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

  • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Another poster sent you an exhaustive list, but to answer your question a bit, AMD has been dominating in the performance/watt category for a while now, I’d consider a Ryzen processor. Anything made in the last few years will be more than robust for what you’re describing. Hell, if you’re willing to wait for delivery I bet a Raspberry Pi 5 could suffice

  • DarkextratoastyBEnglish
    1·
    1 year 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.
  • Ben4425BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.