This is the fourth article in a new series looking at a very interesting piece of kit from the folks at Orange Pi. It’s the Orange Pi 6 Plus development board.
This board is very different to the single-board computers I’ve previously covered. For example, it has a 12 core 64 bit ARMv9 processor with a total computing power of 45 TOPS (CPU/GPU/NPU).
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Orange Pi 6 Plus. While the Pi 6 Plus is a SBC, I’m not going to compare its power consumption with other SBCs. As demonstrated by my benchmarks article, the Orange Pi 6 Plus vastly outperforms the vast majority of SBCs. It’s therefore more appropriate to compare its power consumption to machines with similar performance. I will examine its power consumption against a variety of Intel based machines including three mini PCs and two desktop computers.
Let’s start with the power consumption when each machine is idling.
The Orange Pi 6’s results are good but not as low as I hoped. Bear in mind that with the exception of the N100 machines, the other machines are much more expensive.
The chart needs some explanation to put the results into context.
- 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 use onboard graphics. Power consumption even at idle is much higher with a dedicated graphics card, in this case an NVIDIA Asus RTX 3060 Ti. That graphics card, itself, consumes 13W with the machine at idle with two screens off, 21W idle with two screens on, as reported by nvidia-smi.
- Both the i5-12400F and i5-10400 machines offer good BIOS power management options. This power management is enabled for this particular test. The other machines don’t have power management functionality.
- For the i5-10400 machine, the BIOS offers options to enable Asus Performance Enhancement as well as a Performance Mode. With both these options enabled, the PC idles at 22.2W and 24.9W with both screens off and on respectively. Having the power functionality disabled therefore makes a significant difference.
- The Power Saver CPU governor is used.
- The machines are running Ubuntu 25.10 with the exception of the Orange Pi 6 Plus which is running Debian 12.
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:
| Orange Pi 6 Plus | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the single-board computer |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Orange Pi 6 Plus |
| Cores | The 3 different types of core |
| Power | Testing and comparing the power consumption |