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An official RaspberryPi 5 PSU is akin to a 27W mini brick which doesn't block any adjacent sockets on a power strip. However, the power bricks came with my N100 systems are similar size to 60-80W MacBook power bricks, they're way bigger, even if they're not significantly more powerful.

No, N100 systems do not contain their power supplies in the box. They're external.

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If you were to build it yourself, you can find passively cooled N100 Mini ITX motherboards (I own an Asus N100 Prime) which you can fit with a pico ATX PSU or HDPlex PSU. Pair with a SFF case, you could get it around the size of a mac mini without the brick. Maybe something like a skyreach case.

Again, too big for my requirements. What I want is a box I can forget until it breaks or I need something directly from it. RPi5 allows me to do that while handling a ton of workload for me.

Maybe the tasks it does are light from CPU/IO perspective, but the burden I offload to it is tremendous.

The N100 systems I have are desktop systems which spend most of their life powered off or at standby.

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