3 ms·

Intel i5-6500 with 16GB does 7 watt idle.

• dspillett 2y ago
  So just the CPU at idle pulling more than twice the Pi, about the same as a Pi4 running a CPU stress-test, depending on what figures you take. I had a look around and there are many values out there, just under 3W idle and about 7W spinning the CPU seem like reasonable values (to get better data I might have to try properly testing mine – I've got an overly fancy USB3 cable that displays the power passing through, so I could do that at some point, at least approximately). Figures for mini PCs obviously vary by model, but also you see a lot of different figures for the same model (some of the difference could be due to differences in storage power draw, some don't say if they have an SSD or traditional disk, and some could be differences in ambient heat affecting draw for cooling? age may also have an effect on the efficiency of fan motors) but between 9W and 15W (mostly below 12) at idle feels like a reasonable guess based on those quick searches. This is lower than I was expecting. The official rating for an Optiplex 3070 (picking a random model from the popular ones) is “up to 1.2W” which is far lower than people have measured in their own tests so I'll not be trusting official values. Of course the PiZero or similar would draw less than anything else I've already mentioned, though to be a router I'd need to add at least some NICs to that, some extra storage (given one of my concerns is running the router off an SD card), and would lose some CPU resource (the Zero 2 is roughly equivalent to a Pi3 there?) and a goodly chunk of RAM.