Minisforum MS-02 Ultra 285HX running Linux – Power Consumption

Electricity Costs

PC power consumption matters in the UK, particularly because electricity costs remain high once the unit rate and standing charge are taken into account.

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 costs £0.2467, the current price cap from April 2026 in the UK.

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 storage, networking equipment, and any expansion cards installed in the MS-02 Ultra.

The next table shows the annual electricity cost with each machine running headless, idle, and permanently switched on. This information may be useful if you’re thinking of using the machine as a NAS server, virtualization host, or homelab system and want a baseline running cost. Again, I’m pricing a kWh at £0.2467, the average electricity unit rate under the April-June 2026 UK price cap.

For 24/7 use, the MS-02 Ultra needs careful consideration. It offers much more than a basic low-power mini PC, but that extra capability comes with higher baseline power consumption. If you simply need a very low-power always-on box for light services, an N100 system or one of the efficient AMD mini PCs will cost less to run.

But if you need multiple NVMe drives, high-speed networking, PCIe expansion, virtualization, or a compact workstation/server hybrid, the MS-02 Ultra is a much more capable platform. In that role, its power consumption is better judged against a conventional desktop workstation or small server rather than a simple mini PC.

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: