Know what your kit draws.

Colocation power is allocated as current on a 230V feed. 1A is roughly 230W, 4A roughly 920W, 16A roughly 3.7kW. The estimator converts your watts so you can compare directly with our plans.

Your typical draw is what you will see day to day. Peak is a cold boot, every fan at full speed, or every core and GPU flat out. We recommend a plan where typical draw sits comfortably inside the allowance and peak does not trip it.

No. A server with 2× 750W power supplies rarely pulls anything like 750W — the second supply is for redundancy, and most single-CPU servers idle between 80W and 150W. Use the estimator or your iDRAC/iLO reading instead.

Yes, though not in proportion to capacity. Power follows the number of memory chips on the stick, so a 64GB DDR5 server stick draws roughly 5W in normal use and up to about 9.5W flat out, against about 3W and 5.5W for a 16GB one. Fewer, larger sticks still use less than many small ones for the same total memory.

Not per stick. DDR5 runs at a lower voltage (1.1V against 1.2V) and moves far more data per watt, but it also runs much faster, has more chips per rank and carries its own voltage regulator. Micron’s datasheets show a DDR5 server stick drawing about the same as the same-size DDR4 stick at idle, and roughly 15–50% more under heavy memory traffic. Desktop (unbuffered) DDR5 is much lighter — about half a server stick — and the estimator accounts for which kind your platform uses.

Many do. Desktop Ryzen chips boost to their socket limit — about 1.35× TDP, so a 170W chip draws up to 230W. Intel Core i9s run at 241–253W sustained on Intel’s own spec, and up to around 365W on boards with the limits removed. Xeons can burst to 1.2× TDP for about a second, then settle back at TDP. EPYC holds at its TDP unless the BIOS raises it to its maximum configurable TDP — which Dell PowerEdge AMD servers do out of the box. The estimator models all of this; choose “Max performance / unlocked” if your BIOS removes the limits.

Everything that draws from the wall: motherboard, BMC and voltage regulators, memory, drives, onboard and add-in networking, GPUs, cooling fans (which work harder as the parts get hotter), and the losses inside the power supplies. The figures come from manufacturer datasheets, and the model is checked against measured power for real servers.

Yes. A gigabit switch is typically 35–50W, but a 48-port 10G switch can be 140–260W, and 10GBase-T copper switches 210–315W. Where a vendor publishes figures we use them, and each device says whether its numbers are from the datasheet or estimated. The Arista 7050TX-64 we include free of charge with full rack colocation — 48× 10G RJ45 ports — draws 315W typical and 387W maximum on Arista’s figures, so it’s worth counting in your rack’s power.

Talk to us. Power can be upgraded as you grow, and additional power for single servers is available on enquiry. We would rather size it right up front than have you guess.