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To give a different opinion than all the thin-clients, old laptops can be a good choice too. I am a bit preferrential to really nice old thinkpads.
If you buy them used you can get insane prices (~$40) and also you get all the laptop conveniences of a keyboard, screen, battery (for power failure). Also I think the power/performance ratio is pretty much the same to the thin clients.
Using the laptops battery isn't a good long term solution though as having it plugged in all the time will wear it down fast, not to mention that the battery is build for maximum energy density and not durability/safety. It just simply not working when it is finally needed is almost a pretty light issue when it can just also inflate and pose a huge fire risk next to all of your data. Laptops are great power efficient platforms though for servers
First off, I think you're completely right in that laptop batteries are definitely a non-ideal solution. And, I'm really not an expert in this, so take my words with a grain of salt.
You could mitigate a bit of the dangers by doing some of the following (I only did the first):
If you are an under $100 budget, there seems to be an argument that maybe you are willing to risk a little bit for that extra power reliability.
For that the laptop has to support a charge level on a hardware level though, just setting a limit will cause it to constantly switch between using the battery and charging the battery which would be much worse than keeping it at 100%. Most older and budget systems don't support that
I see. On the surface, that seems to make sense. I might need to rethink how I configure my batteries.
Look for second hand business PCs. They can be had extremely cheap and draw almost no power.
I have a Futro S920 and an HP ProDesk mini G300 (or something like that, never understood the naming). Both draw about 5-7W from the wall, which is roughly the same as my RPi3b.
The HP one has an i5 6500T and 16GB RAM, both upgradeable. There's also a real 2.5" slot including SATA connector on the board, an M.2 slot and an NGFF slot. Really cool device. The only slightly annoying thing is, that the fan can't be controlled (or at least Debian can't detect any PWM devices), and it's always slightly-on, which can be annoying. But for 100€? I think that's a good deal.
Yeah, thin clients are the way to go, but tgey will draw more than 5-7 Watt under load.
Sure, but is that really so much more (for a given amount of compute) than an RPi?
My Futro S740 with an J4105 CPU consumes up to 14 Watts according to this article. It is faster than a rpi 4b plus i bought it refurbished for 40€. I think a system with an I5 6500t will need even more power under load.
Well, yes, but it's also more powerful. If it's twice as powerful as a pi, it will only be half as long under load for a given amount of computation and thus require less power overall.
How would an i5 6500T compare to a mini pc with an N100 or N305 like the beelink?
I’m serious debating if I should get a beelink (or equivalent) with an N100 and 16GB ram or go for an Optiplex with an i5 6500T and 8GB ram. Both are about the same price where I am located.
Im mainly interested in power usage and performance and not so much in upgradability.
I have a zx01 or something like that from AliExpress with an N100 and 16GB. Those little machines are seriously impressive. It's running Garuda and my son has not complained once about any game he's tried to play. I don't play games, I just bought it on a whim cause it's tiny and $150 or so. I've run several systems on it without a hitch. I'm pretty certain it'll hose a Minecraft server without an issue.
Thanks. I’ll check them out, with taxes they are unfortunately hard to get at $150, more like $225-250. Really want something more powerful than a Pi4
The 6500T is fairly slow, so the N100 is a tad faster.
But compared to a Pi4B the N100 should be a beast no?
Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, or another brand similar.
The pricing since the pandemic has been cheaper than Raspberry Pi4's in my region.
just got 2 lenovos to begin my self hosted journey B)
got me a Dell optiplex mini 9020 i7 for less than my Pi
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
[Thread #48 for this sub, first seen 15th Aug 2023, 19:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
OrangePi makes a decent solution with a built-in 8GB eMMC module. Makes it much faster. Dunno if you are CPU or IO bound on the RPi4.
I'm not sure if they are much more powerful but Pine64 might have some products you may want to check out.
I use the RockPro64 pretty regularly.
Wow that's still active? I remember getting one when they had a kickstarter way back and realizing quick that it doesn't matter how nice the hardware is if support is non existent. Glad to hear they are still around and I am guessing the community is much larger these days. I'll have to see if I can dig my original model up from somewhere and see what I can use it for these days.
It's definitely gotten larger since the introduction of the Pinephone and Pencil (soldering iron). The PineNote (eink tablet) and LoRa add on for the PinePhone are some things I'm excited to see more support for.
Here's some Lemmy communities if you want to check them out.
I'd also recommend checking out their Wiki. Specifically the software sections.
I use an Odroid N2+ running DietPi (Debian) for my home server. My kids and their cousins play a Minecraft world together and I haven't heard any complaints. It's my plex server and a web site, too. https://www.makeuseof.com/odroid-n2-raspberry-pi-4-compared/
I assume you're not transcoding anything.
looks like they're more than a Pi where I am anyway though.
Yeah, direct play only. Nothing over 1080p.
check out the orange pi 5 and 5 plus. you'll most likely have to purchase from aliexpress but could be what you're after.
recently bought 2 of the beelink mini PCs - they seem pretty solid so far - they are quite a bit more expensive than the pi but I think they offer pretty good bang for the buck for a small form factor server.
switching to a khadas vim4 myself.
Have you checked out the ODROID? https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-plus
Assuming you've got a spare SSD and RAM lying around, this could be a great option and is x86 rather than arm.
I recently got a beelink mini with an N95 and 8gb of ram and the thing rips, running Proxmox with a few linux and windows VMS all sharing resources, replaced 2 pi3s and a pi4 with it for my home automation services.
Only trouble I'm having is hardware iGPU passthrough is iffy, but that might just be me not having the linux-fu to get it working stably.
Question for the folks in here, are there any inexpensive SBCs with USB-C that can do data and power under ~80 USD? I've seen I think the Orange Pi 5 and a few others but I'm not sure what the track record on support is.
You can't have more calculation power for the same electrical power consumption. A thin clirnt with an i3 or i5 maybe.
luckily smaller process nodes and architecture refinements are a thing, my dude.
This guy took moores law and threw it out the window
And which piece of consumer hardware offers more computing power (relevant for minecraft server) for the same amount of electrical power than a rpi4?
A faster CPU with a power limit applied lol
Yeah an HP Elite Desk Mini or HP Pro Desk Mini would be great.