For this instalment in the series, we examine the power consumption of the DreamQuest N100 Mini PC and compare it to four other machines.
The DreamQuest’s N100 CPU has a TDP of 6W. That’s really low. However, a TDP figure is not necessarily a good indicator of the power draw from a system.
The chart below shows the power consumption with the DreamQuest N100 Mini PC compared to the DreamQuest N95 Mini PC, Intel NUC (i7-1360P) Mini PC and two desktop machines. These desktop machine have a 12th generation Intel processor (i5-12400F) and a 10th generation processor (i5-10400). The specifications of each machine are detailed in the last page on this article.
As you can see from the chart below, both DreamQuest machines draw the least power when idling. This might be an important factor if, for example, you’re looking to run a home server machine which is idle for the majority of the time.
The chart needs some explanation to put the results into context.
- The chart measures the power consumption of each system (not just the CPU).
- The i5-12400F machine hosts a dedicated graphics card, whereas both DreamQuest machines, the NUC and the i5-10400 machine all use onboard graphics. Power consumption even at idle is much higher with a dedicated graphics card, in this case an NVIDIA Asus RTX 3060 Ti. That graphics card, itself, consumes 13W with the machine at idle with two screens off, 21W idle with two screens on, as reported by nvidia-smi.
- Both the i5-12400F and i5-10400 machines offer good BIOS power management options. This power management is enabled for this particular test. The DreamQuest machines and the NUC don’t have power management functionality.
- For the i5-10400 machine, the BIOS offers options to enable Asus Performance Enhancement as well as a Performance Mode. With both these options enabled, the PC idles at 22.2W and 24.9W with both screens off and on respectively. Having the power functionality disabled therefore makes a significant difference.
- The Power Saver CPU governor is used.
- The machines are running Ubuntu 24.10.
Next page: Page 2 – Power Consumption With Light Usage
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Power Consumption With System Idle
Page 2 – Power Consumption With Light Usage
Page 3 – Power Consumption With CPU Stressed
Page 4 – Electricity Costs / Specifications
Complete list of articles in this series:
| DreamQuest N100 Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with an interrogation of the system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the DreamQuest N100 Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Power Consumption and Running Costs |