Intel Coffee Lake Xeons and boards - Rec's / experiences?

[Karl Denninger]

Anyone used them yet?

E21xx/21xxG series?  Board with a built-in IPKVM is preferred (of those
there are only a few) and I'm particularly interested in idle power
consumption and such.

I currently run a few X5650s (hex-core and HT) and while they run well
they're power-hungry monsters, and not just the chip.  The various
frontside and interface chips on the Supermicro boards pull a crap-ton
of power too and generate their fair share of heat; best I've been able
to manage with power management (powerd), a HBA (LSI SAS-2116) and a
mixture of SSDs and spinning rust in the cabinet (with those not mounted
spun down) is right around 2A @ 120V, so figure ~250 watts -- and that's
IDLING.

Put load on it and it really ramps (I've seen well into the 300s), but
that's ok if I'm asking it to work.

The reason this looks interesting is that I have a Coffee Lake
**desktop** processor and Mobo for it (not suitable for a server as no
ECC support, of course) that idles WITH a Nvidia PCIe graphics card in
the box (GTX-1060, 6Gb) running 4 LED monitors connected to it at ~50-60
watts!  Of course if I start up a video render its power consumption
goes through the roof, but again, when NOT working hard it sips power --
and that's with a PCI/e video card in there.

Now it's probably true that ~6-7 watts, more or less, is per-spinning
rust drive in the box that is not spun down (those consume almost
nothing) and there's 5 of those in the server box while the desktop has
just one, and that one is spun down most of the time.  But both have
SSDs; the desktop's is nVME, the server box is 2.5" SATA, but a
half-dozen of them.  Nonetheless they don't pull much power compared
against spinning disks, even when active.

While the cost in dollars the power isn't huge in the summer I pay twice
since I have to run the A/C more to pull the heat out of the room,
obviously, and in the winter resistance heating, while "free", is
expensive on a comparative basis.

What I'm curious about is if anyone has experience with these under
FreeBSD yet and what sort of power consumption you're seeing with a
"mostly idle" system, whether they're stable -- and what combination of
CPU/Board/RAM you're using..... or should I stick with the Kaby Lake
E3-v6 CPUs and boards for them?

Thanks!

-- 
Karl Denninger
karl at denninger.net <mailto:karl at denninger.net>
/The Market Ticker/
/[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]/
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