I've recently upgraded my ageing X8SIL Supermicro with an i5 to a X10 Sm board with a 2960 V4 14core Xeon... I was expecting a horrible power situation but it's less than 100w with a handful of spinning disks etc.

I see lots of people complaining on power with their re-used ProLiant and others etc. Is it the throttling or bios settings that messes with the idle power?

Or are you just running it at 100% and my low usage is what saves my electricity bill?