9 ms·
>N100 based computer draw 9W at idle That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more effici
by PhilipRoman 1y ago
>N100 based computer draw 9W at idle
That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more efficient.
- wltr 1y agoHow would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.
- mjh2539 1y agoBuy a kill-a-watt wall wart.
- blipvert 1y agoAt Walmart.
- PhilipRoman 1y agoI use an electrical outlet meter. It's roughly €10, the only annoying thing is everything rebooting each time I want to move it.
- genewitch 1y agoi wonder if there's a market for pre-made cables with a "loop" in the hot wire, for using clamp ammeters, or a cable where in addition to the choke ferrule, there's another "ferrule" - current transformer - on the hot wire with "test points", where those test points are to a transformer winding around the hot wire. That way you could just put those cables on things you want to know the power consumption of, rather than having to move a kill-a-watt or whatever. I could make either, but they wouldn't be "certified", as i'd be either replacing plugs or cutting into the wire itself to add a pigtail.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- geerlingguy 1y agoMatthias Wandel measures power that way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P47pjVyPP3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P47pjVyPP3w
- bialpio 1y agoYou may be looking for "AC line splitter". One example: https://www.harborfreight.com/15-amp-professional-ac-line-splitter-57716.html https://www.harborfreight.com/15-amp-professional-ac-line-sp... Edit: s/splicer/splitter, damn autocorrect.
- mystified5016 1y agoYup. They even typically come with separate 1x and 10x loops. They're a common pack-in item with low- and high-end clamp meters.
- dgacmu 1y agoThe easy path, as someone suggested, is a kill-a-watt that you just plug it into. The less intrusive path for some definition of less intrusive is a clamp ammeter if you can expose one of the AC wires (you have to clamp around an individual wire, not both hot and neutral). But then you don't need to unplug the system to measure it. The third overkill option is to have it plugged into a full-time power monitoring and control device, such as a zigbee home automation plug switch. ;)
- mkesper 1y agoThis can actually be life threatening if done without proper tools and working fast fuses. So just use a kill-a-watt or any other such tool for safety! NB they're maybe not 100% exact but good enough to give an estimate.
- bityard 1y agoA clamp meter does not expose you to any live uninsulated wires unless you are doing it very wrong. (Although they also tend to be not very accurate for low current measurements. So this isn't a use case I would recommend them for.)
- scottbez1 1y agoClamp meters are completely safe. The only risk is if you DIY your power cable so you can clamp one lead, but that's not necessary if you just buy an AC line splitter plug. And those often come with the hot looped around so you can get a 10x reading for better fidelity at lower current draw. But these days I just skip the clamp meter and throw Ikea Inspelning zigbee plugs anywhere I want power measurement.
- chaoskitty 1y agoDoing anything can be life threatening. We don't need to assume that people who decide to do a thing are the same as you.
- jkortufor 1y agoThere are $10 Chinese kill-a-watts with color display, and live Bluetooth data recording. It's fun stating a CPU intensive job and watch the graph spike.
- vladvasiliu 1y agoI have a regular i5-6500 in an HP 800 G2 SFF. It has 32 GB RAM (2x8+16), two Samsung 840 SSDs and a 4-port i350 network card. It Linux as a KVM host with OpnSense and Home Assistant on top. According to some watt-meter I got off Amazon it idles at 14W with the 4 interfaces UP but next to no traffic. I consider it idling when the CPU usage as reported by the host is under 5%. Now the watt-meter isn't some top-of-the-line exotic model, just a random Chinese thingy, but it seems to measure close enough to what I expect some other devices to pull.
- venusenvy47 1y agoI can vouch for the power draw in this type of system. I have a Dell OptiPlex 7070 with i5-9500, 32GB and running Proxmox with a Windows VM and a couple smaller instances. I measure 8w idle from my Kill-a-Watt on the system. I was really surprised at how low it is.
- daymanstep 1y agoWhich form factor? Tower, MT, SFF or Mini?
- venusenvy47 1y agoSFF
- daymanstep 1y agoThank you! The Dell SFF can only hold one 3.5 inch HDD right?
- venusenvy47 1y agoYeah, just one. Here is the service manual: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/optiplex-7070-sff/opti7070_sff_service_manual/technology-and-components https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/optiplex-7070-sff... I got a refurbished unit for $180 last year, using this deal (now expired): https://slickdeals.net/f/17490348-dell-coupon-50-off-refurbished-dell-optiplex-7070-mff-spf-desktops-from-169-50-free-shipping?p=170995209 https://slickdeals.net/f/17490348-dell-coupon-50-off-refurbi...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- znpy 1y ago> How would you guys properly measure that? I'm using smart plugs that have an open source firmware called tasmota. I can scrape the values using prometheus and can build dashboards with historical data.
- transpute 1y agoUSB-c cables with live PD power display can be chained with PD-to-barrel converters for fixed voltage.
- evil-olive 1y agothe author has a previous blog post about his monitoring setup: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/how-i-monitor-and-control-all-my-powered-devices-zigbee-ha https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/how-i-monitor-and-con... I can recommend those Third Reality outlets as well, I have about a dozen now and they Just Work with my Zigbee dongle (Sonoff ZBDongle-P) and zigbee2mqtt / Home Assistant setup. I use Home Assistant's Prometheus integration to get the data into VictoriaMetrics, which lets me build Grafana dashboards showing the usage of each plug over time.
- poulpy123 1y agoI may misremeber the exact number, but it was high enough compared to a RPI
- Semaphor 1y agoThat sounds wrong, efficient intel chips should be very comparable to pi's. Measurements for the futro s740 (j4105 CPU) were [0] around 2-4 W idle when properly configured [0]: https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consumption.md https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
- sidewndr46 1y agohow did you get a 6500T to idle so low? Is that CPU power or total system power? I have a T part from the next generation, I don't remember the exact model. It's low but it isn't that low.
- ndriscoll 1y agoThe processors themselves all seem to be pretty efficient at idle (there's apparently no real reason to get a T processor. It just caps performance). It mostly depends on everything else. The only place I know of to get this kind of info is this thread[0] where people have been building this spreadsheet[1]. Some threads on servethehome.com also report when some pcie cards have broken power management which can destroy idle efficiency. [0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/ https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18L...
- PhilipRoman 1y agoTotal system power (as in, drawn from the outlet) I didn't do any significant customizations, it runs Alpine Linux. Here is my powertop output: Summary: 139.6 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 0.9% CPU use Usage Events/s Category Description 100.0% Device Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek 480.6 µs/s 38.3 Timer tick_nohz_handler 469.0 µs/s 24.6 Timer hrtimer_wakeup 330.0 µs/s 23.2 Process [PID 2121] [irq/132-iwlwifi] 281.2 µs/s 10.1 Process [PID 3278] containerd --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml 28.9 µs/s 9.5 kWork toggle_allocation_gate 52.4 µs/s 7.5 Timer inactive_task_timer 279.3 µs/s 4.6 Process [PID 3279] containerd --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml 363.9 µs/s 4.5 Process [PID 3306] containerd --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml The system as a whole spends around 95-97% of time in pc8 state.
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- rcarmo 1y agoDepends on what you have active on he board, especially storage that isn’t pushed to an idle state for some reason.
- mmgutz 1y agoCan confirm 8-9w idle for my N100 homelab server having 1 NVMe SSD, 1 SATA SSD, 16GB RAM.
- iamnotagenius 1y ago[dead]
- windowsrookie 1y ago9W at idle for the N100 is similar to what I get with my N100 based PC. Although under windows it's often sitting at 10-12W. I also see lower power consumption with an 8th Gen intel Core system. The small cores that the N100 use are size efficient, but not necessarily power efficient. The N100 chip is just not that efficient power-consumption wise.
- fswd 1y agoI am reading this right now on my N100 desktop and it's 7W
- omgwtfbyobbq 1y agoFrom what I've read, some N100 systems don't support the same c-states as other systems and don't idle as low.