Reducing the Power Usage on Unraid servers With Nvidia GPUs

hi guys and welcome to this another two minute tips video in this video we're going to be looking at how to save power on your server if you have an nvidia gpu installed so if that sounds interesting then let's get started okay guys so let's see if we can save some power on our unread server that's using an nvidia gpu as this is a two minute tips video i'm going to try and keep it to as near two minutes as i possibly can but hey it may well go over a little i don't know never mind okay so here we are on my main server and at the moment all of these array disks are all spun down and there's a few z pools that are active here a couple of nvmes an ssd pool and a regular hard drive so let's see how much power this server is using at the moment and we can see here at the moment it's using about 150 watts so let's go back to the unraid web gui and let's have a look at the gpus i've got installed on this server so there's two gpus the first one a quadro p2000 and an rtx 3080 and like what we just saw we can see the server is using 150 watts now there's not very much going on on the server at the moment the docker service is stopped there's no vms running and only a couple of hard drives spun up so i think 150 watts is quite a lot for what's going on so now let's try and reduce the power by making the gpus run a little bit more efficiently so what i'm going to do is i'm going to install the nvidia graphics drivers for unraid to do that go to the apps tab and do a search for nvidia driver and then install the plugin now with that installed i'm going to install one last plugin as well so do a search for gpu statistics and install that plugin and once that's installed click onto the actions here and go to settings and here i can see the two gpus at the top here where it says change me i'm going to change that to nvidia and with that done i'm going to scroll down to the bottom and click on to apply okay so now next let's click onto the dashboard here and if we scroll right down to the bottom we can now see this part here gpu and we can see this gpu here is using 19 watts and that's the nvidia quadro p2000 so now let's see how much the rtx 38 is using i go back to the settings here and i change the graphics card to the rtx 3080 and click on to apply and then go back to the dashboard here and we can see here it's reporting that the rtx 3080 is using 92 watts well i don't believe it's really using quite that much i think that's inaccurate but it's definitely using more than it should now if we quickly go back and look at the power usage we can see here it's using about 153 watts so installing the driver hasn't actually lowered the power usage because for some reason although the card is idle it's not in the right power state but yep we can fix that with a script obviously to use the script we're going to have to have the user scripts plugin installed so if you don't have that installed then please install that then once you've got the user scripts plugin installed head over to my github you'll find a link to that in the description of this video and click onto nvidia powersave then here you'll see a script so click on to that click onto where it says raw here then copy all of this text here and then head back to the unread web ui then click onto the settings tab go to user scripts scroll down and click on add new script i'm going to call this i don't know one nvidia power save okay so with that done find the script and click on edit script and i'm going to paste in what i just copied so with that done i'm going to click on to save and this script i wanted to start up on the first start of the array only so now i'm going to scroll down and click apply and now i'm going to add another script this time i'm going to call it one nvidia power save hourly and i'm going to click ok and let's find that script click onto that and then go to edit script again paste in the exact same as before click on to save changes and here for the schedule i'm going to put it as hourly and with that done apply those changes and so now we've got that script in twice it will first run at the first start of the array then afterwards it will run every hour after that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to run the script now and just click done so this script will have put your gpus into a low power state so with that done let's see if the energy use of the server has improved any okay great so now it says the rtx 3080 it's only using eight watts so now let's have a look at what the quadro p2000 is actually using so i'm going to swap the gpu over to that here so let's go back across to the dashboard and have a look at the power usage of the p2000 and now this gpu is only using 7 watts so now let's have a look at the total power usage of the server now that the gpus are running in a lower power state and great we can see here it's now only using 109 watts when before is using 150 so really good power saving now running my server is going to cost me less money just what i like okay guys well so that brings us to the end of this video now i really hope you find it useful and you manage to save some power on your server if you like the video then please hit up the like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already now i want to give a really big thank you to all of my patrons and supporters out there without you guys i wouldn't be able to make these videos and i really really appreciate your help anyway guys it's time for me to go now but whatever you're up to for the rest of the day i hope it's good and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 29,975

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Id: KD6G-tpsyKw

Length: 5min 49sec (349 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022