this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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I had an embedded Celeron server, passively cooled with 1 hard drive and 2 SSD which used to idle in the range you mentioned, measured at the outlet... It had a random PSU that came with the mini case it was in.
Realistically, how low do you aim to go? Disks for example add a lot of wattage.
I dont have a specific goal how low i want to come. My Server is an i3-10100 with five HDD an one NVMe. I know that the 20-25W on idle (with disks spun down) are good. But i have also read that there are people which manage to run similiar setups at 15W using really pricey platinum PSU's. But i am really surprised that i didnt find any PSU which is more efficient than my 14 year old and dont cost a whole lot of money. Nevertheless the PSU is 14 years old so it would be nice to have a goold replacement at hand, in case it dies.
I don't think a Platinum vs a Gold ATX rated PSU is going to make such a drastic difference on such low wattages, unless they're made for low workloads. Efficiency is highest around half of the rated maximum load.
So something like a PicoPSU is likely more efficient, and if electricity is very expensive you could even make a return on that investment in 5-10years maybe..I wouldn't worry too much about a 5-10W difference (unless the pc will be off-grid), at the same time a quality PSU will produce less heat and be more silent, will have a fanless mode built in, those are bigger advantages to me.
Like i said, tried the PicoPSU just yesterday with a rumored fairly efficient powerbrick an the PC needed 1-3W more than with the Superflower.
Keep using the Superflower my friend, and keep the Pico + Dell transformer as backup if the first fails. Maybe in a year or two you'll find a great deal on a mobo+cpu combo that's way more efficient and powerful anyway so all investments made now for a few watts will seem moot by then. Just my 2c.
Btw I also have an old Superflower but only 350W, and I recently got a used (barely) Seasonic Focus 550W in case I needed more wattage again (for multiple HDDs spinning up at boot or in case I bought a GPU again), also gold-rated. I was looking to get a Titanium or Platinum one but the price difference was still quite unjustifiable for my use case (idle server/NAS).
Another thing, I never bothered testing with a wattmeter (except the one on the UPS display) because I read that they're a lot less accurate at the low wattages that we are discussing. Also the UPS alone causes some losses as well.
Disks add wattage when running, but when idle use very little power, less than SSD.
Suprisingly hard drives often use less power than SSD because they can spin down, and because they use less power during writes than SSD.
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/ssd-vs-hdd-we-know-about-speed-but-what-about-power-consumption
I wouldn't know, my drives are in RAIDZ and I'm always seeding Linux ISOs, so they never spin down.