Power consumption of old 1U servers

[Bluecube]

Sad person that I am I like trawling eBay looking the 1U servers available. I'm tempted to buy one for playing about VMs and general file serving but am I right in thinking the power consumption of these old Xeon based servers is a tad high even at idle I was looking at the HP 380 range and I vaguely remember the idle TDP of the Xeons in them was in the 60W range. Add in the drives, mobo and other bits and bobs, the idle will be about 200W. Is this right? I'm just looking for ballpark figures and hopefully someone to tell me I'm wrong and these things can idle away, just sipping power

[scaryjim]

Depends on the age of the Xeon Check the specs on Ark and make sure it has EIST. Anything with EIST should be reasonable at idle. If it doesn't have EIST don't touch it - I built a s478 system recently that idled at 90W because the CPU didn't have EIST so didn't reduce the clock/volts at idle. Servers always used to be built for as much speed as possible in the form factor - it's only recently that energy efficiency has come into consideration in the server market.

If it's just for playing about, however, I'd not bother with an old server: a modern desktop will be more efficient and just as suitable.