Putting together a computer that has extremely low idle power consumption AND can handle some casual gaming is pretty tough. Just in case someone’s aiming to do it and isn’t sure where to begin, I figured I’d list some details about the machine I just put together so that you’ve got something to start with (or a basis for comparison).
CPU – Intel i3-6300
- Skylake architecture. Broadwell with Iris Pro was a consideration but lacked some DirectX12 and HEVC/VP8/VP9 improvements. Still waiting on AMD Zen and Intel Kaby Lake at the time of this writing.
- Best iGPU/frequency/TDP/price ratio of the Skylake processors (based on what’s important to me).
- Top iGPU (HD 530 at 1150Mhz)
- 3.8Ghz dual core (only the i5-6600 and i7-6700 match or exceed this at the 2-core turbo level)
- 51watt TDP (looking at higher-specced processors, only the i7-6700T beats this with 35watts but at the expense of frequency)
- Considerably less than the aforementioned i5-6600 and i7-6700(x) models.
The i3-6320 has an edge at the list price with a bump to 3.9Ghz, but local price threw it out the window.
A final piece to note: a few testing tools I ran showed the iGPU only hitting 1100Mhz in Windows, despite Intel (and others) listing it as 1150Mhz. Not enough data on my end yet to determine whether I’m just seeing a bug or if something else is going on. Update: It does hit 1150Mhz, but very infrequently and only under specific loads. Think of it as a 1100Mhz iGPU that will magically touch 1150Mhz in those rare moments when the stars are all aligned.
Case & PSU – Antec ISK 110
- High efficiency PSU. Also rated in the 80w-90w max window, so low idle power (~10w or roughly ~12% PSU load) shouldn’t be too far out of it’s efficiency band.
- No fans – a standard “laptop brick” power supply and circuit board. Not that I care about the noise, but no need to waste an extra watt on the PSU fan if it can be avoided.
I went over the Antec ISK 110 in a separate review.
The other alternative I considered was a picoPSU with a separate case.
I wanted to avoid a larger PSU (anything nearing 200w or higher) because efficiency usually drops a bit harder at very low load percentages (very low wattages) and I didn’t want to start looking at shelling out money for something in the neighborhood of an 80PLUS “Titanium” model to retain efficiency at really small loads.
Hard Drive – Samsung EVO 850 SSD (500GB)
- Samsung is still owning it when it comes to SSD power consumption.
- Samsung electronics in general tend to be pretty good/reliable. They’re also one company that (so far) has managed to maintain a strong focus on remaining cutting-edge.
Alternatives here were a different SSD brand or possibly a lower-power laptop hard drive.
Motherboard – Gigabyte H110N
Not a lot to say here, except that Gigabyte’s been reliable for me long-term (all my Gigabyte motherboards from up to a decade ago are still working). Always decent BIOS settings, very few issues.
I would have preferred a step up to one of their wifi versions, but local stock wasn’t available. Also considered a Z170 board which would have allowed me to run the RAM at over 2166Mhz (the “H” versions of the Skylake chipsets cap it at 2166Mhz), but I wasn’t willing to shell out the large price increase for that alone.
Important: Installing the Realtek network driver on this motherboard reduces idle power consumption by 1 watt (compared to standard Windows 10 Realtek driver). I know 1 watt doesn’t seem like much, but it’s technically a ~10% savings since we’re in the 10 watt range. This was the last piece of the puzzle that got me from 11 watts to 10 watts idle.
RAM – 32GB Kingston DDR4 2400Mhz (2x16GB)
I’ve had a bad luck with many brands of RAM. Kingston’s still in my good books, and this was a cost-effective set.
Power Consumption and Quick Undervolting Tests:
This was measured from the wall, and are values using the Realtek Network driver (which shaved off a watt), in an otherwise clean Windows 10 install.
- Standard voltage settings:
-10w idle
-69w load (Prime95) - Undervolt of -0.10v (BIOS):
-10w idle
-58w load (Prime95) - Undervolt of -0.12v (BIOS):
-10w idle
-56w load (Prime95) - Undervolt of -0.15v (BIOS):
-10w idle
-FREEZE (Prime95)
Undervolting had no discernible effect on idle power consumption. The real benefit was in reducing load power consumption which is nice not only for the savings there, but also because the 80-90w PSU it’s running on doesn’t leave a whole lot of overhead when we’re near the 70w consumption region.
In any case, every -0.01v drop in CPU vCore seems to equate to roughly a 1w reduction in load consumption.
Before anyone asks, I did try GPU undervolting too, but it also had no impact on idle consumption. Values of -0.10v to the GPU caused crashes when waking from sleep, and even -0.05 met with some periodic instability in 3DMark.
My gut feeling is that you’re probably not going to be able to bump the iGPU voltage down much (if at all), and will likely hit -0.10 as a realistic max undervolt on the CPU, possibly having to shave that down to -0.08 or so depending on stability.
I'm curious whether you would agree or if the i3-6300 still takes the cake in your book?
I'm planning to use the PC as a some time web browser, CD/DVD ripper, etc. (general home PC), to get the most use out of it.
I don't do any PC gaming.
Is the i5 overkill for my needs?
I don't want to end up being hobbled by the CPU, but equally I want to keep costs down.
I've bought an 80+gold Corsair CSM 550w PSU, as I read that this would help keep power consumption down.
However, if in addition to ripping the DVD's you're going to be doing a lot of *encoding* (ie through Handbrake), then I'd put a bit more weight towards the i5. Not that the i3 won't do it, but the i5 will do it a bit faster (the 4 slower cores should outweigh the 2 faster cores + HT), which starts to matter if you're ripping/encoding your entire DVD collection.
The i3 is £108 here in the UK and the i5 (7500T now), costs £192, so a fair difference.
However, I don't want to buy the i3 if I then find it's not powerful enough.
My TV server will be Media Portal, which means I'll have to install SQL or mySQL, plus I will install iTunes and I'll also have a DVB-S2 HD TV tuner card in it.
Would an i3 7100T have enough grunt? I really have no idea!
If you're really uncertain, you might consider peeking around any forums for the specific media center and TV tuner you're planning to use and see what the experience of others has been with different hardware. If not, the extra £84 may or may not be worth the extra peace of mind.
It'll really depend on the quality of the power supply.
My i3-6300 has the same 51w TDP rating as your i3-7100 and the power board in my case is rated for 80W with 60W max over the 12v rail (the FSP brick itself is rated at 90W). I've thrown some heavy encoding and heavy gaming at this thing and the power supply hasn't let up, and this is with a bit less than the 96 watts you've got advertised.
That said, in the past I've had a lot of power supplies that failed well before their "rated" wattage, whether name brand or unbranded. I've come to be really picky about PSU brands since then. Antec and Fortron/Sparkle PSUs are the only ones that have never let me down.
So... if you think your PSU is a solid brand, I suspect you'll probably be okay. If not, you might want to look at a replacement.
However, you do have a few things going for you:
- You're using an SSD. Depending on brand it might only pull 1-2 watts (Samsungs tend to be the best here, but most are at least notably better than a spinning disk).
- Media playback isn't usually that CPU intensive on modern Intel processors.
- Kaby Lake (your i3-7100) has hardware accelerated VP9 and 10-bit HEVC. So if your player supports using Intel's hardware decoder, the CPU won't have to work much at all, and thus should be pretty easy on the power demands. You can get a rough idea as to how well it does by playing a video and looking at the CPU usage in Task Manager (Windows), "top" (Linux), or Activity Monitor (hackintosh).
If it were me, I'd probably pick up a Kill-A-Watt (they're handy to have anyway) and measure power from the wall while doing a little playback testing. If the wattage spikes higher than you're comfortable with, stop the video right away and look at a PSU replacement. Could be worth a short stress test also (Prime95 etc) while watching the power draw too so that you know what happens if a runaway process decides to peg the CPU at 100%.Depending on your motherboard, there's also the option of undervolting and possibly underclocking the CPU too - both should have a notable impact on power draw when the computer is under load - as long as there's enough CPU oomph to play the videos you might not miss the extra Mhz.
Good luck!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Skylake-H110-HDMI-Display-Port-PCI-E-SATA-12V-LGA1151-Mini-ITX-MotherBoard/202805248318?ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2055359.m1431.l2649
Do you think I could get away with a FSP 75 watt power supply?
My build would be
G3900T - 35watt
1x8GB ddr4 260pin memory
1x128gb ssd
1x3TB 5400k harddrive
If it were me I'd probably see what price you can get on the FSP and then compare it to the adapters from Digikey: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/power-supplies-external-internal-off-board/ac-dc-desktop-wall-adapters/130 (select 12V, a few items within your wattage range, and barrel plug sizes to start getting reasonable results). Some of the adapters they carry have incredibly detailed spec sheets. Compare what you find to the FSP and decide then perhaps.
In the event you go the other way and go really cheap on a power supply, just make sure at the very least the voltage range is no wider than 11.4-12.6V. A multimeter/voltmeter is usually good enough for a brief test to make sure the unloaded voltage at least isn't high enough to fry the motherboard.
Good luck with your build!
Once I get all my part in, I'll post an update of how things are working. Hoping this build can give me a sub 10 watt idle and with a quality power supply, longevity.
Thank again!
My main desktop i5-7400, odense2k mobo, no gpu, 2x8gb ddr4, 1x250gb ssd, 1x1tb hdd (basically a hp 580-023w without the GPU and added a SSD). It comes with a stock 300w PSU.
My plex build is a i5-2500k, msi p67a-GD65 mobo, GTX 1060 3gb, 2x4gb ddr3 + 2x2gb ddr3, 2x8tb 5400hdd, 1x1tb 7200hdd, 1x250gb ssd, 750w high efficiency psu.
I just purchased a power meter and get about 60w idle while 80-100w under light load (3-5 users total with 1-2 transcoding). Would you have any recommendations to decrease the power consumption? I saw that you have other sections (encoding/hardware) and I'm actually going to head over and read those after posting this comment. My current idea was to use the i5-7400 with iGPU, 2x8gb ddr4, 1x SSD, 3x8tb 5400rpmHDD in order to lower the power more but I was thinking it'd sit around 50w idle.
Your post stated "High efficiency PSU. Also rated in the 80w-90w max window" so I was thinking you meant that was your watts under load or that your psu was rated 80-90% efficiency. BLOWN AWAY that you meant that's your actualy PSU external adapter. I never even considered building out of a mini-ITX, is this just a benefit to using it? I plugged your specs into neweggs reccommended PSU calculator (i3, mini ITX, 2x8GB ddr3, ssd) and it showed a recommended PSU of 126watts.
Sorry about the long winded post, Just exciting to find new content that I'm interested in. With loads of questions about mini-ITX now.
With that said your Plex build seems to use a Sandy Bridge processor (which I previously used in a machine) - Intel has actually done an excellent job making newer processors even more efficient, particularly at idle, and thus upgrading to something more recent is almost certain to shave off some wattage. Of course, the expense of motherboard/cpu/ddr4 is something to keep in mind. Alternately you could undervolt and slightly underclock the i5-2500k to shave off a little consumption: free, but takes a little trial and error.
If the transcoding isn't both hardware-based and dependant on the dedicated video card, dropping that and using onboard video obviously has a chunk of savings attached as well. The last time I'd checked (a few years ago) I don't think I found any video cards that pulled much under 10W when idle, with most appearing to be quite a bit above that.
As to the PSU included in that Antec case (80-90W max), it's pretty hard to find quality PSUs in that area as a standalone product. The reason to aim for a lower power PSU is that efficiency for PSUs tends to be good in the 20-80% load range (roughly) and poor at the extremes - for example, a 500W PSU running a machine that idles at 30W is sitting at 6% load which is well outside of the efficiency range. Of course, at 30W, an efficient 500W 80+ "Titanium" PSU might outperform a grey-box 300W non-80+ PSU, but you actually have no way of knowing unless you come across benchmarks that test against low wattages (which TomsHardware actually does in their PSU reviews quite frequently), or test yourself.
As for mini-ITX motherboards, they tend to have lower component counts which "all else being equal" should equate to less vampire power. However, all else is rarely equal, so the reality is that if you think you'd benefit from more expansion slots, more available DDRx memory slots, etc, it may be wiser to just go with a micro or standard ATX motherboard. I like the mini-ITX stuff because it'll fit in virtually any case and power consumption overhead of the board *tends* to be lower, but I have *also* run into situations where I really wished I had additional SATA ports or PCI-E slots. Sometimes you really have to examine the tradeoffs.
Thank you for sharing your experience
It is rare to find such good technical explanation on the web
I have also built a small mini-ITX in a "Antec ISK like" case a year ago which is working very well
Chieftec has an external PSU with a proper DC board like Antec (85W or 120W)
My first build
https://www.chieftec.eu/products-detail/88/IX-03B-OP https://www.chieftec.eu/products-detail/193/Adapter___DC_to_DC_SERIES https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J5040-ITX/
DDR4 16GB, Samsung Sata-SSD, etc..
Debian server + samba + Docker (homeassistant, plex, dokuwiki, etc..)
My next build
will be based on ASrock Z690-ITX + I5-12300 + DDR4 32GB + 2xMVMe SSD ZFS mirrored (in the same case but 120W)
I am just hoping that the pico like PSU will be good enough
Then, I will install Proxmox to have multiple light virtual machine (LXC container)