lab notes

Measuring idle power on an N100 mini PC

2026-06-02 · hardware

I wanted to know what the small box in the corner really costs per year, so I put a cheap plug-in power meter in front of it for a week.

Numbers

• Idle, screen off: about 6 W.
• Light use, a few containers: 8–10 W.
• All cores busy: around 22 W.

Enabling ASPM in the BIOS and running powertop --auto-tune once at boot saved roughly 1.5 W at idle. Over a year that is small, but it was free.