Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by kutkloon7 on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:36AM (#14341412)

The raspberry pi's selling points are: 1. It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card.

2. It is tiny

3. It is quite power efficient

4. It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware.

5. It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software)

6. It is cheap

All of this makes it fantastic for education and as a gadget. The whole point of the raspberry pi is to be unlike other computers. You can set it up as a server, but this is not its main purpose.

The Dell Optiflex FX160 probably outperforms the pi at all measures, but it is just stupid to compare it to a raspberry pi, because it has none of its unique points which make the pi a good choice in the first place.

Now, there are actually some better raspberry pi clones out there. For those products, a title like this might make sense.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by DamonHD on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:48AM (#14341513)

The Dell is absolutely not outperforming the RPi on power consumption. I run multiple internal- and external- facing servers (eg multiple static and Java-based Web servers, SMTP, DNS, NTP, etc) and the total power usage is generally much less than 50Wh/day.

I can throw my Internet connection router and FTTC box on as discretionary load but that's another ~300Wh/day; it is quite staggering how relatively efficient the RPi is, compared to presumably similar or lower processing requirements in the other two boxes!

http://www.earth.org.uk/off-grid-stats.html

(You can only see the RPi's power consumption when the networking gear is pushed back onto mains.)

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by kutkloon7 on Saturday May 20, 2017 @07:09AM (#14381854)

True. I was thinking of performance, but you're right: power efficiency is a measure as well, and the raspberry pi is very power efficient.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by DamonHD on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:52AM (#14399833)

And idle power matters: a typical server in this kind of use is going to spend much of its time doing very little at all. (Except in my case fending off attempts to SPAM me or other malicious traffic!) It helps that I can set the RPi's clock to fall back a long way unless the CPU is busy.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by moron4hire on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:42AM (#14341473)

> You can set it up as a server, but this is not its main purpose.

I thought the article was very clear about that as it's point. If you were thinking of using an RPi as a server, it's not meant for that, here is a better alternative.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by kutkloon7 on Saturday May 20, 2017 @07:15AM (#14381868)

Good point! Maybe the title of the article should reflect this as well.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by gr3yh47 on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:47AM (#14341507)

Agree, but also, if price is a consideration the optiplex is clearly 5-10x the cost depending on what of the listed upgrades you get for it

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by BryanBryce on Saturday May 20, 2017 @06:16PM (#14384641)

I bought mine for $15

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by teekert on Monday May 15, 2017 @10:37AM (#14341885)

Exactly, all the same hardware makes it possible to exchange images, bit for bit SD-card copies, that run on any of the same model RPis, this is incredibly powerful and handy. For example, installing ROS (Robot Operating System) on Linux can be a PITA, but there is a ready made ROS on Ubuntu Mate for RPi3, so you have it fully functional in minutes.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by DamonHD on Monday May 15, 2017 @11:03AM (#14342098)

Well, I was able to recover from damaging my RPi B+ by simply slotting its microSD card into a brand new RPi2 and everything ran, which is completely astonishing as they are not identical.

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Re:Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi by khedoros1 on Monday May 15, 2017 @03:20PM (#14344319)

Most of the userspaces are just compiled for ARMv6. If you've got your firmware (bootloader, kernels, devicetree overlays) up-to-date, then you should be able to boot the OS on any Pi (the bootloader detects hardware version and inits the right stuff, including loading kernel7.img for the Pi2/3, instead of kernel.img for the 0/1/1+ models).

Ubuntu and some of the other 3rd-party OSes are compiled for ARMv7, and won't run on the 0/1/1+. A couple are compiled for ARMv8/AARCH64, and won't run on anything but a Pi3. There's a lot of work that went into making things like Raspbian as close to foolproof as possible.

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