Last Updated on October 30, 2023
Electricity Costs
To calculate the cost per year we assume each machine is used 8 hours a day under light usage. A kWh is £0.27 (the current price cap from October 2023 in the UK).
| Computer | Wh | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 17.7 | £13.95 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-12400 CPU (with dedicated graphics card) | 64.5 | £50.85 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-10400 CPU | 32.1 | £25.31 |
- 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 NUC doesn’t offer this functionality.
- The Balanced CPU governor is used. We find using the NUC 13 Pro as a desktop machine with the Power Saver CPU governor enabled greatly limits its usability.
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 £0.27 (the current price cap from October 2023 in the UK).
| Computer | Wh | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P | 12.7 | £30.04 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-12400 CPU (with dedicated graphics card) | 37.3 | £88.22 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-10400 CPU | 14.1 | £33.35 |
The next article in the series will look at the NUC’s P-Cores and E-Cores in detail.
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
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Intel NUC 13 Pro Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with interrogation of system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Installing Ubuntu 23.10 Desktop |
| Part 4 | Configuring Ubuntu 23.10 Desktop |
| Part 5 | Power Consumption |
| Part 6 | P-Cores and E-Cores |
| Part 7 | Gaming |
| Part 8 | Installing and Configuring Manjaro |
| Part 9 | BIOS options |
How many watts does the NUC’s GPU take when idling?
intel_gpu_top reports that the GPU of the NUC uses 5w when idling. That’s with two screens on. There’s no difference with just one screen.
Very interesting article, thank you 🙂
Do you mean the machine is noticeably slow even for basic usage (web surfing, watching videos, email, etc.)?
For basic tasks such as email, power saver mode is fine, but web surfing is noticeably slower compared to balanced or performance, particularly on websites that are heavy with JavaScript. That’s largely because with just 1 core being stressed the frequency of a core maxes out at around 2000 MHz, whereas its 5000 MHz with performance.
Watching videos with power save is fine (including high def video encoded with AV1 (4K and 8K) providing hardware acceleration is being used). With a 4K video I just tested, the GPU draws around 9W (as opposed to 5W when idle).
Thanks for the detailed answer, that was very helpful 🙂
Have you tried to experiment with powertop to see if you can get the idle power consumption lower?
That’s something I’m planning on exploring.