E3-1230v2 is completely different to an E5v2 or an E5v3. The E3’s were all 4-core dies. E5’s were built from two different dies, both of which had well more than 4 cores. The chipset is different between E3 and E5, the memory controller is different, and the PCIe lane count is different. You can’t directly compare an E3 to an E5.
Idle power can be estimated (CPU+RAM+chipset+drives+GPU), but is also majorly affected by:
- Efficiency of the PSU: big OEMs were pretty good about putting efficient PSUs in their workstation products, but below 10% of rated load capacity, efficiency will be crap. Exactly how crap, depends on the specific PSU.
- BIOS settings: there are a dozen different BIOS settings that can dramatically change how the CPU behaves, and the defaults vary for each system. Sometimes the defaults do not allow the processor to throttle all the way back under low load.
Your measured power consumption of 100W at low/no load is about what I’d expect. Can you reach lower? Maybe with the right combination of settings, and switching to slower/lower voltage memory, and making sure that the GPU is also throttling down, you could reach 65-80W idle. But I wouldn’t expect less than that.
I’ve had drive failures bring down entire systems. Replace
sdaand see if the problems continue.