Power Consumption with CPU Stressed
I’m using s-tui to stress the CPU, which in turn uses the stress tool.
I can stress the CPU by changing the mode from monitor to stress. Here are the results for each machine.
As the chart illustrates, the Pi 5 uses less than half the power compared to the N95 and N100 machines, while it’s almost as fast. Remember that the NUC (i7-1360P) is more than four times faster.
The Pi 5 power consumption includes the CPU fan (which only activates when the CPU temperature rises over 50 degrees C), but doesn’t include the 2 case fans, as the machine runs so cool they didn’t activate. If I set the GPIO fan mode to Performance or Always On, the case fans come on, and power usage goes up from 8w/h to slightly more than 9w/h (an increase of slightly more than 1w/h).
Power usage figures are higher if other system components (GPU, disk etc) are also stressed. The chart reflects power consumption stressing the CPU only.
Next page: Page 4 – Electricity Costs / Specifications
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 this series:
| Raspberry Pi 5 Series | |
|---|---|
Hardware | |
| iRasptek Starter Kit | All the kit you need to get started with the Pi 5 |
| Pironman 5 Case Review | Transform the Pi 5 into a beautiful desktop mini PC |
| Passive Cooling the Pi 5 | Passively cool your Pi 5 the right way. Silent yet cool |
| Benchmarking | Benchmarking the Pi 5 against an Intel N100 mini PC |
| Overclocking | Let's increase the clock speed of the BCM2712 SoC |
| Power Consumption | Compare the power consumption of the Pi 5 with Intel Mini PCs |
| 2.5Gbps Networking | Improving the wired performance of the Pi 5 |
| WiFi | Improve WiFi performance of the Pi 5 |
| Desktop PC | Is the Pi 5 good value compared to an Intel N100 Mini PC? |
Configuration | |
| raspi-config | Useful text-based tool to configure the Pi 5 |
| PiGro | GUI tool that streamlines the process of managing the Pi 5 |
| Increase Swap Memory Size | Increase the swap size from 512MB to 2GB |
| ZRAM swapdrive | Simple script to use a ZRAM swapdrive instead of a swapfile |
Software | |
| Installing Software | Different ways to install software on the Pi 5 |
| df snap pollution | Replace df with dysk |
| Ollama GUI | Running Large Language Models on the Pi 5 |
| Many software articles are planned. Stay tuned! | |