BOSGAME VTA-439 Mini PC running Linux – Power Consumption

This is a new series looking at the BOSGAME VTA-439 Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 mini PC running Linux. In this series, I’ll put the BOSGAME mini PC through its paces from a Linux perspective, comparing it with other systems, including desktops, to see how it performs in real-world Linux use.

The BOSGAME VTA-439 is a recent addition to BOSGAME’s growing range of AI-focused mini PCs. It’s built around AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 processor, a 12-core, 24-thread chip with integrated Radeon 890M graphics and a CPU Mark score of 37,457. The review unit comes with 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, giving the system a strong hardware base for everyday desktop use, heavy multitasking, and more demanding Linux workloads.

For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the BOSGAME VTA-439 mini PC.

I’ll compare it with one mini workstation, eight mini PCs and two desktop machines: the Minisforum MS-02 Ultra with Core Ultra 9 285HX, Minisforum M2 with Core Ultra 7 356H, BOSGAME M7 with Core Ultra 9 285H, BOSGAME M4 Plus with Ryzen 9 7940HS, Minisforum UM890 Pro with Ryzen 9 8945HS, BOSGAME M6 with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H with Core Ultra 7 255H, Intel NUC with Core i7-1360P, DreamQuest Intel N100, and desktop machines with Core i5-10400 and Core i5-12400F processors.

Let’s start with idle power consumption.

The VTA-439 performs extremely well at idle. With the screens off, it draws just 6.4W, putting it almost level with the Intel N100 system, despite the N100 being a far slower platform. With the screens on, the VTA-439 still only rises to 7.4W. This underlines why TDP is a poor way to judge idle power consumption. A high-performance processor does not automatically mean high idle draw, and a low-power processor does not guarantee a more efficient system. What matters at idle is how well the whole platform enters and maintains low-power states. On that front, the VTA-439 is very impressive.

Notes about the chart:

• 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 at idle is much higher with a dedicated graphics card; in this case, an NVIDIA ASUS RTX 3060 Ti.
• The idle figures for the 285HX machine include the power consumption of its 25GbE network card, which by itself accounts for roughly 10W.
• 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: