Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course).

But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.

Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.

At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.

>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.

How would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.

Buy a kill-a-watt wall wart.

I use an electrical outlet meter. It's roughly €10, the only annoying thing is everything rebooting each time I want to move it.

The 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. ;)

I 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.

If you want something less "risky", ASRock Industrial has mini PCs which are great. I have an AliExpress N150, fully passive which worked just fine but then I saw the shiny of the Arrow Lake-H platform. Ended up getting a NUC BOX-225H for Opnsense. Way overkill, it's great!

https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/industrial-computer-system

The Arrow Lake-H platform can have up to 28 PCIe lanes where as the N150 gets 9. Something to think about if you want dual NIC + plenty of NVMe drives.

This 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.

Weird number. I have one of those enterprise mini pc (think EliteDesk pro mini) with an i9 (8c/16t), 64gb ram and 1 nvme disk and it idles at ~2W.

The measurement was done via a smart plug running tasmota (and the tasmota exporter) so I'd say it's pretty realistic.

I also have an HP MicroServer Gen8 with a 20W Xeon cpu (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/53401/i...) and four disks... It also idles at ~21W (again, as reported from tasmota-based smart plugs).

I 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.

> 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.

A 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.)

for US viewers, there's an N150 16Gb/512 that goes on sale on amazon for $130 every few weeks

Clamp 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.

i 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.

That's $550 on amazon/newegg. It's not in the same price range at all.

Oh, my bad, I don't recall mentioning price in my post. Rather I mentioned a system that has the PCIe lanes to accomidate 2.5G NICs + 4 NVMe drives without compromises.

USB-c cables with live PD power display can be chained with PD-to-barrel converters for fixed voltage.

I may misremeber the exact number, but it was high enough compared to a RPI

Matthias Wandel measures power that way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P47pjVyPP3w

I may misremember the number indeed, but it was definitively not 2W

You may be looking for "AC line splitter".

One example: https://www.harborfreight.com/15-amp-professional-ac-line-sp...

Edit: s/splicer/splitter, damn autocorrect.

Yup. They even typically come with separate 1x and 10x loops.

They're a common pack-in item with low- and high-end clamp meters.

That 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_consump...

the author has a previous blog post about his monitoring setup:

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.

For the price, you can get four N150, with 36 lanes. It's a pointless comparison.

how 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.

Depends on what you have active on he board, especially storage that isn’t pushed to an idle state for some reason.

At Walmart.

Can confirm 8-9w idle for my N100 homelab server having 1 NVMe SSD, 1 SATA SSD, 16GB RAM.

There 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.

The 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-sparsamste...

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18L...

9W 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.

I am reading this right now on my N100 desktop and it's 7W

From what I've read, some N100 systems don't support the same c-states as other systems and don't idle as low.

Use an odroid h4: 2x2.5gbe and a 4*1 m.2 bifurcation card to get 4 nvme drives there. Performance is limited due to ethernet anyway.

Total 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.

Do you have any names or links? I tried a Temu version a while back and even getting it connected to wifi was hopeless.

Doing anything can be life threatening. We don't need to assume that people who decide to do a thing are the same as you.

Which main board are you using? 5W is very impressive. I'd be surprised if it was even possible to achieve with an ATX board without some serious tuning.

Which form factor? Tower, MT, SFF or Mini?

+1 to the ability to use PCIe cards - a RaidZ2 array of spinning rust will saturate a 1Gb link without breaking a sweat, and with 10Gb SFP+ cards being so cheap it's a nice upgrade (although if you care about power then a newer card like the Intel x710)

Which 4 port USB HDD dock did you pick? And how did you setup the drives? (MergerFS/Snapraid?)

I have several asrockrack mobos and this is the first time I am hearing of asrockind, very interesting and there are a TON of different models here

Do any of these asrockind machines have a BMC?

I just got a minisforum s100, it's 4c8g n100 and POE which is pretty sweet. If only it had Intel vpro or some sort of BMC it would be perfect. I can attach a pikvm but looks like I need to do surgery on it to interface with the power switch. WakeOnLan has been really unreliable in my tests so far.

I'm curious to know the details of this as well. 5 watts is absurdly low for an ATX system. I've definitely seen 25 watts before. Assuming you went from a 75% efficient PSU to a 90% efficient one, that'd shave off a few more watts but it won't get you that low.

For perspective, I think the typical NIC consumes several watts of power.