Pi 4 power consumption, my measurements are much less than usually quoted

Indeed you are most likely right., The power consumption of such a machine is utterly dependent on what exactly it is doing. Throw some USB disk drives on and you may see up to 25W...

I am not speaking from facts, but only from general experience, that video processing takes power and no GUI will be a huge drop in power. I doubt that a keyboard or mouse takes much. But WiFi certainly does and so does, to a lesser extent, Ethernet.

Also it is surprising how many 'authoritative sources' merely cut and paste each others data. Without checking.

E.g once many years ago I was interested in the power to weight ratio of WWII fighter aircraft. One German fighter had its power quoted in kW and bhp. But they did not match. Clearly someone had transposed two digits . Because they then *did* match.

I attempted to rectify this, but the original text was reinstated. As the figures had been copied from yet another 'authoritative source' and in academia, 'authoritative sources' are more true than the real world.

As with most things in the real world, if you want real facts, measure the thing yourself. Don't necessarily rely on 'experts' and 'authorities'

I have a RP4(4GB) sitting here in a Rocktech ISG-502 housing, which includes a 12V DC to 5V converter. Powering it from 12V, my power supply shows 2.55W after booting (default install, no display/usb devices, one 1000baseT link).

Without the ethernet link, power consumption goes down to 2.15W.

That includes the losses from the DC/DC converter and some other circuitry on the add-on board (RTC, RS232/RS485 interface).

cu Michael