this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
224 points (99.6% liked)
Hardware
4583 readers
63 users here now
All things related to technology hardware, with a focus on computing hardware.
Rules (Click to Expand):
-
Follow the Lemmy.world Rules - https://mastodon.world/about
-
Be kind. No bullying, harassment, racism, sexism etc. against other users.
-
No Spam, illegal content, or NSFW content.
-
Please stay on topic, adjacent topics (e.g. software) are fine if they are strongly relevant to technology hardware. Another example would be business news for hardware-focused companies.
-
Please try and post original sources when possible (as opposed to summaries).
-
If posting an archived version of the article, please include a URL link to the original article in the body of the post.
Some other hardware communities across Lemmy:
- Augmented Reality - !augmented_reality@lemmy.world
- Gaming Laptops - !gaminglaptops@lemmy.world
- Laptops - !laptops@lemmy.world
- Linux Hardware - !linuxhardware@programming.dev
- Mechanical Keyboards - !mechanical_keyboards@programming.dev
- Monitors - !monitors@piefed.social
- Raspberry Pi - !raspberry_pi@programming.dev
- Retro Computing - !retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
- Virtual Reality - !virtualreality@lemmy.world
Icon by "icon lauk" under CC BY 3.0
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you have a intels chip, you have nowadays an extra heater. i have now a full amd build just because linux compatibility and energy efficiency.
Unless it’s an Intel T model. I’ve built plenty of HTPCs and mini-PCs using passive coolers on them. Those are great.
You don't even need a T model for that. You can take a higher powered model and manually set the power limits to what the T model would use. This doesn't even come with that big of a performance hit either - for all the power Intel dumps into the K models, it's only gaining them a few percent in additional performance.
My entire Proxmox setup is all dell micro i5 T models. 35w, 64gb memory and room for a 2.5gbe addon. I love them.
With electricity being cheaper then gas, having an Intel powered space heater that doubles as a gaming PC is more cost effective to heat my gaming room.
/S
I like to do my video transcoding on cold winter days. That keeps it nice and warm under my desk.
I mean i dont know where you live, but the power bills are just getting higher and higher. Because of missmanaged energy grid of my country.
With solar is it cheaper.
Should get some batteries though...
I dont know from where you get all those cheap solar panels. On my house roof there is for 8 solar panels place and to get even with initial costs it would need to be 100% efficient for straight 5 years.
Australia. Kinda cheating in the solar arena.
I believe that Intel reaches lower idle power in general, but yes, not under load. I think the focus of the previous and next gen was on power use though, so we'll see what happens.
AMD (at older CPUs) do have pretty high idle power usage.
I have a battery system for my desktop (I live in Ukraine, russian our electricity system) and my 5800X desktop doesn't go below 140 W or so (with monitor being off and active background services on the HDDs).
Huh, interesting. I have an AMD ryzen 7 series and I've tested my power usage in the past. The whole system including 3 monitors iirc averaged 120 W. I might be misremembering but I don't think I'm off by much
All TDPs/max clocks can be tuned up and down, Intel just sets theirs ridiculously high out of the box. You can turn a 7950X into a space heater, or throttle the newest Intel chips to sip power.
Also, idle power is realy awful for my 7800X3D. It's way better with Intel.
...That being said, you are not wrong about linux compatibility. And the X3D chips in particular really hit a task energy sweet spot in the right workloads.
Does AMD make a good low power CPU? Have been thinking of getting an N150 mini PC. Low price and very low power usage. Use it for self hosting a bit.
From what I've seen, the lowest power (well, TDP) that AMD targets is 15-28W (e.g., AMD Ryzen™ AI 5 330). They do not really have an equivalent to the N-chips of intel, which are all Gracemont E-cores (severely cut down in performance). The zen 4c/5c cores are not really equivalent to the Intel E cores (much more powerful), hence they do not have a core that targets a low performance + low power target such as intel N100/N150. The competitor for those would be ARM.
ARM is a potential option, but x86 can be pretty nice to have.
The AI Max series is a beast and that with super low voltage + really good gaming, computing its just perfect. (See Framework desktop ) (For me a whole gaming pc, under 400 watts of power is a low powered pc. When a comparable intel + nvidia pc needs at least 700-900 watts
Not sure if you understood my message, looking for something that is low power usage. Like tens of watts peak. Not many hundreds of them.
I mean with intel you wont find that either
The N150 I was talking about in my initial comment
Maybe the A series?
You'll want one of their monolithic chips that's intended for laptops. They do sell some of these chips as desktop models, such as the APUs, but a lot of the mini-desktop AMD systems I've seen straight up use a mobile chip in them.
With that said, AMD doesn't really sell anything that competes directly with things like the N150.