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as long as it is something simple they work fine.
But compare their price to some 1L mini PCs on the second hand market. you will get a lot more guts at around the same price.
Second that.
RPis are still unbeaten in terms of power usage, but the difference to a low end thin client is small.
Cost isn't really an argument either, you can get thin clients with case, psu and SSD for something like 40€.
Not even close when it comes to tuned idle power usage.
My pi 3 idles at 3-4W, my Futro at around 5-6W. I'd say that's pretty close.
You can get your 3b+ (and 3 even lower) to under 2W easily on idle. 3-4 is a lot. Check out some guides, basically disable BT, display out and WiFi.
So, basically don't use it.
I mean, I get the effort, but if you account for your own labor, the power savings probably will probably take years to amortise - even with high energy costs like here in Germany.
Just as a rule of thumb: 1W of constant power costs is at most 25cents (40cent/kwh, which is even high for Germany).
The cost for a year is 1W24h365=8.76kWh which are at 0.4€/kWh 3.504€.
So with a difference of 3-4W you pay in a year between 10.5-14€ more than for the pi.
And i often heard the claim of thin clients idling around 5-6W, but i never got proof. Most things i saw are around 10W. Can you provide a picture? I would be really interested, honestly.
I use a cheap watt meter and the values from above are from that meter.
10-15W is what my Dell optiplex idles at.
I guess, it also depends on your load. My measurements were made at "basic setup idle", so smb, k3s with a handful of idling containers, pihole. Since I'm the only user of these services and don't use them that much, the load average is often enough way below 1 (at 4 cores). It's absolutely possible that someone with higher demands and higher loads pulls more power on average.
Thanks for providing those numbers. Pretty much what i expected
My guess is, that those 5-6W on idle that gets thrown around in so many blog posts is probably just the CPU in idle state and not the whole board with io and other stuff.
As i said. The RPi (and other SBC) remains king for low power and low load applications like for example smart home. Especially in counties like germany with high energy prices. But honestly i am always surprised what can be run off a RPi.
And i just looked. The price for a RPi is actually not.that bad anymore, just saw a ebay listing for 3 * 3B+ for 100€.
For other low power usage where arm is not feasible those intel embedded based thin clients are an excellent choice.
Well, no.
My Futro has some old thin client AMD CPU and the HP Elitedesk g3 mini has an i5 6500T. Both idle at 5-7W (the HP is slightly higher).
My optiplex is just an SFF, so still a regular CPU (i5 6500, without the T), regular SFF power supply, etc. And that one draws 10-15W.