I got my hands on the following server for a day, so I decided to measure its power consumption because the new Intel Xeon Processor E3 series look very promising. They support ECC memory and at the same time have “Intelligent, Adaptive Performance”, which in plain text means that they can power themselves down and thus save energy. Furthermore, their price and the price of the motherboards are fair as these CPUs seem to be meant to be used mainly in Desktop workstations. Having ECC support lets us use them in servers too. The only caveat is that those Sandy Bridge based Xeon CPUs support only single CPU configuration — so don’t try to find a dual-CPU motherboard.

Here is the server configuration:

• Case: Supermicro CSE-512L-260, 260W single PSU
• Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCM-F
• CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 @ 3.20GHz (4 cores, 8 threads)
• RAM: 16 GB DDR3-1333 ECC
• HDD: 1x 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA

BIOS settings are set up for optimal power savings without compromising performance. FAN control is enabled too. Room temperature is 21 degrees Celsius.

Power usage with different server utilization scenarios follows:

• 7W — power off; idle consumation, the IPMI is alive
• 39W — power on; Linux OS is idle
  • IPMI sensor readings: cooling FAN works with 1755 RPM — relatively quiet; CPU temperature is Low
• 45W to 60W — power on; moderate Linux OS usage
  • load average: 1.53; installing 200 new packets via “apt-get”
  • IPMI sensor readings: cooling FAN works with 1755 RPM — relatively quiet; CPU temperature is Low
• 130W — power on; full stress by “stress –cpu 16 –io 8 –vm 8 –vm-bytes 1780M –hdd 4″
  • load average: 36.00; I/O load: 100%, mostly write; CPUs busy @ 100%, 70% user, 30% system, all CPU cores are utilized
  • RAM: about 95% used, 30% cached; network load: 22 Mbit/s constant SSH transfer
  • IPMI sensor readings: cooling FAN works with 3100 RPM — much noisy; CPU temperature is Medium