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So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it's all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I've got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

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[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (12 children)

What happened is that people realized what I've been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: https://lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , https://lemmy.world/comment/4696545

For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.

Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:

  • They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a "computer"? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we're seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi's market.
  • Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn't ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires... more adapters;
  • Price-wise it doesn't make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point... and way more stable with more expansion.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox

Proxmox isn't a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven't discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: https://lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.

The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.

[–] akrot@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The mian issue with Mini/used PCs is the power efficiency. It's just a waste of wattage and performanve/Watt is very bad, especially at idle.

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile "T" CPU that are very decent at idle.

[–] akrot@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But idle still would run much more than 15w. There a very good compilation google sheets for the most efficient X86 cpus, but once you start factoring hdds and ssds, it's only natural to go higher (20w-30w) at least. That's at least double than rpis

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

But idle still would run much more than 15w

This isn't true.

  • HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 9500T > idles at 4.5W
  • Optiplex Micro 3080 > idles at 7W
  • Unbranded Mini Atom C3758 > idles at 3.5W

Either way, quick math, on a 7W range were talking about less than 10$/year to run the device.

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