Comment by deng
5 hours ago
Nice post and technically impressive work. I agree we need to understand the build pipeline and be able to do things locally. However, depending on your electricity cost, it might not make sense financially. These old servers are not energy efficient at all (I'm guessing that old Xeon server will easily pull 200W on load), and that model is currently at 0.1$/0.3$ per 1M tokens (with 76 tps and 262k context) in Openrouter (also, these servers are LOUD).
EDIT: I stand corrected, 200W is apparently way too high of an estimate. I used to run a bunch of old Xeon servers and they slurped watts like crazy, but I can't remember which ones exactly those were.
2620v4 is not a power slurping beast. Depending on the server board, it might not be either. Servers are often loud, but it depends.
There's a lot of budget hosting built around chips like these, and they're suprisingly power efficient.
It should be closer to 85W on load. And it's incredibly silent on even a low end cooler. I rarely get above 50° Celcius.
85W for the whole system?! The specifications for the CPU mention a TDP of 85W [1].
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/92986/i...
But for LLM work the CPU is mostly idle, waiting for new data - so the CPU itself might not pull much power at all.
OK, then you're in luck. I had a bunch of old 1U rack servers and even in the next room it was too annoying to run them (they had a bunch of 40mm fans which always ran at full speed, because in a server room, no one can hear you scream).
Could it just be really bad cooling? Looking at 9800X3D, it seems like it's running in a similar range wrt TDP unless you really push the 9800X3D. I'm comparing with desktop cpu's because that's what my workload is. cpu governor is set to performance (no schedutil). No audible change in fan speed during heavy compilation or gaming (very silent humming), and i don't have any fans beside cheap intake, cpu and exhaust fans (1 each) + an excessive amount of dust.
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Only when you remove it from the original server or enable low fan mode (if available). Most 1U/2U cases will happily blow at full speed well over 90db.
You likely need to replace the flow-through server chassis system with an active "normal" cooler to achieve a bit of silence.
85W might be about right. My old server CPU is in the same ballpark and compiling kernels it reached about 90w in power usage. If you want to keep it running: idle is not very low power unless you have one of the "low power" L versions, keep that in mind.
Get a 4U case, many options if you want to combine it with a NAS. Not hard to cool and keep somewhat quiet. If you can store it in a closet or something that helps too.
Well, you can use it for lots of other things as well.
Compared to the cloud you can probably save up to buy a new server every month. And don't underestimate the gains of having something to experiment on and play with.
These servers are loud if you're trying to fit them into a 1U or 2U, which requires high speed fans to generate the necessary static pressure to push air through the case. I run a similar setup in a 4U case with slow 120mm fans and it's fine.