Intel iGPU are very good for transcoding.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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I'd like to lower my power usage, if possible
40 cores of Xeon E5-2680
So there are your power whores. TDP 4 x 115 W. But they are old and very poor....
my load average is less than 1
... because nobody ever comes to visit them. Kindly give them the boot.
my knowledge of desktop technology
No worries. You don't need to go that far :) At least don't touch things that have "Gaming" as their firstname. Just look for some (nearly) modern CPU(s) because they are so much more power efficient, and spend some hours at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/
An example from the other end: my current server runs an Intel G4560T (35W). My next server will get 1 or 2 Ryzen 5825U's (15W each).
Ive got a bunch of tiny/mini/micros running everything and the kitchen sink - mostly lenovo right now, but with a couple hp elitedesks and dell micros. I only store VMs locally though, so its all m.2 and general storage on the NAS's.
JF you've got plenty of processing with the iGPU for any compatible codec.
Couldn't tell you on the frigate side, but otherwise youre perfectly fine with that hardware.
What do you do to protect your micro's m.2 disks? I had one that cooked itself, and I haven't put much load on it since I replaced the drive.
@Passerby6497 @curbstickle I have a Minisforum hm90 that tried to cook the nvme (it triggered a smart error before actually frying, thankfully). Since the m2 slot is on the bottom near some vents, I just put the minipc on top of an AC Infinity usb fan (I forget if P12 or P14 - use whatever fits your minipc best) that blows up into the case and over the nvme.
I'll give that a look, thanks!
@Passerby6497 np! Any usb-powered PC fan will do, btw. I also have some Arctic fans that I like even better, but for the minipc I'm using an AC Infinity because that's what I had handy.
Nothing special in the slightest.
The rack has good airflow, I keep the case clean and dust free so the fans dont have to work hard, and the room its in is at the same 72F the rest of my home is. Haven't had any issues so far with any m2's, and I've lost one dell micro (mobo failure) in... 8ish years?
Since you clearly plan on keeping this equipment for the long-term, you may be better served by a newer lower power option that will likely be more performant for less long term cost.
For Jellyfin? You really don't need much. A raspberry pi can run jellyfin if you don't have a transcoded format. My main server is only using a 6th gen i3, and Jellyfin runs perfectly for everything. Never tried going above 1080p though.
I was running an old t410 with dual X5650s for ages. Super power hungy. I've recently moved to an older Dell Optiplex 7020 with an i5 4570, running 32 gb ram (not supported according to dell, but works fine). I'm running like 7 vms on proxmox and I haven't seen any issues.
I just spun up a second 7020 as a proxmox backup server and my whole home lab power consumption went from around 130 watts to around 170 watts.
Not saying getting smaller hardware is the wrong move, but have you tried just reducing power with software on your existing machine?
I mean, if you're happy with it other than on idle power usage, I imagine that one can probably do things like:
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Set a power-down time using
hdparmon the rotational drives, so that disks that you aren't using spin down. On my system, I've coupled this with an autofs mount, which means that the mount point doesn't have to be visible and rotational drives don't get spun up by anything just touching the filesystem and looking in /mnt or whatever. Handy if you have a drive that you do want to have a rarely-touched filesystem on. -
Run
# powertop --auto-tune. -
Run
# powerprofilesctl set power-saverif you're using power-profiles-daemon. -
I dunno if and how Xeon on Linux exposes any ability to force a core to power down, but maybe
# cat 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/onlineand so forth. -
I imagine that it's probably possible to lower the minimum fan speed in whatever hardware control Dell provides.
That being said, I haven't used terribly large hardware, so I don't know how far one can go in bringing minimum power usage down.
The 720 is not going to benefit from power savings, even going to hot-spare for the power supplies. These things are relics from the time when power was cheap.
I couldn't get my r720 down below 160w, which is unacceptable for just running some containers.
I know, having had one, that you can set a power budget... but it's going to clock your CPUs all the way down and still run at least 120W with horrible performance.
Data center servers are a different breed. I got an old one for cheap once and only ran it for a few minutes because it sounded like a jet engine. No way to make that thing efficient.
Intel 10th gen got some love on power vs perf and has a better igpu. I wouldn't drop below 10th.