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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Yeah, my beefy homeserver will be sipping less than 40 watts while encoding 4 simultaneous streams, seeding a few hundred torrents, and tons of other stuff. Kinda nuts.
My UPS has a custom built NAS (low tdp ryzen pro and 4 spinny disks), switch, firewall, 3 mini PCs, raspberry pi) plugged into it that are all under decent load and it reports 80W draw. It's honestly incredible how far computers have come and how we're living in an age of apartment sized homeland.
Wow.
And here I thought I was doing so well with about 30w at idle/streaming, and max 80w when converting/ripping.
Granted I'm using an ancient SFF desktop without a dedicated video card, so...
Adding a large hard disk increased idle power 40%.
A built-in GPU (iGPU) is more efficient, no?
Depends on the workload - for light loads like drawing a desktop i am sure this is the case, but under heavy load the increased performance of a normal GPU will probably make up for the higher consumption in a shorter timeframe, compared to the ages it would take running that poor iGPU into the ground for hours (which needs the whole pc to be running that whole time with the respective base power consumption), needing cooling over a long period of time instead of increasing the fan speed for a short duration.
Intel actually went and created a line of low power CPUs to compete with ARM (though their consumption is still twice as much) such as the N100, so you can get quite a bit of CPU power in a modern CPU (so, with hardware video decoding and encoding for all modern codecs).
Also with the transition from HDD to SDD, the power consumption in that side when merelly reading data (which is what's needed to seed a few hundred torrents) is way lower.
I actually have a Mini-PC with an N100 that's a TV Media Player, torrent server with an always on VPN (also another nice thing in modern CPUs - the crypto functions implemented in hardware), NAS and home server for a few more things at that tends to run at less than 20% load and uses very little power.
I don't think the mainstream desktop CPUs, even the notebook ones, are quite as power efficient as those things, and if you add a dedicated graphics card, it's even worse.
Before the current mempocalypse it was actually cheaper in the mid and long term to just buy a brand new Mini-PC with an N100 (mine was €130) to use as an always ON homesever than use an old desktop, purelly because of the massive power savings.