[vbezhenar]

I don't like:

* Pentium G5420 has 54W TDP. That's a lot. It'll be noisy under load. I'd prefer something like Celeron G4932E with 27W. I don't need performance, I need quiet operation and ECC support.

* iLO enablement kit is $100 and need physical delivery. No more $5 ebay key. That's a shame for home consumer.

Also I was not able to find a price. Hoping for the best. Buying Gen8 for $300 with cheap iLO key was a great purchase.

CPU seems to be not soldered, so may be it'll be possible to downgrade.

[prima-facie]

That CPU is a great choice.

The specs on paper won't tell you the whole story. I've got the Pentium G5400 and even though it's rated at 58W TDP its actual power consumption and heat output is on the low end.

I don't have my notebook with me but I ran a small at home experiment with a kill-a-watt sort of device while monitoring temps. Found consumption to be around 21W in idle, 26W for light loads, between 35W and 42W when doing heavy loads like compiling, transcoding, etc.

Temps are 28C in idle, up to 42-ish under load.

These CPUs lack Turbo Boost which is responsible for high temps in many instances.

[znpy]

Thanks, that was a very informative comment.

[francis-io]

I went down the rabbit hole of low TDP Xeon drives when I was last building a home FreeNAS box. It makes sense in theory to get a CPU that doesn't get as hot, so will need less cooling, but I think TDP is more about the total / max power used, not average. I would suggest a CPU with more cores it can keep sleeping for most of operation, but available when you need it.

[snuxoll]

The Xeon E3-1270's in my R210 II's are 80W TDP, the Xeon E5-2450L's I have loaded in my R320 and R420 are 70W - guess which makes more noise? The 2450L's, of course!

TDP is a guideline for cooling, it says nothing about noise, or even power draw. The former is a factor of the cooling system you have paired, the latter can be completely arbitrary as long as the chip can average itself out to the rated heat dissipation (which is what the TDP measures).

If you want a quiet home server, get a tower, my ThinkServer TD340 was hella quiet even with two Sandy Bridge-EN chips installed. Beyond that it doesn't really matter, hell, swap out the CPU cooler and case fans with Noctua ones to go the extra mile.

[markedathome]

> Also I was not able to find a price. Hoping for the best. Buying Gen8 for $300 with cheap iLO key was a great purchase

UK Pricing direct from HPE - expect sticker shock

https://www.hpe.com/uk/en/product-catalog/servers/proliant-s...

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus E-2224 S100i 4LFF-NHP 180W External PS Server P16006-421 £ 839 * inc VAT

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus E-2224 S100i 4LFF-NHP 1TB 180W External PS Server P18584-421 £ 922 * inc VAT

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus G5420 8GB-U S100i 4LFF-NHP 180W External PS Server P16005-421 £ 629 * inc VAT

HPE iLO Advanced 1-server License with 1yr Support on iLO Licensed Features 512485-B21 £ 394 * inc VAT

HPE iLO Advanced Flexible Quantity License with 1yr Support on iLO Licensed Features 512486-B21 £ 394 * inc VAT

HPE iLO Advanced Flexible Quantity License with 3yr Support on iLO Licensed Features BD506A £ 444 * inc VAT

HPE 16GB (1x16GB) Dual Rank x8 DDR4-2666 CAS-19-19-19 Unbuffered Standard Memory Kit 879507-B21 £ 236 * inc VAT

HPE 8GB (1x8GB) Single Rank x8 DDR4-2666 CAS-19-19-19 Unbuffered Standard Memory Kit 879505-B21 £ 174 * inc VAT

HPE Trusted Platform Module 2.0 Gen10 Option 864279-B21 £ 66 * inc VAT

HPE MicroServer Gen10 SFF NHP SATA Converter Kit 870213-B21 £ 11 * inc VAT

HPE 1TB SATA 6G Entry 7.2K LFF (3.5in) RW 1yr Wty HDD 843266-B21 £ 96 * inc VAT

HPE 4TB SATA 6G Midline 7.2K LFF (3.5in) RW 1yr Wty HDD 801888-B21 £ 419 * inc VAT

HPE Mobile USB DVD-RW Optical Drive 701498-B21 £ 119 * inc VAT

[Patrick-STH]

Street pricing in the US from lower margin HPE resellers for the performance E-2224 diskless model (P16006) has been discounted to $578-$660 depending on reseller/ day.

Still a lot more than some of the previous versions.

[markedathome]

the UK price includes VAT@20% so you are looking for around £524 (629), £699 (839), and £770 (922) respectively, which doesn't look terribly far off the US pricing given the standard UK markup.

The normal UK server resellers and disties (including the one I bought my gen8 microserver from) don't seem to have them listed yet.

[jleahy]

Well the G4932E runs at exactly half the clock rate, so it's not surprising that it uses half the power. Just disable one of the two cores and now you have a 3.8GHz single core processor with a TDP of 27W:

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

Alternatively you could reduce the clock speed to 1.9GHz for both cores:

cpufreq-set -f 1900 (need to load the userspace governor also)

And of course you can schedule this to happen at a particular time of day.

[blattimwind]

TDP is largely irrelevant. You are interested in either energy per task or power for availability, neither of which you can figure out from a datasheet. The latter is essentially the same as idle power, but depends on what services you run.

[jleahy]

Sounds like vbezhenar cares about being woken up at night by a noisy server, in that case maximum power draw regardless of load is what matters.

[blattimwind]

Why do you expect high load at night?

[MrGilbert]

Backups come to mind. For me, I schedule them at night.

[thedance]

Have a look at the crontabs that ship with Ubuntu.

[DCKing]

TDP is such a meaningless stat to criticize. People still caring about TDP is a huge pet peeve of mine. The TDP is a nearly entirely fictional number your modern CPU will never operate at.

Especially in a home server, the CPU will be maxed out 0.001% of its life, if that. The only stat that matters is idle power, which it will be at for the majority of its life.

[bayindirh]

I'm happy to show you quite a few servers which run almost at their TDP for 7/24/365.

Yes, it's not very applicable to home scenarios but spike loads create a lot of noise at home when a CPU has high TDP.

[DCKing]

Surely it's clear we're talking about home and small business servers?

[bayindirh]

For sure but what about home servers which do transcoding for example?

They will run at their TDP for some time and, create considerable noise and heat.

[brians]

Great. Who reports idle power on a datasheet?

[saagarjha]

> I don't need performance, I need quiet operation and ECC support.

I'm curious: are you going to put this under your desk?

[vbezhenar]

Actually I'm going to put it into my closet along with the rest of "home equipment" (UPS, GPON modem, switch, landline phone). Noise will disturb me at night, as I'm sleeping not far enough from there. I managed to configure Gen 8 to be quiet enough with some weird tricks (it was not by default). Basically I need for fan noise to be on par with HDD noise.

[kstenerud]

I hated the noise that my N40L microserver made (even though it was super quiet already). Now I have a NUC, and plugged a USB powered fan [1] into it to blow air over the chassis (the small fans in the NUC are noisy as hell when it's under even moderate load). Now it's so quiet I can't hear it. For storage I got a USB3 based 5-drive chassis and hooked up my 4 drives running mirrored ZFS. USB3's 5Gbps is more than plenty for my usage.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/EasyAcc-Rechargeable-Personal-Regulat...

I actually got the earlier version that didn't have a battery. Just adjust the speed knob to the sweet spot of quiet + cooling factor.

[devonkim]

Wish there was a non-insane costing 12 bay Thunderbolt array but because the market mostly consists of video professionals the math in cost and noise works out better to build a more traditional server anyway. 8+ drives won't be quiet. I've got my 8 drive array right behind me and the drives are the issue really.

[pletnes]

Downclock/throttle/disable hyperthreads/etc in BIOS?

[prima-facie]

Disable Turbo https://www.extremetech.com/computing/304884-disabling-intel...

[znpy]

> No more $5 ebay key. That's a shame for home consumer.

I guess that's why