shut down RAM or VPU through software/bios?

[japhy]

Hard drives spin down and the CPU scales down to a low speed when not in use. Is there something similar to be done with the video card and RAM?

My main computer is a server that I use remotely most of the time so if I could just turn off the video card and 2 or the 3 RAM sticks I could lower the noise and heat dissipation (and power usage) of the computer by a lot. Can it be done?

[AuraAllan]

Hi and welcome to SPCR.

RAM sticks only use around 1W of power and dont really dissipate a whole lot of heat.

AFAIK you cant do anything about the videocard.

[aaa]

You can clock down the video card like a CPU.It's called PowerPlay for ATI, dunno the nVidia name.


An interesting setup I'm considering is to actually turn the server off (or standby for speed) and have it's Wake-on-Lan enabled. Then I would use a smart router like the WRT54GL (that only uses less than 10w) to wake it up whenever I need to log in remotely.

[floffe]

You can clock down the video card like a CPU.It's called PowerPlay for ATI, dunno the nVidia name.

Yes, and with most cards that saves maybe 10% of the power used by the card. Ati is better with the latest series, but in general both of them have a long way to go.

[psymanproductions]

not really much you can do other than using the tools mentioned above to decrease your clockspeeds

some people have hacked the bios to their cards allowing higher voltages and clocks.

if you handy with a hex editor and you can find some people on a forum who have used this technique to get an extreme overclock on your card then maybe you can use it to get an extreme underclock?

just a suggestion and dont ask me for help because i couldnt get my head around customising the bios for my ati hd3850 which many people have overclocked and over volted through bios

have you tried removing the card all togethor? if you usualy controll it remotely then maybe its worth a try, or maybe it wont boot with out a graphics installed like my desktop machine but its worth a try i guess?

[scdr]

What do you use the video card for when it is on?
If you don't need all the fancy 3D, and can get by without DVI, etc. - you could use an older, lower power video card. (e.g. PCI or AGP video card by S3, Matrox or ATI, from back in the days before video cards had heat sinks).
Or just forgo video card entirely, set it up for remote admin (network and/or serial console) and slap in a video card if it ever gets so toasted you have to redo setup.

I saw something about an external USB videocard recently. Don't remember if it was on here or elsewhere (maybe in PC Mag).
Probably wouldn't make sense for a one-off rig (because the power/expense to make/buy the thing would gobble up any savings). But might work for somebody with a bunch of machines.

Edit: here is an example of the sort of thing. No idea if you can use it as primary (rather than secondary) display.
http://www.amazon.com/Iogear-USB-Extern ... B000NJFJJK

If the RAM helps let it spin down the hard drives more/sooner, then it may wind up saving power to leave the RAM in/on (undervolting it, of course). (And if not - remove the excess RAM.

The optimist says the glass is half full,
The pessimist says the glass is half empty,
The engineer says that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

[Fallen Kell]

Very few systems support the ability to power down RAM. Only some high end servers that have been built with everything hot-swappable to my knowledge have this ability. Some new stuff that is coming out called Violin Memory I think can do something like this, but it is designed for use as a RAM Disk for high performance computing (think clusters and large database applications like Google for instance). Also starting at $50k, I don't think it will be something you have in your home system, at least in the near term.

[xan_user]

If your PC isn't "doing any thing " you could always turn off the power.
I just have my auto hibernate kick in.
Now if I could just turn off my UPS.....

[CoolGav]

My main computer is a server that I use remotely most of the time so if I could just turn off 2 or the 3 RAM sticks I could lower the noise and heat dissipation (and power usage) of the computer by a lot. Can it be done?

It would depend on the RAM controller whether it can selectively disable some memory (most likely stop refreshing it and power down), and of course operating system support since the data held in the RAM that was "turned off" will be random when reapplying power.

[aaa]

Some BIOS's have an option called CKE Power Down, which may be enabled to begin with (my laptop does it automatically). It puts the ram into standby when it's not being used, and that reduces power to a fraction of a watt.