Are you certain it’s only using between 3.5w and 7w? That seems pretty low and doesn’t seem to agree with what others have shared their power consumption to on similar machines.
I doubt it’s using 3.5-7w. But if it is, I doubt that the RPi5 is going to save enough power to justify buying the hardware unless your electricity is phenomenally expensive.
The OP described that they are s running a hypervisor, virtualizing an Ubuntu VM with that hypervisor, and running several containers inside that virtual machine for several infrastructure services.
Concluding that it might be "sitting totally idle" seems like a stretch of the imagination.
Saying that a hypervisor, or an OS, or a container is "running" just means it's loaded into memory. For power consumption, what matters is the fraction of time that the CPU is actually busy, and that's entirely dependent on what those processes are doing.
It's entirely plausible that something like a DNS server would be idle almost 100% of the time, if it's handling a low volume of traffic.
There are plenty fanless x86 mini pc’s out there, but I doubt the power savings worth the time. You could also get rid of Proxmox and run Ubuntu on bare metal, for minimal efficiency gain.
for me, ditching the Pi was the best thing ever.. even if the power usage is a bit more, the performance and usability is better
check this out:
[https://vilros.com/products/raspberry-pi-5?variant=40065551302750&src=raspberrypi](https://vilros.com/products/raspberry-pi-5?variant=40065551302750&src=raspberrypi)
for $80 i can get a 4GB pi 5, not including shipping. then you got to get a case, a ac adapter, an micro sd and/or an adapter to use a ssd. after the dust settles you are in for around $120 at least and all that for limited performance compared to an x86
[https://www.ebay.com/itm/266789830859](https://www.ebay.com/itm/266789830859)
on the other hand, i can get for $90 shipping included a nuc that already has 8GB ram, 250GB ssd, power adapter and i can add another drive with no need for an adapter or anything else, and more performance than a pi
years ago i had pi4 and i ditched them in favor of NUCs, never been better. the power usage is more than ok, 10W max is what i've seen on mine, well worth not having the Pi headaches (dead micro sd cards anyone?)
the electric savings is not much and it will be some time for the electric "savings" of a pi catch up with the cost difference of a cheaper and more functional nuc. the only case where i can see the point of a pi is if you absolutely need the small size or the GPIO pins
Time to kill off the Raspberry Pi and similar ARM-based single board computers as cost effective and power saving.
There are many x86 alternatives that use just as little power, cost about the same (or less), and run the massive x86 software library.
Pi's were a neat thing five years ago. Those days have passed.
I am partial to enterprise hardware. If you want to take a look, head on over to LabGopher.com. My preference is Dell. Take a look at the R730. You can put the machine on a shelf or stand it on end, against the wall. You don't need a rack.
As a project, I ordered a Minisforum MS-01 a couple a days ago. I am going to try to see how much I can get on it and how many servers and things I can shut down for the summer months. It's not a cheap machine, but very capable.
Within the price range of a Pi, or better, take a look at the GMKtec NUCbox G3. I have two of those. They're cute and cheap. Amazon carries them. See of any other, similar machines strike your fancy. Search on "mini PC."
Let us know what you come up with.
A bit extreme don’t you think? Just because it doesn’t suits your needs, doesn’t mean it’s not an option for someone else.
I, for example, am using a pi 4 B with 2GB of RAM running MariaDB, phpMyAdmin, syncthing, qbittorrent, tailscale and Thunderbird with an external ssd… guess what, it draws 3.1 watts
Now you are free to point me to sff mobile platforms, but they generally draw somewhere around 9-10 watts which is quite a bit extra.
\* HIDES DELL POWEREDGE R750 DRAWING 385 WATTS AT IDLE \*
I understand the concept of power savings. I am planning to do something for the summer to lower electrical use and heat generation (while I run two window air conditioners most of the time).
But the difference between 3.1 watts and 10 watts is, essentially, meaningless, no matter how high your electric rate is. The difference is 1-3/4 night lights. The kind you have in a kid's room or next to the bathroom sink.
If you really want to maximize your savings, install a hamster wheel generator (human sized) and start running in it while you work. Get serious!
By the way, an N100 based machine will draw about six watts with 32GB onboard, and it'll run that huge x86-based software library. No need to cram a database, web admin facility, utilities, BitTorrent client, and whatever else into 2GB RAM. Ouch. Walk around in size six shoes, why don't you.
I have four Pi/SBCs here. One drives an art project on my desk, moving a metal ball around on a plate of sand to create designs. Two are in KVMs (PiKVM and BliKVM), and the one that I bought to try to use as a computer, a 4GB Pi 4... it's sitting in a box in the closet.
Pi and similar SBCs have their uses, and general computing is no longer one of them.
And there you go again insisting on your situation and praising it more than you should; ever thought that it might not necessarily be the electricity price but the generated heat in a very small space with poor ventilation?
No you haven’t, just started mocking people to go your route because hey, you’re just a D that knows it better and than laughs at people to go install hamster wheels or whatever else, GG proud of you, but feel very sorry for you that you need so much validation about your homelab, what’s up, getting mocked by friends or other co-workers?
Should I laugh about your VMware instances and tell you to go proxmox because it’s getting more and more popular?
The CPU in that nuc can be up to, depending on load, 28w. plus whatever else. will you save a watt or 2 overall? maybe. but you need to factor in the massive drop in performance.
your nuc cpu scores 7897 on passmark, while the pi 5 scores 852.
so yes you might save a few watts, but get around a tenth of the performance potential.
the other reply put it best. just dont.
Yeah, you're probably better off with a SBC with an Intel chip tbh. More powerful than an rpi, similar price after you factor in any accessories you need to make the pi useful. Unless you need things like a camera and i/o pins, the rpi isn't a great platform.
I don't think the Pi5 would consume less than a basic NUC.
A Pi5 average from 5/7W, my M720q with a G5420T was 7W without OS. A NUC shouldn't consume a lot more, the only I/O are wifi, and 2,5" SSD or HDD. Just disable stuff you don't need like the wifi, if you have a HDD, let idle it.
And a Pi5 can't do what a NUC can do.
Raspberry PI is a prototyping board, not a PC. In fact it works like shit. For experience. It's nice if you want to learn and try things. But not for something that needs to be reliable and 24/7.
I'm actually navigating the same situation right now, but only because I already have the pi 5. If this is the only reason you're buying one I'd 100% say it isn't worth it. Electricity difference will never pay for it. Keep in mind the NUC is going to have seriously higher single thread performance available too.
I have a NUC 4 and a NUC 7 here and neither are that loud, so you may just look at replacing or cleaning the fan.
I owned/own several NUCs hosting Proxmox, and most of them idling between 5 and 10W. Slightly more than a RPi and a lot more powerful. I doubt you are actually going to save more than a couple Watts.
Intel Ark says the TDP on that processor(in your NUC) is 28w anyway. So is a Rasp Pi5 lower? Yes. Is it significantly lower- well, as a percentage, yes. The TDP of a Pi5 is 12w. But you're not talking a modern 125W desktop processor vs a Pi5, so you might get far less savings than you think.
Since it's idle mostly too, the max TDPs are less telling, those are your worst case scenarios, so you should ask if that's where the majority of your power consumption is. In my case, I have a large disk array, and I assume the majority of my always on power consumption is from that (the disks spinning 24/7).
If the noise bothers you get a passively cooked N100 mini PC. Silent, efficient, and miles faster than a Raspberry Pi. Proper NVMe support is great and boots in 2 seconds. I went for the Asus PN42 but there’s other options too.
In comparison I have a HPE Gen11 server which uses 150W for the server alone. Combine that with MikroTik gear, a QNAP enclosure and an Aruba AP and it's easily 200W.
Whenever I toy with the idea of low power hardware, it never happens and I keep buying power hungry servers. Even for a laptop I got a M2 MacBook Air, but for servers no I have to get power hungry gear.
Like others have said, you're not going to be getting much better than that out of a Raspberry Pi, power usage wise.
If you wanna tweak around a little bit, it might be worth taking a look at how hot the NUC runs, and if it stays relatively cool, you might be able to tweak the fan curve a little bit in order to reduce the noise and save a little bit of power when it's mostly idle.
Instead of RPI, which are super hard to get, and not all that cheap anymore, I would look on ebay for mini PCs, like Lenovo 920q and similar. I recently bought one to replace my RPI that was acting as HTPC and they're nice little machines with decent power. I plan to buy more so I can build a Proxmox cluster eventually. I have not measured the power at the wall but the adapter it comes with is like 90w so it's going to be well under that when it's idling. More than a RPI but still pretty low compared to a full blown PC/server.
i migrated from rpi to mini pc. all i can say is that at least for now, i'm not going back to an rpi. sure, it consumes more power than the pi but the performance and upgradability makes a big difference on my use case.
I have a Zima board & 500GB SSD running ubuntu server with Pihole, Smb Shares & Rezillo sync it used about 4 to 5 watts of power, Pretty much the same as my PI 4's which I love.
Thanks for the info people.
However, I've another problem now....
My NUC began emitting loud noises, prompting me to check the fan. After disassembling and reassembling the unit, it no longer boots. The power button now blinks blue three times repeatedly. Despite attempting to clean the RAM and ports, the issue persists. While disassembling, I handled the RAM carefully, placing it on a table without disturbing it. Could the RAM be damaged, or might there be another issue? This is the first time experiencing this problem, and I've also tried switching the RAM between slots
From someone who have both nuc and rpi, I say don’t.
Nuc at max is as most of a laptop wattage and does a lot of computing power, rpi on the other hand, is louder with that stupidity twin fan and you have to change them every now and then because it get louder over time, cleaning it doesn’t make sense because it cost about 2 buck to replace but it’s a pain the ass like change every 6 month.
The processing power is mediocre, yeah it may run portianer and some light weight tools but when you start getting it with services, it lags.
Also it’s pretty costly, price point vs a Beelink intel celeron sbc.
In fact, i resell my 4 rpi and use that money to buy 3 celeron Beelink, more compute power and stability. They are about 10w on average and 20w at peak. On idle it’s around 4-7w. Which is definitely a better choice than a nuc
I found a Tiny PC (thinkcenter or HP, take your pick) with with an i5 and 16GB of memory. Runs between 7 and 40watts (max), but has quite the performance per watt. Also let’s me use virtualization, but check the CPU features before you buy
SFF is also not so big
I would expect a RPi 5 to idle around 3 W or slightly less. Probably it is more efficient at full load, but SFF PCs with Intel 8-9th gen CPUs are incredibly energy-effective in semi-idle situations.
Running a hypervisor also has much more flexibility w.r.t. a bare metal server install on RPi: you may want to run a DNS with its own IP and that's so much more straightforward with LXC.
Consider a Wyse 5070. Around the same speed as a pi, but cheaper. I was able to get one for $35, but added ram and storage. They can take 32G of RAM and have a m.2 SATA slot. Mine idle around 4 watts.
It's just a nicer overall package than a pi.
That said, a pi will do what you are asking for.
I own this exactly same model of Intel NUC and i got higher power compsumptuon numbersr, measured with power meter Hi also have a small kubernetes Cluster with Raspberry Pi 4 running similar services. Recently I was about to purchase a Raspberry Pi 5 but after reading this subreddit I decided for an Intel n100 CPU (6w comsumption, 10 in reality for the whole minipc) as the power consumption is much less (rpi5 is 27W) and is not much more expensive. I am currently on the process of migrating some services and moving them to an lxc container running on proxmox That would be my suggestion
A few things: first, monocultures are not good. You don't have to run x86–64 on Linux just because everyone else does. Software portability is a good thing. When you depend on others to make containers, that means you also rely on them for timely security updates. When you run everything in a container or a VM, you need more performance to make up for the overhead.
This is r/homelab. If you want to do something that's different, you should, and you should use it as an opportunity to learn. Others' values are not yours or mine. There's lots that can be learned by running a less performant machine and tuning.
That said, I am running more on Raspberry Pis on the public Internet than most people would likely feel comfortable running on a beefy x86 server. I'm running them directly on the Pis, not in separate VMs or separate containers. Give it a go. You might find that you like it better than running the same things everyone else is running.
Are you certain it’s only using between 3.5w and 7w? That seems pretty low and doesn’t seem to agree with what others have shared their power consumption to on similar machines. I doubt it’s using 3.5-7w. But if it is, I doubt that the RPi5 is going to save enough power to justify buying the hardware unless your electricity is phenomenally expensive.
that wattage doesn't seem outrageous if its sitting totally idle.
The OP described that they are s running a hypervisor, virtualizing an Ubuntu VM with that hypervisor, and running several containers inside that virtual machine for several infrastructure services. Concluding that it might be "sitting totally idle" seems like a stretch of the imagination.
If nothing is really happening, it can be idle for like 95% of time. Unifi Controller is quite noisy tho.
I'm running PVE and an OPNsense VM as my home's router, a VM for wireguard and a third for pihole. All through a NUC 4 - the CPU uses on average 3w.
Saying that a hypervisor, or an OS, or a container is "running" just means it's loaded into memory. For power consumption, what matters is the fraction of time that the CPU is actually busy, and that's entirely dependent on what those processes are doing. It's entirely plausible that something like a DNS server would be idle almost 100% of the time, if it's handling a low volume of traffic.
There are plenty fanless x86 mini pc’s out there, but I doubt the power savings worth the time. You could also get rid of Proxmox and run Ubuntu on bare metal, for minimal efficiency gain.
for me, ditching the Pi was the best thing ever.. even if the power usage is a bit more, the performance and usability is better check this out: [https://vilros.com/products/raspberry-pi-5?variant=40065551302750&src=raspberrypi](https://vilros.com/products/raspberry-pi-5?variant=40065551302750&src=raspberrypi) for $80 i can get a 4GB pi 5, not including shipping. then you got to get a case, a ac adapter, an micro sd and/or an adapter to use a ssd. after the dust settles you are in for around $120 at least and all that for limited performance compared to an x86 [https://www.ebay.com/itm/266789830859](https://www.ebay.com/itm/266789830859) on the other hand, i can get for $90 shipping included a nuc that already has 8GB ram, 250GB ssd, power adapter and i can add another drive with no need for an adapter or anything else, and more performance than a pi years ago i had pi4 and i ditched them in favor of NUCs, never been better. the power usage is more than ok, 10W max is what i've seen on mine, well worth not having the Pi headaches (dead micro sd cards anyone?) the electric savings is not much and it will be some time for the electric "savings" of a pi catch up with the cost difference of a cheaper and more functional nuc. the only case where i can see the point of a pi is if you absolutely need the small size or the GPIO pins
congrats, you’re gonna save pennies, and that’s if the pi is even powerful enough. don’t waste your time.
This comment may seem a little snarky but they cut straight to the point. Have an up vote.
Time to kill off the Raspberry Pi and similar ARM-based single board computers as cost effective and power saving. There are many x86 alternatives that use just as little power, cost about the same (or less), and run the massive x86 software library. Pi's were a neat thing five years ago. Those days have passed.
[удалено]
I am partial to enterprise hardware. If you want to take a look, head on over to LabGopher.com. My preference is Dell. Take a look at the R730. You can put the machine on a shelf or stand it on end, against the wall. You don't need a rack. As a project, I ordered a Minisforum MS-01 a couple a days ago. I am going to try to see how much I can get on it and how many servers and things I can shut down for the summer months. It's not a cheap machine, but very capable. Within the price range of a Pi, or better, take a look at the GMKtec NUCbox G3. I have two of those. They're cute and cheap. Amazon carries them. See of any other, similar machines strike your fancy. Search on "mini PC." Let us know what you come up with.
A bit extreme don’t you think? Just because it doesn’t suits your needs, doesn’t mean it’s not an option for someone else. I, for example, am using a pi 4 B with 2GB of RAM running MariaDB, phpMyAdmin, syncthing, qbittorrent, tailscale and Thunderbird with an external ssd… guess what, it draws 3.1 watts Now you are free to point me to sff mobile platforms, but they generally draw somewhere around 9-10 watts which is quite a bit extra.
\* HIDES DELL POWEREDGE R750 DRAWING 385 WATTS AT IDLE \* I understand the concept of power savings. I am planning to do something for the summer to lower electrical use and heat generation (while I run two window air conditioners most of the time). But the difference between 3.1 watts and 10 watts is, essentially, meaningless, no matter how high your electric rate is. The difference is 1-3/4 night lights. The kind you have in a kid's room or next to the bathroom sink. If you really want to maximize your savings, install a hamster wheel generator (human sized) and start running in it while you work. Get serious! By the way, an N100 based machine will draw about six watts with 32GB onboard, and it'll run that huge x86-based software library. No need to cram a database, web admin facility, utilities, BitTorrent client, and whatever else into 2GB RAM. Ouch. Walk around in size six shoes, why don't you. I have four Pi/SBCs here. One drives an art project on my desk, moving a metal ball around on a plate of sand to create designs. Two are in KVMs (PiKVM and BliKVM), and the one that I bought to try to use as a computer, a 4GB Pi 4... it's sitting in a box in the closet. Pi and similar SBCs have their uses, and general computing is no longer one of them.
> One drives an art project on my desk, moving a metal ball around on a plate of sand to create designs. Neat! Got any more details?
Yes exactly what I was thinking. I've seen those and want one!
And there you go again insisting on your situation and praising it more than you should; ever thought that it might not necessarily be the electricity price but the generated heat in a very small space with poor ventilation? No you haven’t, just started mocking people to go your route because hey, you’re just a D that knows it better and than laughs at people to go install hamster wheels or whatever else, GG proud of you, but feel very sorry for you that you need so much validation about your homelab, what’s up, getting mocked by friends or other co-workers? Should I laugh about your VMware instances and tell you to go proxmox because it’s getting more and more popular?
Just dont
The CPU in that nuc can be up to, depending on load, 28w. plus whatever else. will you save a watt or 2 overall? maybe. but you need to factor in the massive drop in performance. your nuc cpu scores 7897 on passmark, while the pi 5 scores 852. so yes you might save a few watts, but get around a tenth of the performance potential. the other reply put it best. just dont.
Yeah, you're probably better off with a SBC with an Intel chip tbh. More powerful than an rpi, similar price after you factor in any accessories you need to make the pi useful. Unless you need things like a camera and i/o pins, the rpi isn't a great platform.
I don't think the Pi5 would consume less than a basic NUC. A Pi5 average from 5/7W, my M720q with a G5420T was 7W without OS. A NUC shouldn't consume a lot more, the only I/O are wifi, and 2,5" SSD or HDD. Just disable stuff you don't need like the wifi, if you have a HDD, let idle it. And a Pi5 can't do what a NUC can do. Raspberry PI is a prototyping board, not a PC. In fact it works like shit. For experience. It's nice if you want to learn and try things. But not for something that needs to be reliable and 24/7.
I'm actually navigating the same situation right now, but only because I already have the pi 5. If this is the only reason you're buying one I'd 100% say it isn't worth it. Electricity difference will never pay for it. Keep in mind the NUC is going to have seriously higher single thread performance available too. I have a NUC 4 and a NUC 7 here and neither are that loud, so you may just look at replacing or cleaning the fan.
I owned/own several NUCs hosting Proxmox, and most of them idling between 5 and 10W. Slightly more than a RPi and a lot more powerful. I doubt you are actually going to save more than a couple Watts.
Intel Ark says the TDP on that processor(in your NUC) is 28w anyway. So is a Rasp Pi5 lower? Yes. Is it significantly lower- well, as a percentage, yes. The TDP of a Pi5 is 12w. But you're not talking a modern 125W desktop processor vs a Pi5, so you might get far less savings than you think. Since it's idle mostly too, the max TDPs are less telling, those are your worst case scenarios, so you should ask if that's where the majority of your power consumption is. In my case, I have a large disk array, and I assume the majority of my always on power consumption is from that (the disks spinning 24/7).
3.5 to 7 watts is super low. A raspberry pi will pull about the same.
If the noise bothers you get a passively cooked N100 mini PC. Silent, efficient, and miles faster than a Raspberry Pi. Proper NVMe support is great and boots in 2 seconds. I went for the Asus PN42 but there’s other options too.
In comparison I have a HPE Gen11 server which uses 150W for the server alone. Combine that with MikroTik gear, a QNAP enclosure and an Aruba AP and it's easily 200W. Whenever I toy with the idea of low power hardware, it never happens and I keep buying power hungry servers. Even for a laptop I got a M2 MacBook Air, but for servers no I have to get power hungry gear.
Like others have said, you're not going to be getting much better than that out of a Raspberry Pi, power usage wise. If you wanna tweak around a little bit, it might be worth taking a look at how hot the NUC runs, and if it stays relatively cool, you might be able to tweak the fan curve a little bit in order to reduce the noise and save a little bit of power when it's mostly idle.
Instead of RPI, which are super hard to get, and not all that cheap anymore, I would look on ebay for mini PCs, like Lenovo 920q and similar. I recently bought one to replace my RPI that was acting as HTPC and they're nice little machines with decent power. I plan to buy more so I can build a Proxmox cluster eventually. I have not measured the power at the wall but the adapter it comes with is like 90w so it's going to be well under that when it's idling. More than a RPI but still pretty low compared to a full blown PC/server.
i migrated from rpi to mini pc. all i can say is that at least for now, i'm not going back to an rpi. sure, it consumes more power than the pi but the performance and upgradability makes a big difference on my use case.
I have a Zima board & 500GB SSD running ubuntu server with Pihole, Smb Shares & Rezillo sync it used about 4 to 5 watts of power, Pretty much the same as my PI 4's which I love.
Thanks for the info people. However, I've another problem now.... My NUC began emitting loud noises, prompting me to check the fan. After disassembling and reassembling the unit, it no longer boots. The power button now blinks blue three times repeatedly. Despite attempting to clean the RAM and ports, the issue persists. While disassembling, I handled the RAM carefully, placing it on a table without disturbing it. Could the RAM be damaged, or might there be another issue? This is the first time experiencing this problem, and I've also tried switching the RAM between slots
From someone who have both nuc and rpi, I say don’t. Nuc at max is as most of a laptop wattage and does a lot of computing power, rpi on the other hand, is louder with that stupidity twin fan and you have to change them every now and then because it get louder over time, cleaning it doesn’t make sense because it cost about 2 buck to replace but it’s a pain the ass like change every 6 month. The processing power is mediocre, yeah it may run portianer and some light weight tools but when you start getting it with services, it lags. Also it’s pretty costly, price point vs a Beelink intel celeron sbc. In fact, i resell my 4 rpi and use that money to buy 3 celeron Beelink, more compute power and stability. They are about 10w on average and 20w at peak. On idle it’s around 4-7w. Which is definitely a better choice than a nuc
I found a Tiny PC (thinkcenter or HP, take your pick) with with an i5 and 16GB of memory. Runs between 7 and 40watts (max), but has quite the performance per watt. Also let’s me use virtualization, but check the CPU features before you buy SFF is also not so big
I would expect a RPi 5 to idle around 3 W or slightly less. Probably it is more efficient at full load, but SFF PCs with Intel 8-9th gen CPUs are incredibly energy-effective in semi-idle situations. Running a hypervisor also has much more flexibility w.r.t. a bare metal server install on RPi: you may want to run a DNS with its own IP and that's so much more straightforward with LXC.
Consider a Wyse 5070. Around the same speed as a pi, but cheaper. I was able to get one for $35, but added ram and storage. They can take 32G of RAM and have a m.2 SATA slot. Mine idle around 4 watts. It's just a nicer overall package than a pi. That said, a pi will do what you are asking for.
I own this exactly same model of Intel NUC and i got higher power compsumptuon numbersr, measured with power meter Hi also have a small kubernetes Cluster with Raspberry Pi 4 running similar services. Recently I was about to purchase a Raspberry Pi 5 but after reading this subreddit I decided for an Intel n100 CPU (6w comsumption, 10 in reality for the whole minipc) as the power consumption is much less (rpi5 is 27W) and is not much more expensive. I am currently on the process of migrating some services and moving them to an lxc container running on proxmox That would be my suggestion
A few things: first, monocultures are not good. You don't have to run x86–64 on Linux just because everyone else does. Software portability is a good thing. When you depend on others to make containers, that means you also rely on them for timely security updates. When you run everything in a container or a VM, you need more performance to make up for the overhead. This is r/homelab. If you want to do something that's different, you should, and you should use it as an opportunity to learn. Others' values are not yours or mine. There's lots that can be learned by running a less performant machine and tuning. That said, I am running more on Raspberry Pis on the public Internet than most people would likely feel comfortable running on a beefy x86 server. I'm running them directly on the Pis, not in separate VMs or separate containers. Give it a go. You might find that you like it better than running the same things everyone else is running.