Does Skylake scale in power usage well, including low watts at idle?

[slikvik]

Hi,

Was thinking of buying another low power Pentium N3700 NUC as a HTPC but then heard that Skylake CPUs may only use a very small amount of power when idle or at least when not doing much.

This article: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/skylake-intel-core-i7-6700k-core-i5-6600k,review-33276-11.html appears to confirm that, with only a 3.8 watt usage on the 6600K at idle?

So my idea was to instead build a PC using Skylake that is on all the time (as a file server), spend the evening using it with Kodi but then if I want to play games I have enough juice - more than with the N3700 anyway.

Given my N3700 is rated at 6w, would the 6600 (I don't want the K version) get anywhere near that when doing similar basic tasks? The article above seems to imply that, yet I can't find a single other bit of corroborating evidence on the net. At the very least, over night when no one is using it, is it's still going to be much more of a drain than a specific low power CPU?

 

[Karsten75]

Is the ultra-low power consumption a deal-breaker? I don't see why you wouldn't believe the review you linked.

 

[slikvik]

Yeah, it is really. This device will be on 24/7 so I can access files and backup clients to it etc. Every other search I've found has the idle usage of Skylake around the 50w mark which is way too high for what I'm trying to achieve. EDIT: These other benchmarks are obviously for complete systems compared to Toms. That however makes it hard to compare against my current setup where I only know the CPU usage.

A bit more background. I have my low power Pentium N3700 HTPC and a HP Microserver. The sever is getting old so was going to replace it with another NUC and some external drives. I'd also like to do some big screen gaming (nothing requiring a descrete GPU) so thought if the SL CPU is this flexible I can build a new gaming capable HTPC, leave it running and ditch the server too. One PC, that when in "file server mode" (read: mostly idle) will be using even less juice than my current 17w server. At the same time when using Kodi, I don't really want it cranking up much more than when Kodi runs on the 6w Pentium N3700.

Noise/heat is also a very important factor as it will now be in the living room so I'm hoping that if these really do clock down well, the fan noise will reduce at the same time.

I hope that makes sense. Not really looking for alternative solutions, just confirmation that Skylake 1151 models really do drop in power this much when minimally used... 3.9w is minuscule.