yet at some point we tend to throw efficiency at the wall for raw compute.
it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Of course such PSU's are undoubtedly more efficient at doing the conversion. What I mean is that the argument of (power) efficiency doesn't hold when we actually end up using significant more power anyway.
Also, to play devils advocate a bit, that's a 20yo PC: how many times would you have upgraded in 20 years- and what is the carbon cost of all of those upgrades? Some PC manufacturing is pretty bad for the environment. I'd guess once every 3-5 years?
According to "8 Billion Trees":
> the Carbon Footprint of a Computer? A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping, and 15% results from electricity consumption when in use.
So you have to really ask yourself: when is that upfront cost paid for by the inefficiency of energy use (which can be sourced sustainably unlike many parts of PC manufacture)?
20 years? Sure, but it's still very questionable at 10 years.
If only we didn't force people to upgrade their computers by making more and more features non-optional and slowing down the computing experience for the sake of producing features easier for developers.
---
EDIT: I can't stop thinking abut this; I think I've been nerd sniped:
I can't find good data on this though, it seems like a new laptop costs the planet 422.5kgs of CO2e on average.
The actual running cost of the Pentium 4 (mobo, ram, etc) itself is somewhere around 40w for this generation (not including peripherals, discrete GPU or screen) - it does not have speedstep so can't power down. a high end dGPU from the era runs about the the same as the entire PC. so let's double that 40w. -- we ignore peripherals and screens as those could be the same for both new and old PC's.
80w used roughly for 8hrs per day? That comes to about 292kW a year roughly.
In the US energy generation costs 0.3712kgs CO2e per kWh; so something like 109kgs of CO2e for running this PC for a year.
Meaning even if your energy efficiency of a new PC doubled (using 40w instead of 80w) it would take nearly 5 years to offset the carbon cost of a new PC. Not discounting that energy production can be carbon neutral.
That said, currently: The most efficient x86 computer will consume 10W to 25W at idle.
>it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's
Exactly that. I just had to upgrade my 850W psu to 1000W because I'm upgrading my gpu to an rtx 3090.
This is why if you want the absolutely most power efficient NAS/home server and you don't need a lot of cpu/ram people use p4 era hardware. The lowest wattage I saw on a German user group about this was around 6W for an idling system.
I myself am currently running a p4 era 1u server (a Fujitsu primergy rx100 s7) with a 4 core Xeon (2.4ghz or so), 4gb ram, google's edge TPU accelerator(dual edge tpu on pcie) and two 1tb spinning disks in a mirror on as a CCTV server(the tpu does object recognition). This box runs at 20%~90% cpu utilisation all the time and it draws 35W on average at the wall. It can peak at 75W or go down to 25W (it never really idles). This server (excluding the tpu) cost me under $100. And if I want I can replace the disks with bigger ones or add 2 more external drives as there are 2 unused sata ports. Also this server comes with remote management card so I can login anytime using a separate network port and do a power down, set temperature alerts etc, see power usage or access the console/bios.
Good luck finding a similar option with similar features, low power consumption and price with modern hardware.
Yes, I'm a fan of retro hw. I have a commodore 64, a 386sx, a win98 and winxp pcs. Some have only sentimental value, but not all old hw is impractical to use seriously today.
Your 1U server seems to be Ivy Bridge-based, which is about a decade or so newer than the Pentium 4 and much, much more energy efficient - and there's a lot of cheap second hand hardware out there from that era as well.
I had to check, because I wasn't aware there is such a time gap between the two. I seem to remember having P4s in many an office desktop while E3 xeons were present in new servers we installed.
My Xeon cpu is Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1220Lv2 with 17W TDP wow! It was released in 2012 while last of P4s were sold new in 2008 (but first were released in 2002). So yes, you're right there is a decade between these two. In my mind (incorrectly) they were in the same "era" as many of my small business clients had lots of PCs with them at the time of Ivy Bridge Xeons.
> This is why if you want the absolutely most power efficient NAS/home server and you don't need a lot of cpu/ram people use p4 era hardware
Calling bullshit on this one, my p4 nas chewed through power, I upgraded to one of the low power modern Celeron boards which drew around a quarter of the power.
My p4 had a big heatsink and fan, my quad core Celeron is passive cooled with a tiny heatsink in comparison.
it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's.
Sure, but today we're pushing absolutely crazy levels of performance. At the efficiency end of the spectrum, we have something like the Intel N100, which delivers something like 14x the performance of a Pentium 4 on a TDP of 6 watts. An i9-13900F might have twice the peak TDP of a Pentium 4, but it has 150x more throughput.
Big PSUs are mostly driven by GPU power consumption, but it's easy to forget just how insanely performant modern GPUs are. An RTX 4090 has a TGP of 450W, which is admittedly very high, but it delivers 73 TFLOPS at single precision without sparsity. That's the same level of performance as the fastest supercomputer in the world circa 2004. It's kind of goofy that we'll often use all that performance for playing video games, but we can also do important work with that power.
>A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping
I don't really buy this figure. Using standard methodologies, Dell cite a figure of 454kgCO2e for the full tower version of the Optiplex 7090, with 46.7% of those emissions created during use. For the micro form factor version, they state 267kgCO2e, with 30.8% of emissions created during use.
There's absolutely a valid case for extending beyond the usual 3-4 year lifecycle, there's absolutely a valid case for buying a refurbished computer if you don't need high performance, but at some point an old computer is just e-waste and the best fate for it is responsible recycling.
>A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually.
It's patently false; a desktop computer emits barely any emissions at all; maybe a tiny amount of off gassing as it heats up.
The power to run the device may emit CO2 during generation, but that's a separate question and isn't from the device itself.
The gist is still correct, reduce and reuse are very important overall.
What I haven't really worked out (and the math would be involved and difficult) is whether all things considered running old enterprise hardware is better than buying new power-efficient hardware for the same use case. A quick cost-benefit analysis says buying new is 'better' because the energy use of the old pays for it, but that doesn't correctly account for all the cost of manufacture and if you're in a climate that mainly heats the house, you get "free heat" from the use of the older equipment.
Disclaimer: I don't mean to derail the discussion and I don't intend this tangent to go far in this thread:
I really wish more systems- and particularly tech-minded folks would think like you more often, especially when it comes to manufacturing/logistics as well as end-of-life costs.
In nearly all cases of my life I've found no real benefit to buying new over buying used, maybe it takes a little more research and patience finding the right deal but the effort is always worth it. I find the discussions around electric cars and massive ML models especially problematic because of the complete lack of consideration for these factors on display.
> it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU
I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era.
400W and above, yes, that was much less common. I can recall at that point in time, Enermax made their name selling some of the largest PSUs on the mainstream market, and that line tended to be like 450-600W units.
I do sort of agree, it's almost completely about GPUs these days. The spinning rust is now low-power flash. A top Ryzen 9 or Core i9 might top out at 150-250W, but that's not that much higher than Prescott on a bad day, and plenty of people are picking models in the <100 watt power classes. However, the idea of a 400W-by-itself GPU was completely off the field in the early 2000s.
I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era.
...and the vast majority of those PSUs were cheap off-brand units actually rated in unrealistic "Chinese watts", with 150-200 being all they could honestly deliver for anything short of brief spikes.
> The most efficient x86 computer will consume 10W to 25W at idle
Totally untrue. I've got a box sitting in my closet right now that has a full system power of only ~4.5W measured by a kill-a-watt.
Its based around a Supermicro X11SBA-LN4F, a small SATA SSD, and a, 80 PLUS Gold power supply.
My personal laptop based around an AMD 3200U sitting idle right now is pulling ~6W at the wall with the 14" screen on. According to HWMonitor the CPU package is using 0.65-0.9W.
Both of these are x86 computers and they're well under even your 10W idle estimate.
it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Of course such PSU's are undoubtedly more efficient at doing the conversion. What I mean is that the argument of (power) efficiency doesn't hold when we actually end up using significant more power anyway.
Also, to play devils advocate a bit, that's a 20yo PC: how many times would you have upgraded in 20 years- and what is the carbon cost of all of those upgrades? Some PC manufacturing is pretty bad for the environment. I'd guess once every 3-5 years?
According to "8 Billion Trees":
> the Carbon Footprint of a Computer? A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping, and 15% results from electricity consumption when in use.
https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-foot....
So you have to really ask yourself: when is that upfront cost paid for by the inefficiency of energy use (which can be sourced sustainably unlike many parts of PC manufacture)?
20 years? Sure, but it's still very questionable at 10 years.
If only we didn't force people to upgrade their computers by making more and more features non-optional and slowing down the computing experience for the sake of producing features easier for developers.
---
EDIT: I can't stop thinking abut this; I think I've been nerd sniped:
I can't find good data on this though, it seems like a new laptop costs the planet 422.5kgs of CO2e on average.
The actual running cost of the Pentium 4 (mobo, ram, etc) itself is somewhere around 40w for this generation (not including peripherals, discrete GPU or screen) - it does not have speedstep so can't power down. a high end dGPU from the era runs about the the same as the entire PC. so let's double that 40w. -- we ignore peripherals and screens as those could be the same for both new and old PC's.
80w used roughly for 8hrs per day? That comes to about 292kW a year roughly.
In the US energy generation costs 0.3712kgs CO2e per kWh; so something like 109kgs of CO2e for running this PC for a year.
Meaning even if your energy efficiency of a new PC doubled (using 40w instead of 80w) it would take nearly 5 years to offset the carbon cost of a new PC. Not discounting that energy production can be carbon neutral.
That said, currently: The most efficient x86 computer will consume 10W to 25W at idle.