This is a series focusing on the Orange Pi 5 Max and Orange Pi 5 Ultra single board computers. These two SBCs are identical in almost all respects with the exception of their HDMI ports.
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the Orange Pi 5 Max only. I’ll see how the this computer (“Max”) compares to a couple of other single board computers, the Orange Pi RV2 (“RV2”), the Banana Pi BPI-F3 (“BPI-F3”), the Raspberry Pi 5 (“RPI5”) as well as a few Intel mini PCs with the following CPUs (“N95”, “N100”, and “i7-1360P”).
I’ll begin with power consumption when each of the machines are left idle.
What an amazing result for the Orange Pi 5 Max. Its power draw is even lower than the RV2. The frugality of the Max and RV2 might be important if, for example, you’re going to use the either of these computers as a home server machine such as a backup server.
The chart needs explanations to put the results into context.
- The chart measures the power consumption of each system (not only the CPU). It doesn’t include the power drawn by a monitor.
- All the machines have onboard graphics only.
- None of the machines have power management functionality built into the BIOS.
- The DreamQuest N95 and N100 and Intel Mini PCs are using the Power Saver CPU governor. The Orange Pi 5 Max, the Orange Pi RV2 and Pi 5 are using their default settings with no underclocking. When idle the Orange Pi 5 Max runs at 408 MHz, Raspberry Pi 5 runs at 1500 MHz. The Orange Pi RV2 runs at 1600 MHz.
- WiFi and Bluetooth are enabled on all machines. It’s possible to shave a little off the results but most users will probably want the standard settings enabled.
- The Max is running Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), while the RV2 is running Ubuntu 24.04.2 (Noble Numbat) The Raspberry Pi 5 is running the Raspberry Pi OS (which is based on Debian 12). The other machines are running Ubuntu 25.04.
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 / Specifications
All articles in each series:
| Orange Pi 5 Ultra and Max | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the Ultra and Max |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Orange PI Single Board Computers (Processor and Memory) |
| Power | I compare the Orange Pi 5 Max's power consumption to other machines |