This is a series of articles looking at the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H running Linux. In this series, I examine every aspect of this Mini PC in detail from a Linux perspective. I’ll compare the machine with desktop PC counterparts along the way.
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H. I’ll see how the the computer (“BOX-255H”) compares to a couple of other mini PCs and a couple of desktop processors. Specifically, the Intel NUC i7-1360P (“i7-1360P”), DreamQuest Intel N100 (“N100”), and desktop machines with “i5-10400” and “i5-12400F” processors.
Let’s start with the machine at idle.
This is an excellent result for the ASROCK NUC BOX-255H. It uses less power than the other well specified machines yet it has the best CPU in the field. The cores run at a mere 400 MHz clock speed when the machine is idle.
The N100 machine has lower power consumption but that’s not surprising considering the processor.
The chart needs some explanation to put the results into context.
- The chart measures the power consumption of each system (not just the CPU).
- The i5-12400F machine hosts a dedicated graphics card, whereas the other machines all have onboard graphics. Power consumption even at idle is much higher with a dedicated graphics card, in this case an NVIDIA Asus RTX 3060 Ti. That graphics card, itself, consumes 11W with the machine at idle with two screens off, 21W idle with two screens on, as reported by nvidia-smi.
- Both the i5-12400F and i5-10400 machines offer BIOS power management options. This power management is enabled. The other machines don’t offer power management functionality.
- For the i5-10400 machine, the BIOS offers options to enable Asus Performance Enhancement as well as a Performance Mode. With both these options enabled, the PC idles at 22.2W and 24.9W with both screens off and on respectively. Having the power functionality disabled therefore makes a significant difference.
- The Power Saver CPU governor is used.
- The machines are running Ubuntu 25.04.
Next page: Page 2 – Power Consumption With Light usage
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Power Consumption With System Idle
Page 2 – Power Consumption With Light Usage
Page 3 – Power Consumption With CPU Stressed
Page 4 – Electricity Costs
Complete list of articles in this series:
| ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the NUC BOX-255H |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the NUC BOX-255H |
| Power | Testing and comparing the power consumption under various workloads |