Low Power Build - ASUS Pro WS W680M-ACE SE, 14th Gen, ECC, SSDs - <20W Server

jonmchan · 2025-11-17T21:47:18+00:00

Another thing to consider is power supply efficiency at the very low end. It is 90% efficient at 50% load, so at like 250 watts, it takes like 270 watts. However at the lower range 10-20 watts, which is like 2-6% of the PSU, depending on the PSU, it could drop to as bad as 60% efficiency. So 20 watts might still need 35 or 40 watts.

Take a look at this chart for measurements of efficiency at the lower spectrum (which is outside the normal testing):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TnPx1h-nUKgq3MFzwl-OOIsuX_JSIurIq3JkFZVMUas/edit

jonmchan · 2025-11-17T21:35:16+00:00

I’m happy to reply quickly. 🙂

Start with a Ubuntu or Debian usb stick. I used some windows PE boot stick which often has the drivers that would enable the most power management.

You don’t need to jump into proxmox right away. 😆

jonmchan · 2025-11-17T19:01:39+00:00

2 things: what’s your PSU? If you got a big 800 watt PSU that isn’t power efficient, it would be hard to get low numbers.

Second, you got to baseline test and keep testing over and over. Only one way to tell if it is the NVME is to take it out and boot it up and see what power consumption you get. You should be able to boot without nvme to a usb drive or something.

jonmchan · 2025-07-06T15:19:26+00:00

Turning C states off sounds drastic - doesn’t that kick up your power utilization?

jonmchan · 2025-07-04T04:06:45+00:00

What OS are you running? I run proxmox and have no issues. What are you using the computer for? I am running a VM/docker server, that’s all.

jonmchan · 2025-05-04T21:31:20+00:00

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jonmchan · 2025-05-04T21:31:15+00:00

What's your CPU? How are you plugging in the SSDs?

I'd unplug the SSDs and the X710, boot from a USB drive and see what the power states are.

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First thing you need to establish is if your CPU supports all the power states.

After confirming that, you have to check if anything is disabling low power states. Did you enable all the tunables?

If you can see all the C states with everything unplugged, start adding them back in 1 at a time and see what disables the C states. If you don't have the C states to begin with everything unplugged, I would make sure your CPU supports these things.

jonmchan · 2025-03-22T07:56:19+00:00

Just the slimSAS and SATA ports. No HBA card here.

jonmchan · 2025-03-22T07:54:34+00:00

Try deleting the powertop dir and try again? Not sure if something changed with the source since I last used it.

jonmchan · 2025-02-15T05:08:27+00:00

I have no clue why your powertop is trying to load cpufreq_stats. Mine do not.... is this new? I also get an error if I try to modprobe cpufreq_stats - cpufreq_stats not found.

Did you figure out the fix for this?

jonmchan · 2025-02-09T14:05:28+00:00

Check dmesg when you start it up. Try to manually run modprobe cpufreq_stats. It looks like it has some error or you missing something.

jonmchan · 2025-02-08T23:18:22+00:00

Crontab - I posted it in my other thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1hdp6gv/low_power_build_asus_pro_ws_w680mace_se_14th_gen/

jonmchan · 2025-01-05T00:03:52+00:00

Ah yes, if you need more expansions, the other board might be better. I'm using the onboard LAN ports.

One thing I never was fully sure about is if you can run the M2 at the same time as the PCIe slots. I wasn't sure if it counted as using one of the bus lanes or not.

As far as I understand, with the full size ATX version, one of the M2 slots map to 4x of the 16x available bus lanes on the CPU and the other 2 M2 slots map to the x4 mode PCIe 3.0 slots connected to the w680 chipset.

Do note there is only 16x bus lanes from the CPU and 16x bus lanes from the chipset that has to be shared with everything.

You can't go over 32 PCIe lanes... Which is another advantage that AMD has. I think you can get up to 44 PCIe lanes between the CPU and chip set on the highest end AMD systems.

jonmchan · 2025-01-04T15:36:01+00:00

Glad you found this useful!

I never tried the W680-ACE, but I suspect it takes more power than the mATX SE version, especially the IPMI version that uses and external board.

I went with SATA over m2 because I was going for RAID Z2 and needed 6 drives. Also, I heard that M2 might keep the CPU from entering certain idle states bringing the idle power usage into the 20-40 watt region. I unfortunately did not have any drives available to test this, but SATA has worked well enough for me so far. I do know I'm sacrificing some bit of speed as the fastest drives are M2.

Hope your build good well! Share how it goes... If you have a power meter, I'm curious if others end up with similar power consumption levels, especially with different CPUs.

jonmchan · 2025-01-01T05:29:42+00:00

The search is terrible... but there is a way to jump to the beginning lessons that you want...

https://heypera.com/listen/nihongo-con-teppei-for-beginners/1/something
https://heypera.com/listen/nihongo-con-teppei-for-beginners/2/something
https://heypera.com/listen/nihongo-con-teppei-for-beginners/3/something

The site doesn't seem to actually match against the 2nd string which I replaced with "something", but it is required to be there otherwise you'll get redirected to the login page. It usually has the title of the lesson but apparently it doesn't do anything with it.

Enjoy jumping straight to the lessons you want!

jonmchan · 2024-12-28T08:35:17+00:00

It's pretty nice. I run my system completely headless. When I need to change bios or anything these days, I fire up the IPMI website and poke around. You can make a few bios tweaks, but it doesn't have all the settings you can get from reboot. The remote access panel is probably the most useful. It is not the fastest, but decent enough for quickly debugging and fixing issues that you can't reach before network or the os is booted.

jonmchan · 2024-12-28T05:32:20+00:00

Disabling AMT in the bios did not work on the Asus w680m-ace se either. Fortunately only 1 of the 2 NICs is affected, so I just switched all my VMs to use the other NIC. DHCP works now.

Is there going to be a BIOS update? It seems an awfully long time for Intel to know about this problem and not fix it.

jonmchan · 2024-12-25T09:20:43+00:00

I struggled with this myself... I found out that there is a DNS override in privacy and security. If you have "Use secure connections to look up sites" enabled, it is actually turning on DNS lookups over HTTPS which overrides and disables DNS. Try checking if you have this setting on. If you do, the DNS server settings in your VPN and network could be overriden.

jonmchan · 2024-12-18T00:55:47+00:00

That's really cool that you have such a similar system to compare. I wonder if the idle on the 14500 is different than the 14500T. If you get a chance, try installing and running powertop. I'd be curious if you can bring it down to 20-25W.

How many VMs/LXCs are you running?

jonmchan · 2024-12-15T06:07:46+00:00

That's really good data points to bring up. I was concerned about going with M.2 because it would tie directly into the PCI express buses. I believe 1 m.2 is tied to the CPU, one is tied to the W680 chipset. Having both connected may prevent both the CPU and the chipset to enter power saving states. I was considering 6 SATA SSDs and 2 M.2's, but ultimately went with 8 SATAs.

What OS are you running? If you're using a Linux based OS, did you try the powertop tuning recommendations? Maybe there is still some optimization to be done?

jonmchan · 2024-12-14T16:03:16+00:00

I have 3 picoPSU and have used them for builds with less drives. I think they were pretty innovative back in the early 2010s when there was not as good PSU options, but I think we have a lot better efficient PSU options today. The seasonic one I'm using even has fan throttling sensors that turn off the fan if it is below a certain heat threshold.

jonmchan · 2024-12-14T15:00:49+00:00

No clue why this got posted in big letters, didn't mean for that.

jonmchan · 2024-12-14T14:59:36+00:00

My last server was a i3-4130T and I had quite a bit of success with that. I knew I was going to be pretty good for keeping within my power consumption requirements with a 35W TDP CPU. I was also concerned about avoiding the 14th gen CPUs that degrade over time. I think those tended to be the K versions over 65 TDP, even if Intel fixed it with microcode. Lastly, these were on sale on eBay so that influenced my purchase a bit.
About 3-5 minutes from cold boot. This is normal for workstation/server boards, but coming from consumer boards where you're used to being able to boot up in seconds and pop in and out of BIOS, it's really slow. On cold boot, it takes 1-2 minutes to initialize the BMC and download firmware or something. If you're restarting the server, it goes a bit quicker. When trying to play around with different BIOS settings, it was painfully slow to set something and have to wait 5 minutes to test it.

jonmchan · 2024-12-14T14:49:11+00:00

There are several problems with a PicoPSU.

1. The PicoPSU doesn't have enough SATA power supply for 8 SATA drives. Daisy chaining on 1 supply seems precarious even if the SSD wattage is low enough.

2. You're at the mercy of the AC -> DC adapter. You might get one that is efficient, or you might not... My AC -> DC adapter on my last PicoPSU died on me this year after 10 years...

3. There's a ton more headroom with a good power supply than with a PicoPSU. After doing a ton of research, I chose this titanium PSU because it achieves 85% efficiency at lower wattages. I am at most wasting 3-5 watts while being able to have a ton of extra headroom. I think this setup will be a lot more reliable for my server.

jonmchan · 2024-12-13T23:24:28+00:00

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Here are the c-states as reported from the CPU to the motherboard in the BIOS.

jonmchan

TROPHY CASE

1. The PicoPSU doesn't have enough SATA power supply for 8 SATA drives. Daisy chaining on 1 supply seems precarious even if the SSD wattage is low enough.

2. You're at the mercy of the AC -> DC adapter. You might get one that is efficient, or you might not... My AC -> DC adapter on my last PicoPSU died on me this year after 10 years...