Relatively low power build report

TrueNAS General
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A while ago I was looking for suggestions on low-power build. Finally, I did it and am ready to report.

So in the end I bought:
CPU: i5-14500
RAM: 32Gbx2 Kingstone KSM48E40BD8KM-32HM
MOBO: PRO WS W680M-ACE SE
Power supply: Be Quiet Pure Power 12 M 550W

HW that migrated from the old build
LSI 9300-8i
3 spinning drives
2 ssds
1 nvme

I would not say that I’m really happy with the power consumption, but anyway, it is more than twice lower than what I had.

Numbers from the wall:
Baremetal TrueNas Scale: ~64W
Baremetal proxmox: ~48W
Virtualized TrueNas Scale under Proxmox: ~71W

P.S. There were no issues to passthrough IGPU and HBA to TrueNas from Proxmox. Plex HW works flawlessly. The IPMI is sh*t in comparison to supermicros but it does its job.

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There’s nothing in the list which shouts “low power”, but you can begin by removing the HBA.

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Thank you for your supportive “low power” :rofl:. Not sure about the HBA as I liked virtualized TrueNas, it was my very first attempt to do it :slight_smile: I guess the first place to start optimizations would be BIOS.

P.S. i renamed the topic, to reflect reality :slight_smile:

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After I removed HBA power consumption dropped to ~50w/h from ~71

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As you’re certainly aware, if Proxmox lives off NVMe, you can passthrough the chipset SATA controller to TrueNAS.

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50 watts is pretty good considering you have 3 HDDs still and I’d consider that a low power system (that is me). My all NVMe system has two fans (1 case, 1 CPU), and it pulls 41 watts and still has a good CPU as well. I run ESXi and TrueNAS in a VM. TrueNAS is just a simple NAS to me, no real apps to speak about.

@etorix gave you great advice to lose the HBA, and that is about it. Your Be Quiet PS is actually quite efficient according to what technical data I’ve read. Lose the three spinning drives and replace with SSD if you can, but I don’t think that will get you much more savings.

How many case fans do you have. What speed are they running at. A properly designed case layout that uses one fan for air flow can be done along with the PS exhaust fan of course. So if you have six fans, find a way to remove some of them without losing cooling. Also to see if it is even worth it, unplug a fan to see what the system watts drop to, it could be only 1 watt, but if it’s 5 watts…

Congrats on building a low power system.

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That’s exactly what i did. MOBO has 2 NVME slots.

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Thanks for the advice, I’m probably ok with what I have at the moment, do not want to spend any more time dancing around fans:) As for the current case layout, there are 4 fans and they run at a pretty low speed, ~380 RPM.