I have a ASUS PN40 and I got it to idle at 1.8W just by installing a Linux distro with almost no tuning whatsoever. (Just installing tlp which was at the time part of the suse laptop metapackage).

I probably have the same N100 miniforums and can only get it down to 7w. Is it possible you could share how you got it down to 3.6W and 4-8W?

I just got this N100 a few weeks ago, have it on a killawatt next to my desk.

There are many tips here: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2096876 but I think the thing that did the trick was simply `powertop —-auto-tune`. I also disabled the wifi in the bios. I ran for a bit with turbo disabled which lowered the consumption a tiny bit and severely limited the peak usage, but it also made the system slow overall. So I enabled it again and now sometimes usage spikes but feels snappy. I’m running Fedora.