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Comment by Fr0styMatt88 | Hacker News Reader

For those TV/media centre/home server use-cases, I suspect it’s also that enthusiasts might already have a collection of older, good-enough hardware for that purpose as well.

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Part of this is likely related to power consumption, particularly how power-inefficient older hardware is. A raspberry pi 3b+ will draw max of 2.5A at 5v, so 12.5Wh would make it 8.64KWh per month, and I pay about $0.13 per KWh, so about $1.21 per month for that thing to be screaming every waking hour. Meanwhile, desktop setups baseline power consumption is in the 100s of watts.

100W for baseline is too much for desktop. Maybe fail of power saving settings. Good tiny desktops can achieve about 12W at idle. https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-thinkcentre-m900-tiny-pr...

I built a ryzen 5 desktop in 2020 and put 2 hard drives in it. Running a headless Linux install it would idle at 70w. Part of that was I had to put a small GPU in or it refused to boot.

Sadly Ryzen is not as good as Intel for low-power efficiency, just high-power efficiency. Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18L...

I just threw in the 100 watt as a baseline because my 10+ year old rig runs that while idle and we seemed to be talking about using our older computers as the media player or home server.

According to this, 12yo Sandy Bridge PC uses 52W to 74W. 100W is hungry even over 10 years ago.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-... https://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel...

You’re forgetting about the rest of the computer. Processors don’t run in isolation.

> Total System Power Consumption

The very machine I had in mind was actually my sandy bridge setup, specifically my i5 unlocked (K-skew) which I had a GTX-660ti (with a reported 110 watt TDP, but at idle it’s quite a bit less). Throw in the two spinning rust HDDs and, at idle, it does exceed 100 watts.

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