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I had a Raspberry Pi 4 I wasn't using, so last night I flashed LibreELEC to an SD card and set it up to connect to my backup box over Wireguard. Now I don't have to spin up my gaming box to watch things! Haven't plugged it into a Kill-a-watt yet, but I suspect the Pi is using 1/4 to 1/10 of the electricity my gaming box does. Also, no fan noise.
2 years ago · 👍 gnuserland
@smokey Yeah, really not sure. I tried installing stock Armbian before going with LibreELEC, and I was getting "low voltage" error messages with both the "3.6V to 6.5V at 3A" and "5.0V at up to 4.6A" PSUs I tried with it. No idea how much power it was pulling with Armbian, but I'm willing to bet it was generally a bit more than what I'm seeing with LibreELEC.
I plugged the Raspberry Pi into the Kill-a-Watt this morning and tried streaming a bit of video from my backup box. The highest reading I observed was 4.6W. Looks like it stays around 3.3W to 3.4W while it's not doing anything. Pretty good! Just a bit under half of what my laptop tends to consume. · 2 years ago
@lykso I guess 600 watts was a big overestimation on my part lol well its cool that its at least 10 times more energy efficent if not more. Maybe the PSU requirements are for overclocking or if you wanted to use the pi USB's or GPIO pins to deliver power to external things. · 2 years ago
@smokey I did some tests with my gaming box, and it looked like it pulled about 50 watts while idling, with some random spikes to 90w, and then around 120w to 150w under ordinary use. I didn't try to really push it, as I just wanted to know what it was pulling under normal conditions.
5 watts max for the Pi 4 is a lot better than I was expecting! I'd figured 15w max due to the PSU requirements. · 2 years ago
Video where this is demonstrated: https://youtu.be/9ofoqDc6RaE · 2 years ago
The pi 4 is 5 watts at max CPU usage, your gaming box might be very well 600 watts · 2 years ago