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Comment by hddherman | Hacker News Reader

I've found that most desktop PC-s have idle power usage around 35-50W. That was the main motivation to look for alternative solutions like ASRock Deskmini, or the Dell/HP/Lenovo TinyMiniMicro form factor machines. Mini PC-s tend to have great idle power usage compared to big towers, which is probably down to the selection of the CPU, components on the motherboard and the power supply which usually has to only output 12V/19V. ATX PSU-s need to handle 3.3V/5V/12V, which probably plays a role in efficiency at idle.

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You're right, using a desktop CPU for a mediacenter is not a good idea.

Laptop CPUs are, however, really well optimised for very low consumption when idling and that's what you should be using for a mediacenter.

Also, IMHO, ASRock Deskmini would not be a good idea for a media center since it's using desktop CPUs. The idle power draw will not be as good as mini pc with a laptop CPU.

Even desktop CPUs, at least Intel ones, sip power when idle (anecdote: my 12700K sips around 7W when idle).

If that's the CPU's own power consumption as measured by the CPU something is broken in your system or you have redefined "idle". When these things hit PC6—all cores off, caches off, iGPU refresh off—they should fall below 1W. This is a typical idle state for a desktop computer that is nominally "on" but nothing is happening.

Idle as in sitting on the desktop doing practically nothing except for very minor and insignificant background tasks.

I've measured 11-15W idle power usage on a Deskmini X300 with a Ryzen 7 5700G, which is not bad for a socketed desktop CPU.

Then you need to look at motherboard power usage, that's another huge difference if CPU is already taking just few watts

> I've found that most desktop PC-s have idle power usage around 35-50W.

My desktop server uses 50W at idle. ASRock Z390 motherboard, Pentium G5400, 32GB RAM, no GPU. There are 15HDDs, but 50W is with all of them spun down. It hits 120W will all disks spun up and CPU under load. I've come to the conclusion it's the motherboard, because the parts individually shouldn't draw that much power.

Europe energy prices :/ Here in Texas it cost maybe $5/month to run a 45 watt little server (pc)…

Consider yourself lucky - in Germany we're talking 20 EUR/month for a constant 45W load.

On the other hand, if you can, please consider using a more energy efficient alternative (and/or ensure you're getting the electricity from green sources) - the planet will warm up regardless of whether the electricity was cheap or expensive.

45W 24/7 would work out at about £10.50/month in the UK right now (~$12.60).

My total household usage averages around 4.5KWh/day so adding that 45W 24/7 server would add about 24% to overall load! It would need to be an important little server to justify the increase.

ATX even needs -12V, which was useful for RS232 at that point I guess.

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