Comment by indigo945

The article only compares idle power as far as power consumption goes, but regarding compute performance compares the systems under full load. This is somewhat of an apples-and-oranges scenario. If you care about the compute performance under full load, you should think about performance-per-watt, not about idle consumption. And in that capacity, the RPi 5 will easily beat any enterprise surplus mini PC with a 10-year-old architecture.

One of the mini PCs tested in the article has a CPU with a 65W TDP! That's considerably more than the Pi 5 will draw (the entire SBC's power supply only has a capacity of 25W).