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
N100 is a good low power CPU (I own one) but beware that they only have 9 PCIe lanes. Every peripheral and motherboard slot needs at least one lane and many (like NVME slots) often have more. For example, NVME normally uses 4 lanes and each NIC needs one.
So, do the math, 2 standard NVME slots and a NIC use all your lanes so there would be none for the PCIe slots.
The Asrock N100m tries to deal with this but limiting the number of lanes per device but it does so, potentially, at the expense of performance. It assigns 2 lanes to the NVME slot and it’s 16 lane PCIe slot only wires 2 of those lanes. Shit should still work, but it may not be at its fullest performance.
Anyhow, beware that striving for lowest idle power may have other hidden costs if you also want flexible and high speed I/O.