Comment by kalium-xyz
17 days ago
Depends on what youre comparing. Some people buy a pi just to run home assistant or some other compute task
17 days ago
Depends on what youre comparing. Some people buy a pi just to run home assistant or some other compute task
I bought a few used NUCs for $150 each, they're amazing home servers. Much, much faster, more capable, more flexible than a Pi, at only twice the price.
Pi's were never a good for compute-intensive tasks; running a DNS resolver (PiHole), print-server, or uploading backups to the cloud is the sort of thing it excels at. The Pi Zero W costs $15 and idles at less than 1 Watt; it's the always-on-appliance that turns on my GPU-workstation or NUC for the heavier stuff.
What do you use them for? I'm one of those that have Raspberry Pi 5 mostly just for Home Assistant. It's clearly overpowered for that use case, but I wanted the NVMe support. I'm not convinced by these articles -- used x86 box that maybe achieves almost the same low power draw still doesn't have any actual upsides if you don't realistically need that computing power.
I have one where I deployed K9s so I can learn Kubernetes better, and one where I have deployed Harbormaster (http://harbormaster.readthedocs.io/).
The Harbormaster one has a bunch of stuff (Zigbee2MQTT, my smart home stuff, my apps, etc. I have a Pi 4 that has Octoprint, services on the NUC load instantly whereas Octoprint feels a bit sluggish.
The NUC is an x86 (well, amd64) box, with a 10W power draw, which is great. I don't think a desktop PC will do less than 100W...
3 replies →
I use the mini-pc for running security NVR, git servers, self hosted NextCloud, local hosted LLM models, and backup servers.
After my branded security camera NVR died for the N times and the company went out of business, I got fed up and decided to run my own NVR. I got a powered switch to provide power and network connection to all the cameras via POE. Connected a mini-pc to the switch and ran Blue Iris on it to stream from all the cameras. Attached an external harddisk enclosure to use some old harddisks for storage. This ensures every piece of the system can be replaced and upgraded separately.
I have a home server that stores and processes all my photos, using PhotoPrism. Things like face recognition does require a bit of a compute. A NUC is perfect for this use case.
5 replies →
So you're saying that the Pi is a proverbial Toyota Hilux and people are buying it to highway commute to work and back instead of using it for what it was meant for, and then saying it compares poorly to sedan? Yea, no shit.
If you're not using the GPIO or any of the ribbon cable peripherals there are much better options out there. But a Pi will be able to do things those machines never will.
I think they are comparing a $700 micro PC to an $80 Raspberry pi, but pretending they are in the same price range since the micro PC is available cheap in the refurb market.
You don’t need to pay that much. For example, Minisforum is selling a barebones MS-01 for $399 new. This isn’t quite apples to apples — the Raspberry Pi includes RAM (but not much), whereas the MS-01 includes a case, a cooling system, a power supply, and an RTC battery. (And the MS-01 uses a non-janky 19V supply, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 wants a weird not-to-spec not-quite-sure-what-they-were-thinking 5V USB supply by default.)
For the price, you get massively more CPU power, 3x the number of easily connectable NVMe devices, at higher bandwidth each, 22x (!) the network bandwidth, and the ability to connect a real multi-lane PCIe card of your choice.
I still find it sad that NVMe is an afterthought in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. SD is convenient, but it’s also slooooow, and it holds back a lot of raspberry pi use cases. The new-to-RPi5 official NVMe support still seems really awkward in the way it interferes with the overall thermal performance and the way it interferes with the IO header if you use the official board.
3 replies →
Personally, I'm a fan of the odroid H+ series - full x86 SOC with dual nics, and some on-board gpu stuff for $125. I have 3 of the old H2 series and I love them.
Not only are they very different in price, the micro PC is 10x the size. Size doesn't matter for all uses, but there are going to be things where a Pi will fit but these micro PCs won't.
2 replies →
You can pick up something like an HP elitedesk g2 with 8th gen intel cpu for $100-120 on secondary markets. Most of them ship with at least 8gb ram and also a 500gb m.2 drive. A 8th gen cpu will be many many times more powerful than even the rpi 5. In addition to having quicksync for hardware media transcoding. Something the Pi still cannot do via hardware. Not to mention, its x86 - so lot more support over the ARM7
Of course, if you size and the ability to interface with other hardware via GPIO is the primary use - then yeah a SBC like a Rpi would be the better option. But for a small home server, one is better off just buying a mini-PC.
No, an apt comparison would be with a PC like a used ThinkCentre off eBay, where $50 buys you an i5 with 8 GB RAM and a real SSD.
1 reply →
$700? Here's one with 4GB RAM, 128GB eMMC and Linux already installed at $87,49. New.
https://t.ly/S-OW6 (shortened Amazon link)
Now the 4020 isn't certainly a monster, but I can assure you it's way more performant than a RPi. Also, bear in mind that, as is the case with many Chinese products, those mini PCs are produced in huge quantities and sold under at least a dozen different ever changing "brands". Don't let the name "Wo-We" make you think this is something deemed to disappear in a few months; the name could certainly be thrown away but the product will most certainly reincarnate under another "brand".
7 replies →
Bmax B1 Pro costs less than $130 for 8GB RAM and it comes with 128GB storage and a case out of the box.
For $150 you can get a new mini pc with a low power intel cpu (e.g. N100) and 8GB of Ram. It comes with an SSD, a power supply and (gasp) a case. Add those to a raspberry pi and the price is not much different.
4 replies →