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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Having a rack alone doesn't consume anything, it's what you put on the rack.

I have a rack setup and most of the time it consumes around 200 watts during the daytime and 100 watts at night, but can spike upto 600 watts if I put a heavy CPU+GPU load on it.

I also put my desktop into suspend at night, something which I think a lot more people with desktops could do. Don't run 24/7 services (e.g. Home Assistant) on your massive desktop with an i7/i9 and a GPU. Run that stuff on a NUC or Pi4 or anything that has low power consumption. Then turn your desktop on only when you're actually using it.

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I get that but the blog discussed a pretty beefy setup. My whole rack still used less power than my gaming PC at load but after doing the math I ultimately saved more money by going serverless for my apps and dumping (non-critical) data into a B2 bucket on paper. In reality I just started shutting things off and only turn them on when I need them.

I'm curious as to what others are doing to save costs if anything. I love the hobby but we're in a recession, lol!

MiniITX boards are low idle power, 17 watts for idle with a Ryzen 5600 compared to a full size boards 50 watts. I would no longer buy anything larger, even for a gaming machine.

Amen on that. The past few rigs I built for myself were all ITX machines. I went through and undervolted my CPU, RAM, and GPU. Once my current gaming rig dies I'm just going to stick with the consoles for gaming until they goes to shit as well.

In an era of abundance we seem to be trying to use more power to support what we already do, rather than rethinking what we do to use less power. It's a shame!

Honestly I could I could easily solar power all of my compute needs (and probably a lot more) from my apartment's roof.

But at last, I'm a renter and my property management isn't going to allow that.

We're literally wasting clean energy because of a bunch of rich turds hogging real estate with shitty rules about what you can't do. When my property changed management the new management even banned EV charging on the property and locked up all the outlets in the parking lot. These kind of management are not welcome in Silicon Valley but somehow they are here.

It jumbles my jimmies hearing about outright rejection of modern tech by industries that would best benefit from said tech.

I'd almost be willing to bet money that your landlord would charge a "renewable energy" fee even if they're just dumping power back to the grid for $$$ even if they had the panels

I really wish more Mini-ITX boards came out that allowed GPUs to be horizontal so it could fit in a 2U case. Unfortunately making it vertical makes it 4U, negating the size advantages of Mini-ITX.

So I actually "repurposed" a riser cable from an old ITX build to slap it into my primary proxmox server to play around with home-rolled VDI. Surprisingly, it worked. If you're feeling bold you could try that route

If you don’t require ECC RAM a common setup these days is a Proxmox cluster set up on refurbished USFF PCs like the Lenovo m720. They sip power at idle.

My personal approach is separate archived storage from working storage and keep archive storage offline until I need it. Keeping hard drives spinning is costly.

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