Hello,

What would be the lowest TDP consumer grade CPU that I could get off the shelf? I’ve read that recent Intel “i” series are quite efficient, but I’m wondering which3/5/7/9 series (and maybe a model?) is “the best”.

I’m looking to self-host only a small amount of containers. 4k video output (or transcoding) would also be a great feat, even if nowadays I’m not using Plex that much.

Thank you

  • @DarkextratoastyBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    If you’re not doing much computing, then the idle power consumption is much more important than the tdp, in which case the motherboard and other hardware are more important than the CPU. For your use case, something like a tinyminimicro 1L PC or a Celeron mini PC would be good. I’ve personally played around with

    • a dell optiples 3050 micro with an i5-7500t that idles about 6 watts
    • an AliExpress n5105 mini PC that idles about 8 watts
    • an AliExpress n100 3inch mini PC that idles about 5 watts
    • an Asus Chromebox 3 with an i7-8550u that idles about 4 watts Any of these have plenty of juice to run some docker containers and a media server assuming you don’t need to transcode multiple 4k streams simultaneously. I’m currently using the Chromebox as my proxmox server with 3-4 vms and maybe 20 docker containers/lxcs and it uses about 8-9 watts on average.