Ryzen 7 Mini-PC makes a power-efficient VM host

22 points by secure 1 year ago | 12 comments
  • jauntywundrkind 1 year ago
    Power efficiency & power management really need to be a focus. I have an old Gigabyte GA-AB350-Gaming-3 I got when I eventually upgraded to a Ryzen 1700 (now 5800), and I: a) cannot get this system to idle below 80W after stripping non-essentials, b) suspend or sleep in any way (the system goes down but I literally have to pull the plug, wait, and replug it in to turn back on). I've tried undervolting, spent hours trying to tune power profiles &making sure maximum PCIe aspm link savings are active; the system is just a brute, and unmanageable. It feels so cursed & has been such a leaden disappointment I've tried to carry for so long; it has truly shattered my faith in AMD in general.

    I'd rather not get a G core, but hearing that this system idles at 10W is incredible. That's what my 8600t HP tiny PC's idle at. That would be stellar.

    I'd love to see more reviews and write ups include power consumption, and also ideally suspend capabilities. Ideally wwol would also be verified working.

    • Rinzler89 1 year ago
      >cannot get this system to idle below 80W

      You can't do anything about it. It's a limitation of your Ryzen's chiplets based design where the ineficient IO die sucks a lot of power leading to poor idle efficiency.

      Intel chips, Ryzen laptop chips and the new G chips like the one in the article don't have such issues because they're a monolithic die.

      • f001 1 year ago
        That doesn’t seem right. The tdp for the 1700 is 65w… no way an io die is consuming most of that. Here’s a comparison of a system with a ryzen 1700 idling vs intel contemporaries which don’t have a separate i/o die: https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/amd-ryzen-7-1700-revie...

        Note that it’s only 7W greater at stock clocks.

        • Rinzler89 1 year ago
          Yes it does.

          You're looking at chips from 2017 when Intel had stinkers and under load, but what I said is true, the IO die has high idle power draw compared to modern monolithic designs, which gets hidden away under load.

          Just Google if you don't believe me, plenty of older desktop Ryzen owners complain about higher idle power draw compared to Intel.

      • inhumantsar 1 year ago
        I kind of doubt the 10W number this article states. Other reviews of this CPU I've seen say that the CPU alone idled around 20W. It may be that ASRock might be doing some aggressive tuning in the BIOS to get the CPU down to 10W, which would explain that doing any work at all causes it to jump to 50W. Could also be a function of this review using Linux while the other reviews are using Windows.

        Either way, I suspect with a few VMs and the host all at idle, power consumption would average 50W for the CPU and 75 to 100W for the whole system.

      • pseudalopex 1 year ago
        2 days ago

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40864364

        • inhumantsar 1 year ago
          Seems strange that they compare this to a raspi in the conclusion rather than one of the fully integrated mini PCs with a soldered down laptop CPU, eg from Minisforum.

          Besides, the barebones unit is over €200, the 8700G is €300, and RAM is €150-250, for a total of €650-750. Meanwhile an 8GB Raspi 5 is less than €90 all-in and a 7 node cluster of these would use about as much power in total as the 8700G does on its own.

          • anotherhue 1 year ago
            I've had a dozen Pis over the years, and every single time I'd prefer an old laptop or server (amd64). It turns out that things like casing, power management, platform expandability, standardisation, sensible storage devices, things not made by broadcom, etc. are all desirable features.

            Pis are toys, fun but frustrating if you want reliability.

          • 1 year ago