like my 2007 iMac. But if you’re getting back to the Pentium 4 era you’ve gone too far and need to turn back around.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 weeks ago
Oh god, P4? Yea, those were just 100 watt light bulbs.
Cort@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
No, the graphics from Intel back in 07-10 were crap. 2012-2013 would be my bare minimum, usb3 if only for loading a new OS.
Damage@feddit.it 4 weeks ago
For my first server, after moving on from 2 raspberrys to a Proxmox host, I went with an embedded Asrock MB, passively cooled so you know it wasn’t drawing much power, still had multiple SATA ports and with the right sticks I could get 32GB RAM in.
Seems better to me than a minipc where you have no expandability, especially no chance for RAID.