DL360 G5 - SpeedStep & Power Regulator Not Functioning with Xeon E5335

[FalconFour]

We're trying to cut down on power consumption and server room cooling costs... just spent who-knows-how-much having our A/C system repaired, and we're only running about 6 physical machines (all HP) in our rack.

Simple low-tech solution... I felt the air coming out of each of the machines. The DL380 G6, DL320 G5, and two DL385 G2's are all running with acceptable heat output, but the DL360 G5 is blowing out pretty warm air for sitting idle.

I found that the CPU wasn't scaling down using its Enhanced SpeedStep Technology (EIST). ILO2 Advanced (licensed) reports the power consumption at 275 watts idle (ouch!), and reports that "The processor in this system supports only one processor state". (congrats, you're now the only Google result for that phrase as well). Something is very wrong.

Tried with HP Static Low Power Mode - no change. OS Control Mode, no change. OS Control Mode and "Server Balanced" power profile (Windows Server 2003 R2 x64), no change... and "Max Battery", still no change.

All firmware is as up-to-date as I can find, although an all-in-one firmware console would be nice to have, with all the firmware that needs to be updated on this thing. BIOS is P58 (4/26/2010), power management controller is v3.4(c), ILO firmware v2.01 (8/4/2010). Nothing has helped bring its power consumption down.

What do we need to do to enable this server to clock down when idle?

[j0dan]

We're having the same problem here.

We added a ML350 G5 and it's eating a large amount of power. At first I thought it was an issue with VMware, but even setting OS Control doesn't allow ESXi to manage the power settings.

Have you had any luck figuring this out?

[FabianR]

It's not possible to have a lower clock on a E5335 and L5335, because they have a 6x multiplicator on the FSB (6x333MHz=2GHz). Intel SpeedStep doesn't allow any multiplicator lower than 6x. The slowest and the highest Speed is 2GHz. So a E5335 in idle consumes the same amount of power as a X5365 on idle.

The only thing you can do to lower power consumption is to activate C1E in bios.

[j0dan]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

For others who might be concerned about this: We recently upgraded some of our CPU's and found that there wasn't a noticable power consumption (10w max) difference between those that supported SpeedStep and those that did not.

[Matt Falcon]

Thanks for the info! But it doesn't quite make sense. Why is it claimed that the E5335 supports SpeedStep if the multiplier (and of course the FSB) is fixed? That's not SpeedStep at all... so... what are they referring to then?

It's the only server in our rack that doesn't clock back from its high speed (2GHz) to something lower (like 1GHz or 800MHz)... as a result it's the highest-power-consumption-with-lowest-workload server we've got.

Is there ANY CPU that DOES work? We're open to "sidegrades" (a change without necessarily being a "higher performance" part)...