Librem Mini : Power consumption

Hardware
1

Hello,

I known that a lot of parameters makes the power consumption of a computer (RAM capacity, HDD, CPU and GPU usage… and many other things).

But do you have an approximative idea of the power consumption of the librem Mini in idle ?

By idle, I mean powered on, with no user action or screen connected, but maybe some passive software servers (like apache)

thx !

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2

Good question. Appears to be missing info.

Since you only said approximate idea, I will guess 12W - 15W. Someone really needs to measure it.

If your use case is as a 24x7 mini server then you would definitely care about the power consumption.

Note that there is no GPU as such. This computer is using the Intel integrated graphics.

3

depends on the load average and the type of load on the CPU (as that is the most power hungry of all the components in the machine)

my guess is that the librem mini will come with a 60w power brick.

this CPU is an i7 and it boosts quite high so for burn-test i’d suspect that it can easily climb to 45-50w total power draw from the wall. but if you keep it like this 24/7 you’re going to need a few power-brick spares (just in case - they don’t have any active cooling you know :wink: )

i don’t recommend anyone to use it as a substitute for a proper server machine because of the power-supply unit … you could use a UPS with it but still … when it goes it goes …

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4

The question was about ‘idle’ power draw though - which is why I took the question to be about a 24x7 server but one that is not heavily used. If it is heavily used then looking at the output of the AC/DC adapter is probably a good indicator.

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5

Just measured my laptop which uses similar but prev.gen cpu has power draw 5W at almost idle and with a screen. Screen at half draws 5.5 screen at max get 5.9W in total. So considering next gen should draw less and without screen even more so should be safe to approx the iddle draw to 4-5W
That was what battery status was showing. And here’s powertop output when plugged into AC:

Leistungsaufnahme bei Grundauslastung beträgt 7.43 W

Gesch. Leistung    Auslastung     Gerätename
  6.09 W     40,9%        CPU misc
  935 mW     40,9%        CPU core
  402 mW     40,9%        DRAM
    0 mW    100,0%        USB-Gerät: xHCI Host Controller
6

There are limits as to what you can achieve though when going from 2 cores to 4.

7

eh… but mine has 4, 4 cores 8 threads.

8

I took the question to be about a 24x7 server but one that is not heavily used

You get it right :wink:

if you keep it like this 24/7 you’re going to need a few power-brick spares

My actual set up use the same power-brick for 8 years now, as it’s not heavily used I should be ok :slight_smile:
Truth is, I don’t really need a high availability server
My actual spare is a Raspberry Pi B+ which I keep up-to-date, I used it only once after a very nasty power cut

1 Like
9

You didn’t say what CPU you have but OK. I assumed Librem 13 or 15.

10

Ah sorry it was in different MINI thread, it is i7-8550U

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11

I’d love to know this as well, also how it compares to different ARM64 boards. I’d expect it to use somewhat more power as it’s faster but it would be nice to know exactly how much.