> I've never been very moved by the pi line for "non-maker" "server-type" stuff.

I love raspberry pis but pi-mania is absolutely out of control. I can't count how many $100+ programmer hours I have seen wasted waiting for a $10 pi to boot, build, or generally stop being slow. I have witnessed the deep shame of a multi-million dollar exhibition center-featuring a RPi kiosk deployed in front of customers that chugs so hard the sales team takes shifts intercepting people before they can poke at it and realize how much of a dog it is. But at least they saved $200 on not using a laptop, right?

If you want to dip your toes in the hardware world from the comfort of ubuntu at impulse buy prices, pis are great, but they stop making sense very quickly once you exit that specialized vertical.

Phoronix did a reasonable comparison of an Rpi4 to a Celeron G5900 and it does a pretty good job of showing why a Pi isn't a great (even low end) general purpose option. Not disputing it's usefulness in other spaces...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberr...

The only interesting thing about that comparison is that the Pi did pretty well in the single real-world software benchmark Phoronix did (something to do with LibreOffice and pdfs), where it was 59% the speed of the Celeron G5900, and it managed that with an SD card rather than proper USB 3 storage.

"It's not as fast as a new Intel processor" is not new information...

I’m guilty of this. I use Pis for industrial use monitoring some machinery’s serial output and being a server for it. I know the SD cards will eventually get corrupted from power cycling and I’ll have to come fix them. But the alternative is buying a bunch of $250-500 industrial arm computers sight unseen, with a tiny fraction of the support and reviews that Pis have so it feels like a shot in the dark.

The MLC and SLC cards for industrial use are not that bad. Regular sd cards TLC will break quicker. I use pi's for exhibitions at work, with great success for a few years, as well as for digital signage screens.

I think ARM is cool and have a few SBCs around for various projects, but... for ~$150, you can get an entire (used) PC, with a Skylake i5 and 8GB of RAM (in addition to the case, power supply, etc). There's just so much more you can do with that, so unless you need ARM, there isnt a lot of point. Even with expensive electricity, the Pi will save you maybe $1/month.

Example eBay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-OPTIPLEX-7040-SFF-DESKTOP-INTE... (no storage drive on this, but it has NVME, so for $50 you can add more storage than many use cases need, and it'll be much faster and more durable than SBC eMMC or SD solutions).

Yep I recently picked up a used slim HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF i5-4590 Quad Core 3.3GHz 16GB RAM / 240GB SSD With Win 10 Pro for $150..

And it literally was in lightly used (basically perfect) shape and no issues at all.. they even threw in a cheap WiFi dongle.

It’s amazing what you can get on eBay for value as far a large used computers go.. obviously it’s YMMV as far as the seller you happen to buy from and the condition of the item you receive.. but for me, this machine was super awesome and fast (I hadn’t bought or built a desktop PC in at least 10 years prior to this)...

This is interesting also. Maybe I need to do the math and compare potential electric bills.

You can get an i3 with 8G, passively cooled in a VESA format enclosure with wifi and ethernet for sub $200 on aliexpress.

I use a second-hand HP t620 thin client instead.

4 x64 AMD Puma cores at 1.5GHz, dual-channel DDR3 4GB SODIMM (1600MT/s), 16GiB m.2 storage, mPCIe, gigabit ethernet, 6x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0. 7W in idle and it's fast enough to run Gentoo. I paid 25 EUR for it. You can expand RAM (up to 16GiB) and storage if you wish for a little bit more.

PC recycling companies buy these by weight and there is very little in terms of secondary market. Most of these end up in landfills, while being perfectly capable little home servers.

https://heap.ovh/home-server-upgrade-to-hp-t620.html

Wow this is eye opening. I appreciate the links, I will look into this!

This looks interesting.

Would it be any good with a bunch of H265 5mp cameras hanging off it?

I want to put security cameras around my house, but naturally I want to DIY.

You're probably going to want something with H265 acceleration, which most ARM servers lack as I understand it.

Intel QuickSync for H265 might be what you're looking for; should be able to find a few 7th gen processors that support it.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

Thanks

Go to serverbuilds.net

That site is honestly incredible.

Awesome, thank you!