Comment by Johnny555
19 days ago
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.
19 days ago
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.
You don’t need to pay that much. For example, Minisforum is selling a barebones MS-01 for $399 new
That doesn't really change my point that they are comparing the Pi to a PC that costs 4 - 8 times more (and in a much larger formfactor), so it's not surprising that it's faster.
Checkout the odroid H+ series...about $125 for full x86 passively cooled system with dual nics, up to 32G of RAM, sata and m.2, etc.
> 22x (!) the network bandwidth
It's 25x, the copper ports are 2.5g. It's even more if you use the usb-4 ports for ip over thunderbolt.
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.
I got one recently that was £159 (1.4x the 8GB Pi 5 starter kit) for a 16GB i3-8109U (with 500GB SSD) and is just about 3x the volume of the Argon Neo 5 case for the Pi 5 (113 x 127 x 43mm vs 94 x 70 x 30mm).
Doesn't change the "[places] where a Pi will fit but these micro PCs won't" assertion but the pricing and sizing are not as egregious as you're suggesting.
NUCs are very similar in size
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.
$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".
Linux already installed from a Chinese vendor.
I guess it’s subsidized by the malwares that come preinstalled.
OK I understand the RPi must have very good press, but nitpicking every part of a message just to find something to attack isn't constructive. Linux preinstalled means that Linux works out of the box, that is, you don't even have to search around for Linux compatibility with any of the peripherals inside that mini PC. Of course I would never ever trust anything preinstalled, neither Linux nor Windows, just as I got rid of stock Android on my recently bought Pixel 7 in favor of GrapheneOS like 2 hours after unboxing it. I only meant about compatibility, certainly I wasn't suggesting that anyone runs unknown software from China.
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I got the $700 figuring by looking up the list price of one of the mini PC's mentioned in the article, which use an Intel i5-6500 or AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200GE CPU (which each have 4 cores @ 3.6Ghz), I think if they'd compared against a 2 core 2.8Ghz Celeron, it would have been more evenly matched. The Raspberry Pi 5 beats the 4020 in both single and multi-core performance in this benchmark:
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
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".
Does that matter? If it dies in 2 months and I can't find the manufacturer because it's operating under a different name now, is that any different than if the manufacturer folded completely?
I'm not sure whether to assume you either are clueless or whether to assume you're actively working to try to sabotage perception.
No one's gonna recommend an ancient middling mini-PC that costs vastly more than a modern current mini-PC.
Either go on the secondary market & get this old PC for under $100. Or go get some modern Ryzen mini-PC for $500. Or a decent n100 for somewhere in between, especially if you insist on new for some reason.
The manufacturer is the same, what dies is the brand name; the very same product is just being packaged in a box with another name. I mean, you shouldn't place too much importance in the name, just look at the real iron inside the box. We, as westerners, are used to give a lot of importance to brand names, possibly because it comes from the old times when brand names identified products with the families that created them; that is completely different from how it works in far east today.
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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.
I have been looking at a N100, are they good in general as a Pi alternative. I am mostly looking at running K8s and running apps and running things like Pihole
I recently got a mini PC with an N100, 16GB ram, 512 GB SSD for €150, and am using it to run several docker compose projects. Basic home lab apps, such as nginx, home assistant, adguard home, vaultwarden (bitwarden), and actual and the CPU is at 4% and RAM is at 22%. I don't know how intensive K8s is, but I'm very happy with my setup and am surprised it's not breaking a sweat running all these things.
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