Electricity Costs
Here’s the running cost for each machine under light desktop usage.
To calculate the cost per year I assume each machine is used 8 hours a day under light usage. A kWh is £0.2573 (the current price cap from July 2025 in the UK).
| Computer | Wh | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Mini PC DreamQuest N100 CPU | 12.9 | £9.70 |
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 17.7 | £13.30 |
| Mini PC ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H | 25.1 | £18.86 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-10400 CPU | 32.1 | £24.12 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-12400 CPU (with dedicated graphics card) | 64.5 | £48.46 |
- The annual cost is the electricity cost of the computer only. To calculate the overall running costs, you’ll need to factor in peripherals such as monitors, speakers, external devices etc.
- Power management is enabled in the BIOS for the two desktop machines.
- The Balanced CPU governor is used.
The next table shows the annual electricity cost with each machine headless running at idle and permanently on. This information may be useful if you are thinking of using the machine say as a NAS server and want a baseline running cost. Again, I’m pricing a kWh at £0.2573 (the current price cap from July 2025 in the UK).
| Computer | Wh | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Mini PC DreamQuest N100 CPU | 6.5 | £14.65 |
| Mini PC ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H | 9.1 | £20.51 |
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 12.7 | £28.62 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-10400 CPU | 14.1 | £31.78 |
| Desktop PC Intel i5-12400 CPU (with dedicated graphics card) | 37.3 | £84.07 |
Specifications
Here’s the specifications of the ASRock NUC Box-255H.
| ASRock Industrial NUC Box-255H | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mobile |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 255H P-Core 2 GHz (Turbo 5.1 GHz) E-Core 1.5 GHz (Turbo 4.4 GHz) Low Power E-Core 700 MHz (Turbo 2.5 GHz) 16 Cores, 16 Threads 28W TDP (115W maximum turbo power) |
| Chipset | Intel Arrow Lake |
| Memory | 32GB DDR5 (5600 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel Arc 140T GPU |
| Disk | 2TB Fanxiang M.2 S880 NVMe |
DreamQuest N100’s specifications.
| DreamQuest N100 | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mobile |
| Processor | Intel N100 E-Core Turbo 3.40 GHz 4 E-Cores 6W TDP |
| Chipset | Intel Alder Lake-N |
| Memory | 16GB DDR4 |
| Graphics | Intel Alder Lake-N |
| Disk | 512GB CF400 M.2 2280 SATA SSD |
These are the specifications of the other machines featured in this article.
| Intel NUC 13 Pro | 12th Gen Intel PC | 10th Gen Intel PC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Mobile | Desktop | Desktop |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-1360P P-Core Turbo 5.00 GHz E-Core Turbo 3.70 GHz 4 P-Cores 8 threads 8 E-Cores | Intel Core i5-12400F 2.50GHz (Turbo 4.4 GHz) 6 P-Cores 12 threads | Intel Core i5-10400 2.90GHz (Turbo 4.30GHz) 6 P-Cores 12 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Raptor Lake-P | Intel Alder Lake | Intel Comet Lake |
| Memory | 32GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) | 32GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) | 32GB DDR4 (2666 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 | Asus NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti | Intel UHD Graphics 630 |
| Disk | 2TB TEAMGROUP NVMe | 1TB Samsung 980 NVMe 2TB Crucial SSD | 1TB Corsair MP400 NVMe |
The next article in the series will look at artificial intelligence on the NUC.
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 |