Low power office computer?
 

I am looking for some suggestions on possible upgrades. My wife has an old quite inefficient computer setup that she has been using. It is an Athlon X3 455 which has a 95W TDP. The thing sucks down over 100W at idle and 200W loaded. It performs fine for her, but I am casually looking to upgrade it. There are now 10W TDP chips that are quite a bit faster haha. Increased speed isn't a huge priority, but power consumption is. I've been looking at some of the mini PCs that run the Celeron J4105 or J4125. These are both 10W processors. Even an Athlon 200GE would be a sizable upgrade with its 35W TDP.

So, I am looking for suggestions. I am quite comfortable building the computer. I'd actually prefer some older used hardware if possible like the Lenovo M93P which sports a I5-4570T 35W TDP, but that's not an absolute. I am also open to other solutions, but it has to run Windows 10 as that is what she is used to.

For energy efficiency computing .. For several years I've had good luck with the Lenovo Ideapad 100 series.

Laptops are usually the best bang for the energy they use because they are a package designed to run off of a small battery for as long as possible. Usually a machine with built-in graphics versus a dedicated graphics card and a display that is about 15" or smaller will often be a reasonably low power usage. I'm currently shopping for a new laptop but with the microchip shortage going on it seems laptops and desktops are going for $100 or so more than the price they were this time last year for the same technology. ..usually prices go down or you get newer technology for the same price, but at the moment that's not the case. Apparently the graphics card market is taking a large share of the market share for crypto mining operations.

something like an intel NUC is a good place to look as well. you can pick them up on ebay for a song.

Ryzen and Intel Xe are the only integrated graphics worth buying nowadays for a new x86 machine. You can also consider some of the higher end ARM boards out there, the Pi 4 works great for regular office work.

If you're OK buying used, you might be able to find a great deal on used Thinkpads.

While it's true the Raspberry Pi 4B is a very powerful 4 gig ARM based 64-bit computer. I think you'd be leaving quite a bit out if you don't mention that it's not going to run like a standard computer.

ARM based chips don't run your Windows 10 or Mac OS the same. The instruction set is a limiting factor and it requires the Windows 10 IoT operating system that doesn't have the standard GUI and basically allows a single application at a time. ..not quite the Windows you would be used to and the supported applications are also not that plentiful either. The best bet is to use Linux with it, but you would want to be sure all of the software you want to run on it has a compiled version for the ARM chip

With those limitations aside, it is a very low power consumption computer and dirt cheap for the performance you get.

I agree with NiHaoMike about Intel Iris Xe or AMDs integrated graphics, these will save power versus a dedicated graphics card designed for gaming, video editing, and other graphics processing.

Low power office computer?
 

Agreed. While newer chips have a better power-to-watt ratio, even the i7 in the seven dollar Ideapad Y570 I most recently picked up at a charity shop benchmarks at double the speed of your Athlon. The hinge is a bit wonky and I had to put a $21 SSD in it, but the price was right and it makes a good Linux 'desktop' when coupled with an external monitor, mouse and keyboard. It idles at 12 watts with the lid closed and peaks at 75. I've also picked up newer laptops with better Windows 10 driver support for under $25.

I have a M93p Tiny with the i5 4570T that I use as a Plex and file server, along with playing media on my TV. It uses about 10-13w at idle and I think peaks at 40-45w from the wall. Prices have gone up a little since I got mine (along with most hardware), one of those mini PCs with the Celerons you listed would be tempting if the difference is ~$50 or less. The one reviewed in this video is $180 on Amazon, not bad for that amount of performance in a tiny box.

I compiled a list of CPUs that I think would be some okay fits. R20 and R15 are Cinebench benchmarks for single and multi-core. I am really liking the idea of the J4000 series Celerons and Pentiums. The idea of the Asrock ITX boards with integrated processor is quite appealing. She does have a 3.5" HDD for photo storage that has to fit up to it otherwise I really do like the Lark Box Pro. Still looking for other suggestions. Thanks guys!

https://ecorenovator.org/forum/attac...1&d=1614446423

FYI the modern pentium/celeron branded chips have a lot disabled, even certain instructions. i would hunt for an i3 before going to one of those.

The i5 4570T in my M93p scored 299 single core and 695 multi in Cinebench R20, if you want to add that to your chart.

You could use a USB enclosure for your 3.5" drive. For my M93p, I have a 2.5" SSD inside for the boot drive and a USB 3 hard drive for storage.

Thanks for that vskid! I would have guessed it would have done better than the 200GE and 3000G. But, I could not find those numbers anywhere.

Do you know what other CPUs can be put into the M93P?

It looks like the only other CPU it came with was the i7-4765T, not sure if anything else would be supported.

Is your ultimate goal the lowest possible energy usage or saving money upfront and long term? I recently got an HP Z220 SFF that I have an i5-3550 and GTX 1050 Ti in. It idles and even plays Youtube at 25-30w with spikes to 40-60w when doing tasks like opening programs or loading webpages (highest I've seen is about 100w in games, I wouldn't be surprised if it could hit 130w). So most office computers from the last ~5 years should get you better performance and power usage. Your monitor(s) might become the bigger energy user at that point.

My goal is to find a slightly faster computer that has drastically lower power consumption. Money input into this would ideally be minimal after selling the old equipment. Saving money in power usage really isn't a big deal. She doesn't use it a massive amount and she is good about turning it off. Another part is that it is a fun project for me because I like tinkering and finding out what else is out there. Before looking into this I didn't even know celerons were still a thing, and I didn't know about the micro / mini PCs. I'd love to try a Pi4, but I really don't think that would fit her well. But, it was great to find out that you can actually do it.

I did get a message from Redpoint on EcoModder. He is going to ship me his old i5-3570k setup. We'll see what I can do with it to get its idle power draw down. I think he said it idles around 35W. With a K series CPU I know you can overclock them, so perhaps I can undervolt this one? I'm not sure if its an OE brand or what. I suppose I could still use Intel XTU to tweak that though. So, once I get it I'll still do some tweaking to lower its power consumption a bit more.

if you don't need a big GPU, the NUC has a 25W power brick. full load under that idle. depends on what you want.

I got the computer with the i5-3570K from Redpoint5 just the other day. Big thanks to Redpoint for the generosity! It arrived mostly intact, with only a little bit of shipping roughage, but nothing that can't be quickly solved. The system will need a quick cleaning up (dust), but looks to be put together with nice quality products for the most part. That was a very pleasant surprise. This is much better IMO than a HP or Dell. After I get that taken care of we'll measure the power draw and see what we can do lower that power consumption.

https://ecorenovator.org/forum/attac...1&d=1616357472

https://ecorenovator.org/forum/attac...1&d=1616357500

I just went a couple of rounds with a mobo/processor/memory rig like that. I believe it was the same processor, maybe not the k version. Intel desktop board with a skull on it. The eyes light up to indicate hard drive activity.

I needed to get windows 10 on my htpc, since the streaming service providers only send surround sound audio if you are using their windows 10 app. I figured hey, why not upgrade the whole thing?

Once I swapped motherboards, the Intel board refused to boot anything. I tried a gaggle of methods. System would post, bios working great, then it would hang at error code 00. Screen showed a 0 and that's all folks.

I finally figured out that all the graphics cards I have are too new. Board has no onboard video, so until I find a 12 year old video card, I'm stuck. I put the old motherboard back in the case and loaded up a fresh windows 10 on it.

I've been playing with the new to me computer setup and am quite happy with it. Performance is definitely superior and power consumption is light years ahead of the older computer despite only being 2 years newer technology (2010 vs 2012).

After some tweaking, I was able to get idle power consumption down to about 28W. All the readings were taken via a killawatt from the wall, so it is total system power draw. Here is the process I went through:

stock idle - 33W
unplug DVD drive - 31W
swap out bronze 500W to 350W gold rated power supply - 29W
add wifi card - 29W
add HDD - 29-30W

I then started to undervolt the processor. It did quite a great job and is pretty stable at -.18V though I think I may need to increase that to -.17V. My wife mentioned it crashed once on her today. But, all these settings were tested with a cinebench run.
-.03V - 29W
-.05V - 29W
-.10V - 29W
-.15V - 28W
-.18V - 28W
-.20V - crash

While poking around in the bios for undervolting, I also increased the sleep state from S1 to S3 and went from 26W sleeping down to 2W when sleeping.

Finally, I did also monitor power usage while benchmarking in cinebench. At stock it was using about 82W. After the undervolting it dropped it down quite a bit to 70W with the same performance. I did not underclock it, but its possible I could get power consumption down even further. Of course this would sacrifice performance.

I am very happy with these results. The old computer idled around 100W and the new one now runs about 28W at idle. So, the new computer uses less power at full load than the old one did while idling! Also, if my wife leaves the computer on by accident (which is rare), its not guzzling power all night long.

I also did take a months worth of power usage and it really isn't a ton. In the past 30ish days her old computer used about 9 kWh. I'll probably throw the killawatt on it and check the new one in a month.