Any idea on the difference between and i3 verse an i5 is for power draw, particularly idle power draw? Will likely run the processor 2 or 3 hours in the evening and will only be encoding and running the plex server. Don’t normally look at intel cpus so if there is something else I should know or consider here please let me know.
Both will likely have the same idle power draw. There are 14 generations of i3s and i5s and you haven’t mentioned which it is.
Newer CPUs 10th gen or higher would be around 2W or even less.
11th Gen or Higher, is there an advantage to my use case getting the newest?
I have only used 10th gen but I guess newer ones are more power efficient.
Better transcoding with a newer iGPU