I have never purchased a used server and aruck with the included CPU’s, they’re either power hungry beasts or bottom-rung SKU’s. All of my 12th gen PowerEdge servers at home run E5-2450L’s (they’re all -EN platforms), for example. The one exception is the R210 II I use as a firewall/router.
By percentage the number of 1U/2U servers sold with ultra power efficient CPUs is fairly low. When people buy those new they will absolutely be going for CPUs that are 85W to 130W TDP per socket, times two sockets.
As a person that's formerly worked for a server manufacturer for a number of years I would say that the mid to upper performance range of the CPU market is 80%+ of the servers by volume. The other 10% is either the very low power models, and the top 10% of the units sold by volume are the very most expensive CPUs available at the time.
If you buy a used 1U Dell R610 with two six-core CPUs and 64GB of RAM, nobody should be surprised that a 120VAC watt meter at the wall shows it idling at 150W power consumption, with cpu load at 0.00... [surprisedpikachu.gif]
I mean, they don’t have to be the ultra-efficient ones - but for my home lab use I want < 100W idle usage and even my R520 can handle that with the 2450L’s (Ivy Bridge-EN could do this without the L suffixed SKU’s, but HCC chips in that family were more expensive when I was buying).
