Pico PSU

    My LibreElec system is a J3355B and an SSD in a 10+ yr old gateway desktop chassis with a ~10yr old Antec green PSU or something like that.

    I just swapped out the PSU for a pico PSU because I wanted to get rid of the fan noise. Incidentally pico PSU's use less power, so I thought I'd share my results for anyone looking at putting together a box.

    Overall the switch saved a little over 8 watts on average compared to the old PSU, where I live that's a little over $11/yr (my system is on 24/7).

    My pico PSU (85W non-WI) & AC/DC converter cost me a little under $40 shipped form eBay. Again, I did this because I hated the fan noise in my living room, it doesn't make sense for power savings.

    However if you're building new and don't have a PSU lying around, it might make sense for you.

    You can get a bargain bin PSU starting at about $20, if you care about 80 Plus, then you start at about $35.
    In these cases the picoPSU with it's totally silent operation and low power usage might be worth it!

    Old PSU | picoPSU
    Idle 23W | 14W
    400 Mbps 4k HEVC 10 bit 28W | 21W peak, then 15W
    1080p HEVC 18W | 10W

    Quote from vitorp07


    Good info, noiseless is always a good thing.

    But why is your system consuming more watts idling than during 1080p HEVC playback?

    Yeah I thought that was interesting as well.

    My best guess is that the apollo lake has HEVC decoding so it isn't taxing for the system to run HEVC playback. The Menu GUI however is not being hardware decoded so I guess it makes the CPU work a little harder to render that stuff, and there are movie art slideshows always running the background and it has to render all that.

    My system goes to idle power saving mode after a few minutes and I suspect the power draw there is less than everything I posted above.

    It does make sense.

    I love those small PSU, one of my favorite case to assemble a mini-itx build is the Antec ISK 110 which comes with a 92% efficiency PSU, not a Pico, but still great .