Beelink EQi 304 Mini PC Review – Power Consumption

This new series looks at the Beelink EQi Core 3 304 mini PC running Linux. In this series, I’ll put the Beelink mini PC through its paces from a Linux perspective, comparing it with other systems to see how it performs in real-world Linux use.

The Beelink EQi Core 3 304 is a recent addition to Beelink’s EQ range of compact PCs. It’s built around Intel’s Wildcat Lake Core 3 304 processor, a 5-core, 5-thread chip comprising one performance core and four low-power efficiency cores. The processor integrates Xe3-LPG graphics and currently has a CPU Mark score of 11,720. The review unit comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 6400MT/s memory and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage, giving the system a capable hardware base for everyday desktop use, office work, media playback and lighter Linux workloads.

In this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Beelink EQi 304 mini PC. I’ll compare it with ten mini PCs and two desktop machines.

The Beelink EQi 304 is exceptionally frugal at idle. With the screens switched off, it consumes just 5.5W, the lowest figure in the chart and 1W less than the N100 system. With the screens active, consumption rises only to 6.9W, placing it joint-lowest and still slightly below the N100’s 7.2W.

That is particularly impressive given the Core 3 304’s 15W TDP, substantially higher than the N100’s 6W rating. TDP reflects the processor’s expected thermal load under sustained activity rather than its minimum power consumption, and the results show that the EQi 304 can enter very efficient low-power states when idle. It offers considerably more processing performance than an N100 system without imposing a corresponding idle-power penalty.

Notes about the chart:

• The chart measures the power consumption of each system, not just the CPU.
• The i5-12400F machine uses a dedicated graphics card, whereas the other machines all have integrated graphics. Power consumption at idle is much higher with a dedicated graphics card; in this case, an ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.
• The BOSGAME VTA-439, BOSGAME M7, BOSGAME M4 Plus, Minisforum AI X1 Pro, Minisforum MS-02 Ultra, i5-12400F, and i5-10400 machines offer BIOS power management options. These options are enabled.
• The Power Saver power profile is used.
• The machines are running Ubuntu.

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: