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

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
276 points transpute | 5 comments | 04 Jul 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.007s | source
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poulpy123 ◴[04 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44464387[source]▶
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.

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PhilipRoman ◴[04 Jul 25 13:37 UTC] No.44464442[source]▶
>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.

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1. sidewndr46 ◴[04 Jul 25 16:42 UTC] No.44465978{3}[source]▶
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.
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2. ndriscoll ◴[04 Jul 25 18:04 UTC] No.44466632[source]▶
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...

3. PhilipRoman ◴[04 Jul 25 19:48 UTC] No.44467336[source]▶
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.
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4. daymanstep ◴[04 Jul 25 23:01 UTC] No.44468653[source]▶
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.
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5. sidewndr46 ◴[05 Jul 25 13:41 UTC] No.44472742{3}[source]▶
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.