Electricity Costs
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 |
|---|---|---|
| OrangePI RV2 | 3.7 | £2.78 |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 4.9 | £3.68 |
| Banana Pi BPI-F3 | 5.6 | £4.21 |
| DreamQuest N100 CPU | 12.9 | £9.69 |
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 17.7 | £13.30 |
- 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.
- Where relevant the Balanced CPU governor is used with the exception of the single board computers. I find using the DreamQuest or NUC with the Power Saver CPU governor enabled greatly limits its usability in some basic tasks.
The next table shows the annual electricity cost with each machine headless running at idle. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| OrangePi RV2 | 2.5 | £5.63 |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 3.5 | £7.89 |
| Banana Pi BPI-F3 | 4.3 | £9.69 |
| DreamQuest N100 CPU | 6.5 | £14.65 |
| Mini PC Intel NUC 13 Pro i7-1360P CPU | 12.7 | £28.63 |
Specifications
A brief summary of my Banana Pi BPI-F3’s specifications.
| Banana Pi BPI-F3 | |
|---|---|
| Type | Embedded |
| Processor | SpacemiT K1 8 core RISC-V chip 8 Cores |
| Memory | 16GB LPDDR4 RAM |
| Disk | 128GB microSD card, 128GB eMMc module |
A brief summary of my OrangePi RV2’s specifications.
| Orange Pi RV2 | |
|---|---|
| Type | Embedded |
| Processor | Ky X1 RISC-V AI CPU 8 Cores |
| Memory | 4GB LPDDR4 RAM |
| Disk | 512GB microSD card, 64GB eMMc module |
Here’s the Pi 5’s specifications.
| Raspberry Pi 5 | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mobile |
| Processor | ARM Cortex-A76 CPU 4 Cores |
| Chipset | Broadcom BCM2712 System-on-Chip |
| Memory | 4GB LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM |
| Graphics | VideoCore VII GPU |
| Disk | 1TB Samsung 980 NVMe |
For reference, these are the specifications of the other machines featured in this article.
| 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 |
| Intel NUC 13 Pro | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mobile |
| 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 |
| Chipset | Intel Raptor Lake-P |
| Memory | 32GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 |
| Disk | 2TB TEAMGROUP NVMe |
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. |