Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Raspi 4 for Bitcoin Node: Still Compatible?
by
DaveF
on 18/11/2023, 21:55:44 UTC
No. The netbooks / laptops have a lot of other things that will cause them to use (nominally) more power.
Circuits to charge / maintain the battery.
Things involved in dealing with the keyboard & screen. Even if you remove the screen there is still more there then just the HDMI output like the RPi.
Not a lot individually but they do add up.
This got me curious, so I measured the power consumption of my coldest laptop. With the battery charged, the display on the lowest brightness setting, Wifi on and the CPU and SSD idling on the (Linux) desktop, I unplugged it. The house's electricity meter dropped 4W. That's as accurate as I can measure it, it could be 10-20% off of course, but I'd say it's quite impressive.
Here's another rule of thumb: with laptops, divide the battery capacity (in Wh) by the number of hours it's said to run on battery. The first new Lenovo laptop I checked, has a 47 Wh battery and lasts up to 10 hours (MM18) or up to 15 hours playing video. With those specs, it should be able to run a Bitcoin node on less than 5W.

Remember there is a loss when converting from AC to DC. And there are losses when the AC adapter is just sitting there plugged in not doing anything.

You would also have the same losses with having the adapter for the RPi plugged in.

At the pennies or nickles a day to run a node it's probably not worth worrying about.

-Dave