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Comment by TacticalCoder

17 days ago

I find TFA interesting because I've got at home, both on my desk and in the closet, a mix of Raspberry Pis and... HP EliteDesk mini PCs / NUCs. I mean: literally the same HP EliteDesk as pictured in TFA. I bought three HP EliteDesk that were decommissioned from a nearby NATO base (so I bought them factory reset and without any hard disk in them).

One advantage the EliteDesk do have is that they are not ARM, which can help at times when I need to run that's only shipped as an image and that wasn't compiled for ARM. I know there are other ways but, well, when that happens I just run that on the EliteDesk.

Now the very obvious advantage the Raspberry Pi have: no fans. That is, to me, a big one. A huge one. My main PC is so quiet that I do hear the EliteDesk's fans when I turn one on. Typically I'll just run a Plex server at home on the EliteDesk and only turn it on when I want to stream something: the rest of the time they're off.

The Pi do run servers not requiring lots of CPU: like an unbound DNS server.

I don't see these as mutually exclusive: they can be complementary.

If I had to pick only one I'd probably still pick a Pi though.

4 comments

TacticalCoder

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louwrentius  17 days ago

The Pi 5 needs a fan, unless you can find a special case that allows the device to run without a fan. I run the Pi4 which hosts this blog fan-less and that works fine, even 'right now'.

  • distances  17 days ago

    Not the parent, but I run my Pi5 without a case, out of sight. I do have the Active Cooler fan on it, but on normal low intensity usage the fan turns on only during bootup and otherwise stays off.