Electricity Costs
To calculate the cost per year we assume each machine is used 8 hours a day under light usage. A kWh is £0.245 (the current price cap from April 2024 in the UK).
| Computer | Wh | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| FIREBAT T8 Plus N100 CPU | 11.9 | £8.51 |
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 16.5 | £11.80 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-12400 CPU (with dedicated graphics card) | 58.3 | £41.71 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-10400 CPU | 32.1 | £22.96 |
- The annual cost is the electricity cost of the computer only. To calculate the overall running costs, you’ll need to factor in peripherals such as monitors, speakers, external devices etc.
- Power management is enabled in the BIOS for the two desktop machines. The FIREBAT and NUC don’t offer this functionality.
- The Balanced CPU governor is used. We find using the FIREBAT or NUC with the Power Saver CPU governor enabled greatly limits its usability in some basic tasks.
The next table shows the annual electricity cost with each machine headless running at idle. This information may be useful if you are thinking of using the machine say as a NAS server and want a baseline running cost. Again, we’ve pricing a kWh at £0.245 (the current price cap from April 2024 in the UK).
| Computer | Wh | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| FIREBAT T8 Plus N100 CPU | 6.5 | £13.95 |
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 7.1 | £15.24 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-12400 CPU (with dedicated graphics card) | 38.5 | £82.63 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-10400 CPU | 16.8 | £36.06 |
Specifications
A brief summary of the FIREBAT’s specifications.
| FIREBAT T8 Pus | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mobile |
| Processor | Intel N100 Turbo 3.40 GHz 4 E-Cores 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Alder Lake-N |
| Memory | 16GB DDR5 (4800 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel UHD Graphics Xe 24EUs |
| Disk | 512GB Wicgtyp 2242 M.2 SSD |
For reference, these are the specifications of the other machines featured in this article.
| Intel NUC 13 Pro | 12th Gen Intel PC | 10th Gen Intel PC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Mobile | Desktop | Desktop |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-1360P P-Core Turbo 5.00 GHz E-Core Turbo 3.70 GHz 4 P-Cores 8 threads 8 E-Cores | Intel Core i5-12400F 2.50GHz (Turbo 4.4 GHz) 6 P-Cores 12 threads | Intel Core i5-10400 2.90GHz (Turbo 4.30GHz) 6 P-Cores 12 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Raptor Lake-P | Intel Alder Lake | Intel Comet Lake |
| Memory | 32GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) | 32GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) | 32GB DDR4 (2666 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 | Asus NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti | Intel UHD Graphics 630 |
| Disk | 2TB TEAMGROUP NVMe | 1TB Samsung 980 NVMe 2TB Crucial SSD | 1TB Corsair MP400 NVMe |
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)