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Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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... 100W? Isn't that like a rally bygone era? CPUs of the past decade can idle at next to nothing (like, there isn't much difference between an idling i7/i9 and a Pentium from the same era/family).
Or are we taking about arm? (Sry, I don't know much about them.)
I got a Kill-A-Watt similar device. I have measured my old PC at around 110W. PC specs: i5-6600, 16gb DDR4 ram, 1060 3gb, 1x2TB hdd, 1x250gb sata ssd, 1x1tb m2 ssd.
All devices on the computer consume power.
The CPU being the largest in this context. Older processors usually don't have as aggressive throttling as modern ones for low power scenarios.
Similarly, the "power per watt" of newer processors is incredibly high in comparison, meaning they can operate at much lower power levels while running the same workload.
I think we need to qualify "idling", my NAS runs bittorrent with thousands of torrents, so it's never really "idle", it just isn't always doing intensive processing such as transcoding.