‘Some’ professional laptops indeed. I get my memory 2nd hand on eBay mostly, and it’s slim pickings on SO-DIMM ECC memory. That’s why I used the term ‘weird’. Of course it’s quite ‘normal’ memory, it’s just harder to get used.

Just found an enclosure at an acceptable price, it’ll be here in ~2 weeks. Those modules use some weird memory though: so-dimm ECC. I’ve been having some trouble getting it. The switch modules are ‘dirt’ cheap.

Just to give you an idea, I’ve just built myself an AMD Ryzen 9 7900(not X) with: P600 gpu, SAS controller, SAS Expander, Intel x710 10gig card, Samsung 3.84Tbyte u.2 nvme PCIe 4.0 drive (scratch space), Samsung 2tbyte 980 pro PCIe 4.0 (OS disk), 64gbytes of ddr5 ram.

It idles at ~100W, though I am working on reducing that. But the power/performance ratio is nuts compared to those old ‘clunkers’ like the r710.

I still have to migrate my storage drives from my old NAS, but those are 870 QVO drives (8tb) that idle at 30mw, so I don’t expect much extra idle usage from those.