A cited, filterable database of mini-PCs / SFF boxes by measured idle power (not TDP), for picking a low-running-cost box to self-host on (idlewatt.vercel.app)
from idlewatt@lemmy.cafe to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 02 Jun 06:54
https://lemmy.cafe/post/36043093

Affiliation up front: I built this, the data is open (CC BY 4.0), no signup, not selling anything.

What pushed me to make it: when you’re choosing the box your self-hosted services run on 24/7, the number that decides the power bill is measured idle watts, and nobody prints it. Spec sheets list TDP, which is a thermal rating for sizing a cooler, not actual draw. The same Dell OptiPlex Micro chassis idles around 11W with a 35W-TDP “T” chip vs around 18W with a 65W-TDP desktop chip, and at roughly $1/W/year (US) or $2.50/W/year (EU) that gap adds up over the life of an always-on server.

So I aggregated 51 boxes into one filterable table built around the facts that actually decide a self-host box: measured idle (wall-metered, with the method noted), the 2.5GbE chipset (i226-V is fine, i225-V has the documented random-dropout bug that takes a headless box offline until a hard reset), ECC support, RAM ceiling, and IOMMU / GPU-passthrough notes for anyone running VMs. Every field is cited to a dated source or left blank, never guessed.

Finder: idlewatt.vercel.app Open dataset (CC BY, pull it or send corrections / new wall-meter readings as PRs): github.com/SolvoHQ/homelab-mini-pc-dataset

What are you running your stack on, and does anyone have measured-idle numbers for a box I’m missing?

#selfhosted