It is true that if we are talking about a mini PC, and especially one that is already relatively old and not very powerful, its consumption will be quite low, especially compared to a desktop computer. However, having a device on 24/7 can generate consumption that may surprise you, and may make you wonder twice if you really need it to be on 24/7.
How much does it cost to build a Mini PC server
Really, the cost of the mini PC is what you want to spend. You have the option of reusing a viejo mini pc that you already had and set it up as a server, in which case you won’t spend any money, but it’s also possible that you need to set up a server and you’ve decided it’s a good idea to invest in a mini PC to guarantee low consumption, low noise and it is not too expensive.
In any case, we are going to illustrate this with a real case: we decided to buy an old used mini PC between several friends to set up a Minecraft server and thus be able to play together without depending on third parties. To do this, instead of going to the second-hand market, we decided to buy a refurbished mini PC from a trusted store.
We bought a Dell OptiPlex 7040, equipped with an Intel Core i5-6500T processor (4 cores at 2.5 GHz), 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD, more than enough hardware to mount a Minecraft server, that was the intention. It’s a device that’s already a handful of years old, but it’s been refurbished and comes with a 2-year warranty, so the $193 we paid seemed more than fair.
And that was the first expense, the initial investment that had to be made to buy the hardware, although it is true that as we noted at the beginning, if you already had the mini PC in your possession, it is something you back up. But hey, how much are you going to spend if you have it 24 hours a day, every day?
And how much do you spend on the electricity bill?
It is a low-power mini PC, featuring a 4-core processor with a TDP of 35 watts. However, the processor will not always consume 35 watts, nor is it the only thing it consumes in the computer, because the card, the RAM, the SSD consume energy and even the power supply itself suffers some losses due to its effectiveness. ., so it would be a mistake to make the calculation based only on the TDP of the processor, even if it is true that it is the biggest “culprit” of the consumption of the equipment. Moreover, in general and thanks to CoreTempwe have seen that the average consumption of the processor is around 8 watts.
Once configured and started, we left the mini PC apart and with nothing connected except the network cable and the power cable, i.e. it has no peripherals or monitor which adds consumption to the equipment (for its management we leave VNC configured to be able to connect to it whenever we want), so the consumption has only been the mini PC itself. With a wall meter, we have estimated that the total consumption of the equipment on is 14 watt under the conditions we have described.
And now comes the calculation: 14 watts means a consumption of 0.014 kWh, but since it is 24 hours a day, we are talking about 0.336 kWh per day, which multiplied by 30 means 10.08 kWh in months. The price at which electricity is currently available can vary greatly depending on the contract you have, but the person who hosts the server at home has a tariff without hourly discrimination in which he pays $0.174/kWh including tax.
With these data, a simple multiplication tells us that having this mini PC as a Minecraft server in 24×7 costs us approximately $1.75 per month. Obviously this is the case as long as the average consumption of 14 watts is maintained, since if we “give more power” to the server (the processor has room for it), the consumption could easily triple.
