Reducing electric power ?

[bhelmes]

A peaceful night for you,

I have a small computer:
Processor : AMD Ryzen 5 - 6300 Six-Core Processor, 65 Watt
4*16 GB Ram DDR4 3200
Motherboard Asus B-450 Plus, Prime
M.2. 128gb,
no graphic,
400 Watt power suply, Gold

The computer needs 130 Watt for mprime calculation,
any idea how to reduce it ? (30h for a DC)

I improved the powersuply, switched off the usb ports and the soundsystem and put away some ssd cards.

Any suggestions ?

[paulunderwood]

Remove 2 sticks of RAM (DIMMS) if the CPU runs with dual channel -- make sure it is running in channel afterwards.

Underclock the CPU and reduce the CPU voltage -- this might require some experimentation to get it stable,

[drkirkby]

Originally Posted by bhelmes

A peaceful night for you,

I have a small computer:
Processor : AMD Ryzen 5 - 6300 Six-Core Processor, 65 Watt
4*16 GB Ram DDR4 3200
Motherboard Asus B-450 Plus, Prime
M.2. 128gb,
no graphic,
400 Watt power suply, Gold

The computer needs 130 Watt for mprime calculation,
any idea how to reduce it ? (30h for a DC)

I improved the powersuply, switched off the usb ports and the soundsystem and put away some ssd cards.

Any suggestions ?

I have heard it said that reducing the number of cores mprime uses, will reduce power without a massive reduction in performance. I have dual CPUs with 26-cores, and someone suggested going down to 24 or 25 cores per CPU would not change the throughput much, but will reduce power. But I have not tested this - I am using all 52 cores.



I don't know where you live, but some countries (eg USA) have both 120 V and 240 V outlets. If you have such a facility, I would expect efficiency to rise with a higher input voltage.



If you can locate the computer somewhere cooler (outside ??), it should reduce the cooling required, so reduce the fan speed and power consumption.



If you are running Windows, upgrade to Linux. The overhead is lower on Linux than Windows. Also turn off any unnecessary services on the computer - anti-virus software will certainly increase power consumption, and you may consider unnecessary.


If a computer is used inside a house, in a room you heat, then the power the computer uses is not really wasted. The power will generate heat, which reduce the need for your main heating system to be on as much. However, heating by electricity is a fairly expensive way to heat here in the UK at least.

[a1call]

My Ryzen 9 system behaves quite differently from any/many quad Intel/AMD systems I have owned throughout the years. In my experience the quads would heat up more, the more load/cores/threads are placed/used. The Ryzen 9 (16 cores/32 hyper-threads) heats up most near the 16 instances of say load from Pari instances with reduced heating towards the two extremes of 1, 32 threads. The fact is the overall progress is virtually the same for 16 instances to 30 instances. The overall progress drops significantly if 32 instances are used.
I use these characteristics to get near maximum progress with 29 threads which keeps the processor at about 55° C with liquid cooling applied.
FTR the free iCue program from Corsair works with my quad Intel system (without a Corsair hardware) and provides excellent information regarding all the different components' temps.

ETA I do not assign instances to threads, so the Windows OS takes care of load assignments per threads.

[pinhodecarlos]

Beat way to reduce power is to shut down the system completely. You will run 0 DC’s.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by pinhodecarlos

Beat way to reduce power is to shut down the system completely.

And unplug it, and remove the RTC battery.

[Xyzzy]

Originally Posted by bhelmes

Any suggestions ?

What flavor of Linux are you running?

Depending on what distro you are running, there are several ways you can control the frequency of the CPU.

Here is an example for RHEL 8: https://access.redhat.com/documentat...nd-performance

By lowering the frequency you will do less work per unit of time, but you will use less energy per unit of work. It will also run much cooler so you can slow down your fans, which will save even more power. Plus, the system's noise will be less of a nuisance.

Also, sometimes the BIOS will have some settings that you can tweak. For example, if this computer is only used for mprime, you can turn off hyper-threading and/or turbo/boost.

Or, you may have a BIOS option for ECO mode.

[kriesel]

Miners commonly turn off a lot in the motherboard BIOS for power efficiency; PCIe, onboard graphics IF, USB, serial or parallel ports if present; anything identifiable that's not being used. Here, each watt trimmed is $1/year saved.

[paulunderwood]

Originally Posted by pinhodecarlos

Beat way to reduce power is to shut down the system completely. You will run 0 DC’s.

And sell the system, and wait and buy 2nm tech.

[bhelmes]

Originally Posted by paulunderwood

Remove 2 sticks of RAM (DIMMS)

= 20 Watt saved.

I prefer Linux Mint - "from freedom comes elegance " and pay 29 cent/kWh in Germany.

Thanks for the "realistic" suggestions.

I can feel it, the next Mersenne prime is approaching.

[PhilF]

You guys must have forgotten about the Throttle= option, which is probably preferable to scrapping the machine:

If you are running on a laptop or in a hot room and you want to slow the
program down to reduce heat, then you can add this line to prime.txt:
	Throttle=n
where n is the percentage of time the program should run.  For example,
Throttle=40 means the program will run 40% and be idle 60% of the time.