Chimney Top Calculators

CPU server hosting profitability calculator

Per-core or per-server payouts against power cost: is your spare server worth renting out?

Calculator

Choosing a preset fills in cores, CPU power and idle power; you can edit all three.

RAM, drives, fans, NICs and power-supply losses.

Few hosts are rented 100 % of the time; 40–80 % is a common planning range.

From your utility bill: total charges ÷ kWh used, including delivery.

1.0 = no extra cooling; 1.1–1.3 for a home rig with extra AC; ≈1.5 is a typical data-center average.

What renters pay per core per hour, before the platform fee.

Commission the marketplace keeps from each payout.

What you paid (or would pay) for the hardware you are dedicating to rentals.

Results

Net profit per month
$190.05
Net profit per hour (average)
$0.2603
Net per rented hour
$0.4460
Power cost per rented hour
$0.0660
Power cost per idle hour
$0.0182
Average revenue per hour (after fee)
$0.3072
Energy per month
228.1 kWh
Net profit per year
$2,280.58
Break-even
18.4 months
Break-even utilization
3.9 %
  • Presets and default values are editable estimates, not quotes. Taxes, internet, depreciation beyond break-even and hardware failure are not included.

Renting out a CPU server

Spare servers and workstations can earn on compute marketplaces, render farms and bare-metal rental platforms. The economics differ from GPUs: payouts per core are small, and a server's idle draw is a large fraction of its load draw, so utilization and electricity price decide almost everything. This calculator handles both per-core and per-server payouts and shows the utilization you need to break even on power alone.

CPU / server presets

CPUCoresTDPServer idle (est.)CPU power $/h at $0.15
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (16 cores)16170 W60 W$0.0255
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (16 cores)16170 W60 W$0.0255
Intel Core i9-14900K (24 cores)24125 W55 W$0.0188
AMD Threadripper 7980X (64 cores)64350 W120 W$0.0525
AMD EPYC 7763 (64 cores)64280 W110 W$0.0420
AMD EPYC 9654 (96 cores)96360 W140 W$0.0540
Intel Xeon Gold 6338 (32 cores)32205 W100 W$0.0307
2× Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 (28 cores total)28240 W110 W$0.0360

Presets are specification-sheet figures and rough idle estimates — edit them to match your hardware.

The formula

power $/h (rented) = (P_cpu + P_system) / 1000 · price · PUE
power $/h (idle)   = P_idle / 1000 · price · PUE
gross $/rented h   = payout per core · cores     (or payout per server)
net $/h            = u · gross · (1 − fee) − [u · rented + (1 − u) · idle]
net $/month        = net $/h · 730

Worked example

A 64-core EPYC 7763 server (280 W CPU + 120 W rest of system, 110 W idle), $0.15/kWh, PUE 1.1, rented 60 % of the time at $0.01 per core-hour with a 20 % fee: gross is 64 × $0.01 = $0.64 per rented hour. Net works out to $0.2603 per hour and $190.05 per month; against $3,500 of hardware that is about 18.4 months to break even. Break-even utilization on power alone: 3.91 %.

Frequently asked questions

Per core-hour or per server-hour — which should I use?
Use whatever your platform pays. Distributed-compute and bare-metal marketplaces differ: some price per vCPU or core per hour, others rent the whole machine. The calculator converts either into the same net-per-hour figure.
Why is idle power so important for CPU servers?
Servers draw a large share of their full-load power even when idle — fans, memory, drives and chipset keep running. At low utilization, idle power can eat most of your revenue, so measure it with a watt meter if you can.
Is TDP the same as power draw?
Not exactly. TDP is a thermal design figure; real package power can briefly exceed it, and the rest of the server adds more. The "rest of the server" field covers RAM, drives, fans and power-supply losses.
Should I count the hardware cost if I already own the server?
Enter what the hardware is worth to you — its resale value is a fair opportunity cost. Enter 0 to see only whether the rental beats the power bill.

Sources

  1. NVIDIA, AMD and Intel product specification pages (total graphics power / board power, TDP / default TDP, core counts).
  2. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A — Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector. www.eia.gov
  3. Uptime Institute. Global Data Center Survey (annual). Industry-average power usage effectiveness (PUE). uptimeinstitute.com
  4. The Green Grid (2012). WP#49 — PUE: A Comprehensive Examination of the Metric.