Ah sry, I misread your post.
I’ve done the math on the energy consumption of the small fleet of ARM SBCs I used to have for server things, and came up with a surprisingly high number, up to 80W with all peripherals. This, plus the cable mess (although I tried to minimalize that by putting them in gutted rack router cases and such) made me consolidate all services into two X10 based servers. One is backup/playground and usually off, one is the prod unit. They idle around 20-30W and are tucked away in a rack.
So, for my use case one x86 unit with Proxmox is more energy efficient than going the ARM way. Added comfort gain is standard cases, cabling, PSP and IPMI.
On the negative side, one has to watch out not getting totally sucked into the homelabbing rabbit hole ;-)
Ah sry, I misread your post. I’ve done the math on the energy consumption of the small fleet of ARM SBCs I used to have for server things, and came up with a surprisingly high number, up to 80W with all peripherals. This, plus the cable mess (although I tried to minimalize that by putting them in gutted rack router cases and such) made me consolidate all services into two X10 based servers. One is backup/playground and usually off, one is the prod unit. They idle around 20-30W and are tucked away in a rack.
So, for my use case one x86 unit with Proxmox is more energy efficient than going the ARM way. Added comfort gain is standard cases, cabling, PSP and IPMI.
On the negative side, one has to watch out not getting totally sucked into the homelabbing rabbit hole ;-)