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Good time to mention: Depending on what you want, you don’t actually want a Pi. Reasons to want one are a) the GPIO port and b) the form factor. Maybe c) low power draw under load. Maybe there are some other niche usecases that I can’t think of, but those are the main ones. Passively cooled, older, low power intel chips have far more power and better interfaces for the same price and about the same idle power draw. The cases end up being a bit bigger, but that’s the main disadvantage.
The steps are to reduce, reuse, recycle.
Honestly getting cheap old laptops just make more sense for what most people use these for. Emulation on media servers will run just fine on an old thinkpad off eBay. We need to move tech to the Reuse stage
They’re also cheap, which is a huge benefit.
But yeah, I haven’t picked up a Pi in quite a while, the only one I still use is an emulator station and media streaming device. I’ve been seriously considering getting a RockPro64 to replace my NAS, which is a fantastic option if you want low power, decent performance, small form factor, and expandable IO (it has a PCIe x4 slot).
Eh, especially the last few years they were more expensive. Now granted, mine was refurbished, but 40€ is still roughly half what I’d have had to pay for a PI at that time.
Sure, but that wasn’t because of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it was because there was a shortage and resellers jacked up prices. MSRP has been pretty consistent.
That still doesn’t make it cheaper ;)
I’ve found recent celeron/pentium and i3 nucs are really great for a balance of low power consumption (<13W) and reasonable performance. Their BIOS allows you to specifically set a power limit and customise other low level things like TAU etc, so you can tune the boost performance to your liking.
It’s a shame Intel discontinued them, the form factor itself was not the only thing setting them apart. The software was well thought out and the hardware just worked 😭
The (6th gen??) ones with programmable ring LEDs are extremely handy for telling system status at a glance, I’ve got three of them 🤫. If i’m not mistaken, a few nuc generations also had onboard GPIOs too?
Didn’t they just hand NUCs off to ASUS?
I have a J4105 Celeron CPU, idle power draw is under 4W, and I run Jellyfin, Homeassistant, Paperless NGX and some other services on it. HA now being one of several services, it still runs far better than when it had my whole PI4 (also from an SSD) for itself.
Yepp, ASUS is continuing them as far as I know.
I have my doubts that the build quality and BIOS will hold up to an Intel-made device, but I hope i’m proven wrong once reviewers have spent some time with them. I vaguely remember something about Intel manufacturing NUC motherboards only, but I’m not sure if that applies to the arrangement with ASUS
I have the Celeron J3455 ones, can’t recall what idle consumption is but it’s really low. I stopped using the Pi for selfhosting several years back after realising my old atom netbook was faster at that time, and from there I scaled up to desktop systems, but now I’ve scaled right back down to the nucs lol.
I run HA, Plex, Zabbix and a bunch of other small stuff. Currently looking into a selfhosted markdown notes solution, since the hosted one I’m using at the moment (HackMD) is moving further into proprietary territory
I wish you told me this two years ago before I bought one. It was just too underpowered to work for my use case. I was expecting like the power of a low/mid range smartphone.
It was 10x more expensive, but I got a steam deck for my usecase, which involved real time video decode for live streams of sports games. Raspberry Pi kept having micro stutters that made watching sports impossible.
My far cheaper CPU with iGPU can also do hardware video transcoding ;)
My PI4 is still in use, but it’s only running Proxmox Backup Server to backup the main server ;)
My far cheaper CPU with iGPU can also do hardware video transcoding ;)
I have no doubt there’s something in between a raspberry pi and steam deck that would have worked fine for me. But I also just wanted an excuse to buy a steam deck. 🙂
Hah, fair enough :D
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