For this instalment in the series, we’re going to examine the power consumption of the FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC and compare it to three other machines.
The FIREBAT’s N100 CPU has a TDP of a mere 6W but a TDP is not necessarily a good indicator of the power draw from a system.
The chart below shows the power consumption with the FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC compared to the 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, the FIREBAT T8 draws the least power when idling. But it’s not much of a saving compared to the frugal Intel NUC.
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 the FIREBAT, 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, 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 FIREBAT and 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 22.4W and 23.1W with the screen off and on respectively. Having the power functionality disabled therefore makes a significant difference.
- The Power Saver CPU governor is used.
- Each machine is connected to a single 32″ 4K monitor.
- The machines are running Ubuntu 23.10.
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:
| FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with an interrogation of the system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Testing the power consumption |
| Part 4 | Multimedia: Watching videos and listening to music |
| Part 5 | How does the FIREBAT fare as a gaming PC? |
| Part 6 | Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 |
| Part 7 | Installing and Configuring EndeavourOS, an Arch-based distro |
| Part 8 | Installing and Configuring Rhino Linux, a rolling release Ubuntu-based distro |
| Part 9 | VirtualBox performance on the FIREBAT |
Under your light usage test, your results show the Firebat uses 11.9W. What’s your overall power consumption taking into account the 4K monitor and any other accessories used?
4k monitor takes 24W (with brightness at 40).
Bluetooth speakers 3.2W idle (around 4-5W when playing music, video etc)