Power saving ideas reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swampyjim · 2023-12-30 13:51 Hi all, I have a pretty overpowered pc running various VMs and docker containers mainly gaming VM, TrueNAS and Plex. Looking at my power usage I’m looking about £40 per month just for the PC, I’m thinking off possibly putting my storage onto a separate enclose and using a PI for CIFS and Plex, only having direct play content and then just powering up the PC for gaming. Any ideas on this? Possibly could do WOL. I do have a 3080ti and 1080ti passed through to VMs but these are only under heavy load when gaming idle power shouldn’t be too drastic ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Agile_Ad_2073 · 2023-12-30 14:36 How much in idle are you at the moment? How many hard drives? What processor? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swampyjim · 2023-12-30 16:00 At the moment it’s sat at 180w I think depending on the state of the GPU idles it drops to around 100w at minimum. 4 x 14tb HDD 1 x 8tb HDD 1 x 2tb HDD Ryzen 5700g E-atx board with few nvme drives also. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Fluffer_Wuffer · 2023-12-30 17:23 I did a few things when the UK prices start going up.. one thing to keep in mind, it's easy to spend more than you'll save. If your not using those VMs constantly, then you could write a Cronjob to fire them up when you need them, say 4pm, then shut them down at 1am.. you may find that's enough to power off the GPUs.. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- swampyjim · 2023-12-30 17:39 That’s not a bad idea, the windows gaming VM and a Ubuntu server VM with docker both have the GPU passed through and I thought idle would be less managed by the os then just powered on without a host. The only other big VM is the TrueNAS if I could move my NAS and media out to a pi then I would be happy enough to power the pc up manually for gaming, it’s been a busy month with kids been off so the usage is prob a little high with the pc getting more use ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cocogoat_Milk · 2023-12-30 21:48 If you are turning VMs off (ones that use GPUs) when not in use, you can try using ACPI calls to turn them off, saving some power. Note that this may not work with all GPUs or drivers and some people have experienced system hangs or kernel panics when doing this (typically due to the drivers). It’s been a while since I’ve done this or gaming in VMs, but I had success with a GTX 1060 and an RX 580 when I last used this approach. Also be careful not to try turning off the GPU until the VM I’d fully down and similarly, ensure you turn the card back on before starting the VM (less of an issue in terms of crashes, but VM will likely fail to start). I also used the on/off state as a sort of lock to “share” the GPU between different VMs that did not run concurrently. If on, consider the GPU locked and do not attempt to start another VM that depends on it. This can be useful if you have multiple gaming VMs or other GPU hungry software that you want to isolate.