Hi everyone,
for 20 years now i run servers in my own home to host my stuff. Because i am living in europe with quite high price tags for electricity i am always searching for ways to make my servers more power efficient.
But finding a power efficient ATX PSU with performes well in ranges around 20-25W, where my server idles most of the time, is quite challenging.
Dont get me wrong, the Server has an very efficient PSU, a Super-Flower SF450P14XE Golden Green Pro but thats now 14 years old (but serves me well). I bought it for 55€ back in the days.
Over the years i tried various budget insider tips regarding efficent PSU’s (for example the Cooler Master MWE400) which all were also good but not better than the 14 year old Super Flower, which i think is kind of sad.
Just yesterday i tried a 160W PicoPSU combined with a 150W DELL DA-1 powerbrick (which should also be quite efficient), but it was the same. My Server used 1-3W more than with the Super-Flower.
Long story short: are there any efficient PSU out there that you can recommend for loads around 20-25W, that dont have a price tag like a kidney on the blackmarket?
I also have seen people trying to mod old Dell Server PSU with are 750W with platinum rating an are cheap on ebay, but thats another story.
I dont have a specific goal how low i want to come. My Server is an i3-10100 with five HDD an one NVMe. I know that the 20-25W on idle (with disks spun down) are good. But i have also read that there are people which manage to run similiar setups at 15W using really pricey platinum PSU’s. But i am really surprised that i didnt find any PSU which is more efficient than my 14 year old and dont cost a whole lot of money. Nevertheless the PSU is 14 years old so it would be nice to have a goold replacement at hand, in case it dies.
I don’t think a Platinum vs a Gold ATX rated PSU is going to make such a drastic difference on such low wattages, unless they’re made for low workloads. Efficiency is highest around half of the rated maximum load.
So something like a PicoPSU is likely more efficient, and if electricity is very expensive you could even make a return on that investment in 5-10years maybe…I wouldn’t worry too much about a 5-10W difference (unless the pc will be off-grid), at the same time a quality PSU will produce less heat and be more silent, will have a fanless mode built in, those are bigger advantages to me.
Like i said, tried the PicoPSU just yesterday with a rumored fairly efficient powerbrick an the PC needed 1-3W more than with the Superflower.
Keep using the Superflower my friend, and keep the Pico + Dell transformer as backup if the first fails. Maybe in a year or two you’ll find a great deal on a mobo+cpu combo that’s way more efficient and powerful anyway so all investments made now for a few watts will seem moot by then. Just my 2c.
Btw I also have an old Superflower but only 350W, and I recently got a used (barely) Seasonic Focus 550W in case I needed more wattage again (for multiple HDDs spinning up at boot or in case I bought a GPU again), also gold-rated. I was looking to get a Titanium or Platinum one but the price difference was still quite unjustifiable for my use case (idle server/NAS).
Another thing, I never bothered testing with a wattmeter (except the one on the UPS display) because I read that they’re a lot less accurate at the low wattages that we are discussing. Also the UPS alone causes some losses as well.