This is a new series of articles focusing on RISC-V single board computers running Linux. One set of articles concentrates on the Banana Pi BPI-F3, an industrial-grade RISC-V development board with SpacemiT K1 8-core RISC-V AI CPU, providing 2TOPs CPU fusion of general-purpose computing power to support rapid deployment of AI model algorithms.
The Banana Pi BPI-F3 is a low cost RISC-V single board computer designed to be an affordable option for those interested in exploring RISC-V technology. We write a lot about open source software. But open source hardware is just as exciting. I’m testing the 16GB RAM model.
For this article in this series, I’ll focus on the power consumption of the Banana Pi BPI-F3. I’ll see how this board compares to a few other single board computers.
The chart below shows the power consumption of the Banana Pi BPI-F3, compared to the OrangePi RV2 (also RISC-V based), as well as the Raspberry Pi 5, DreamQuest N100, and the Intel NUC (i7-1360P) when each machine is running idle.
As you can see, the Banana Pi BPI-F3’s power consumption when idling is extremely low, although slightly higher than both the OrangePi RV2 (RISC-V) and the Raspberry Pi 5 (ARM).
The chart needs explanations to put the results into context.
- The chart measures the power consumption of each system (not only the CPU). It doesn’t include the power drawn by a monitor.
- All the machines have onboard graphics only.
- None of the machines have power management functionality built into the BIOS.
- The DreamQuest and Intel Mini PCs are using the Power Saver CPU governor. The Banana Pi BPI-F3, OrangePi RV2 and Pi 5 are using their default settings with no underclocking. When idle the Pi 5 runs at 1500 MHz. The OrangePi RV2 and Banana Pi BPI-F3 runs at 1600 MHz.
- WiFi and Bluetooth are enabled on all machines. It’s possible to shave a little off the results but most users will probably want the standard settings enabled.
- The Banana Pi BPI-F3 is running Bianbu OS 24.04, the RV2 is running Ubuntu 24.04.2 (Noble Numbat) The Pi 5 is running the Raspberry Pi OS (which is based on Debian 12). The other 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 / Specifications
All articles in the series:
| Banana Pi BPI-F3 | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the Banana Pi BPI-F3 |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Banana Pi BPI-F3 Single Board Computer |
| Power Consumption | When idling, general desktop usage, and stressed. |