Bought a mini pc with N100 and 16GB of ram, SSD included, no need to buy an enclosure, everything setup and ready, just needed to install Linux from a USB stick with the normal procedure.
I might have chosen RPI5 if it had 16GB ram, but I went with x86 and I like it because there are no software issues anymore (redpanda was not working on rpi)
I run a couple of N100s with 32GBs of RAM. They're great machines, but they are actively cooled, so they have dust (and noise) issues, and they're bigger than a RPi 5.
On the other hand, I have an "armor case" for my RPi5 which has contacts for every major IC on the board, and it runs at most at 50 degrees C (if I saturate it to the point of choking).
Plus it's way smaller, and there's no performance or software problems. One of the hidden tricks is to get an A2 card like Kingston Canvas Go+, which completely removes SD card related lag from the system.
There are many good options for passively cooled N100s (or even machines with significantly faster chips) roughly the size of a mac mini.
A Mac mini is still significantly bigger than a Raspberry Pi 5. On the other hand, there are N97/N100 machines with 12GB of soldered DDR5 RAM, but they are also actively cooled and their smaller blowers are whinier than their bigger cousins.
A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device which you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something. They're that reliable from my experience.
I have a newly acquired habit of getting the thing which requires the least amount of maintenance for my needs. I can replace it with a more powerful, power hungry and noisier device if I really need that, however this is rarely the case for me, and I can use my laptop for that oddjob.
> On the other hand, there are N97/N100 machines with 12GB of soldered DDR5 RAM, but they are also actively cooled and their smaller blowers are whinier than their bigger cousins.
Yes, but like I said there are also mini pcs that meet or exceed those specs that don't have any fans nor any coil whine. Of course you need bigger heat sinks when you draw more wattage (or maybe you're fine with some thermal throttling), but even this is quite manageable. I have multiple machines like this that are 100% reliable with zero maintenance.
As I said earlier, these machines doesn’t fit my space requirements, and I don’t need more powerful machines due to my processing needs and unwillingness to have space heaters. So, ARM based single board computers fit the bill perfectly for me.
I’m not ignoring or denying these systems’ existence. I just note that they don’t fit into my constraints and requirements for my home server needs.
"A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something."
Is this booting from the SSD.
Nope, from the SD card. Quite fast though. SSD is just a storage volume.
>A Mac mini is still significantly bigger than a Raspberry Pi 5
Sure, but there’s a lot more in it; like a power supply.
An official RaspberryPi 5 PSU is akin to a 27W mini brick which doesn't block any adjacent sockets on a power strip. However, the power bricks came with my N100 systems are similar size to 60-80W MacBook power bricks, they're way bigger, even if they're not significantly more powerful.
No, N100 systems do not contain their power supplies in the box. They're external.
If you were to build it yourself, you can find passively cooled N100 Mini ITX motherboards (I own an Asus N100 Prime) which you can fit with a pico ATX PSU or HDPlex PSU. Pair with a SFF case, you could get it around the size of a mac mini without the brick. Maybe something like a skyreach case.
Again, too big for my requirements. What I want is a box I can forget until it breaks or I need something directly from it. RPi5 allows me to do that while handling a ton of workload for me.
Maybe the tasks it does are light from CPU/IO perspective, but the burden I offload to it is tremendous.
The N100 systems I have are desktop systems which spend most of their life powered off or at standby.
>I like it because there are no software issues anymore
I keep saying this despite being somewhat a fan of ARM. If x86 or subset of x86 opens up it will still be able to compete in many areas.
Oh well. Pat is gone now I need to remind myself I shouldn't care about Intel.
In a ideal world isa shouldn't matter so much but x86 has been so dominant for so many years... It's hard to imagine a world without x86
Ah the ol' obligatory "a mini pc is much better" reply we see on every. single. Raspberry Pi post. I kid but seriously do we need to do this every time we discuss the RPi?
Like clockwork.
The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.
Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:
"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.
I feel like it kind of needs to be said, ever since RaspberryPis stopped being price-competitive. Most of the original sales pitch for why you should adopt an extremely weird proprietary ARM-variant was centred on price.
Is that really true? I thought the pitch was always, pretty much in order:
• GPIO for hacking - basically an Arduino but a real computer
• Low power use (practical to run from a battery for some purposes)
• Tiny form-factor
Price seemed to be more of an "it doesn't matter that much if you break it while hacking with it" factor than a reason-to-buy.
I think the problem with your bullet points is that something like an ESP32 beats a Pi at all of these criteria (as well as on cost), and can be wired/wirelessly tethered to whatever PC you have handy if you actually need a bunch of compute.
With the exception of the Zero, Pi has always been playing in the realm of "this is a real computer, except cheaper". And that's a pretty crowded space these days.
"Low cost" is/was part of their mission.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio...
That's very interesting.
Incidentally that slide deck mentions the pi zero - which is still very cheap (the 2w is about $20 where I live), so I guess they're still honouring that even if their fancy one is pricy-ish.
Edit: I also found this article from before the original pi release https://hackaday.com/2011/05/06/miniature-pc-packs-a-big-pun...
The comments in that thread are very focused on the price point (many doubting it could hit $25, which it actually did reach) so I stand corrected; it was clearly part of both the marketing and the attraction.
I think most people buying RPis for the GPIO would be better served by a small microcontroller devboard like the Arduino Uno acting as the intermediary between the computer and the wires. This way if anything goes wrong (overvoltage, short) then the Arduino takes the impact and is much cheaper to replace.
All of these are true (even more so) for the Pi Zero.
Why would someone buy a Pi5 when they can get more power for the same price?
It's become a dual-use device, hence the obligatory comparisons.
It needs to be said as long as RPI's are this expensive they were supposed to be VERY cheap SBC's and instead they're approaching and in some cases exceeding full commercial boxed products
Every topic has typical comments that are predictable.
Because there are a shocking number of folks that don’t realize just how cheap you can get a used mini-pc off eBay. And if the only thing you’re missing is gpio that can easily be added.
And frankly our planet needs to do a lot more reusing in that “reduce, reuse, recycle” system if we plan on leaving anything to our great grandchildren.
The discussion is how RPi raised its price close to a PC rather than one of a hobbyist board
The reason that safety briefings on every single plane take-off is not because people might be flying for the first time- it's to reiterate important points to bury important information in your mind despite not using it.
Our brains are extremely good at getting rid of data that it thinks is not relevant, if you don't apply knowledge or information your mind will "optimise" it away. Hence, the infinite repetition.
The same is true here. If you're buying a raspberry pi just for hosting: it's foolish not to consider alternatives.
This is important for two reasons, and less important for a third.
1) It free's up supply of rPIs for people who will actually use them for GPIO and education
2) It actually gives people a better, more wholistic experience, at a better price.
3) It forces people to consider the reason for purchase; instead of piling up some e-waste because the RPI was purchased for a yet unknown reason "I can use it for anything*".
Your post just highlights the extreme absurdity of these urgent "my God, don't you know about mini PCs!" and "you could just buy a used computer on eBay!" posts that accompany every Raspberry Pi announcement. You really believe you're offering a safety briefing.
sorry, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I was suggesting that this kind of comment is akin to a “safety briefing” - in so far as it makes you safer.
What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s very easy for mundane information to be lost and so it bears repetition.
I don’t believe I’m offering a safety briefing, I believe the author is making the point that if you’re looking for something to host a service, you will be better served with something more suitable to the task. And not something that is designed for something completely different; constraining the supply and making things more expensive and difficult than they need to be
Same here. Just spent €150 on something more powerful and versatile and more complete than this pi. IMHO the pi is tremendously overpriced.
What was it? Model?
GMKTec G3 is a very good N100 PC. It's not the smallest one and its SATA port is also M2, but its NVMe port is x2 instead of x1.
Another alternative is BeeLink's S12 series, which accept 2.5" SATA drives and M2 NVMe drives. However, the NVMe port on these systems are x1.
Both are silent (for active cooling), dependable systems, but not as silent and small as a passively cooled RPi5.
Not parent, I'm mostly looking at small thinkcentres for that price. The last one I looked at was about $60 for a unit that needs a power supply (about $20) and a couple drives. I haven't figured out a specific model I want yet.
Thanks. Do yo mean Lenovo thinkcentres?. Checked out their page, and they seem a lot more expensive.
They are, I should have specified that I'm looking at used ones.
I missed them. Was under different category.
They do look good. Though, I think aimed at business. So probably some upcharge.
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-Tiny-Desktop-Mini/...
If you need a PC, as in a desktop or a generic server, by all means buy a PC.
If you need a ton of fast and sophisticated GPIO, small size, light weight. passive cooling, battery-powered operation, a PC starts looking a bit problematic. That's where an RPi fits in.
I don't know, all my use cases where I needed GPIO are better satisfied by an ESP32. If I need more compute, I connect the ESP32 to my server via the internet.
Makes sense for many applications. But what if you are building an autonomous flying drone? That's the kind of application at which RPi shines, to my mind.
(Otherwise, indeed, an ESP32 has rather adequate amounts of compute and RAM for many control applications.)
Unless it processes images on the fly to do some sort of image-based steering or target recognition, an Arduino or comparable microcontroller should be beefy enough [1]. In mobile applications, power consumption of a RPi quickly becomes an issue.
Yes, an autonomous drone would have to process images, height data, map data, etc, so the compute of an RPi would still be relevant. Also, the drone does not have to max out the CPU all the time, it just may need intense compute in some situations, say, depending on the terrain. Larger drones, such as delivery drones, have motors with power consumption that dwarfs that of an RPi. For a a small, palm-sized drone it's of course untenable.
Great unless you need low power, ARM, small form factor, GPIO, or ability to load your software to a compute module.
Also not an argument for users buying 2GB/4GB models I suppose.
RPi5 is far from low power these days.
But a lot closer than anything from Intel (except a few Celeron-style chips that are even slower).
The Intel Celeron mini PCs you decided to exclude because they don't fit your narrative, actually use less power at full clock and idle at the same power consumption.
They're slightly slower at peak, but they're also a much fuller package with SSD interface, Intel graphics with multiple monitor support and no need for running custom linux distros due to x86.
Which one did you go for? I have a raspberry pi 4 with 8gb RAM which is fine for now but may be on the look out for a replacement in the coming years.
I like using dell Wyse 5070. Cheap and available, basically same or less power than a Rpi but without all the limitations.
Building any server on a SD card or external HD is just causing stress for their future self.
Yeah, beginning to think the SD card is the Pi's Achilles' heel. They should put a 64 GB (or so) SSD on the board for the RPi 6.
Yep its a better deal. Counterintuitively, the N97 is newer and has higher performance than the N100, especially its built-in graphics. It does consume more power though (12W vs 6W).
Here is a comparison between the models: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/04/intel-processor-n95-...
Raspberry PI lead the way, and made a big splash a decade ago. The defined this market.
But wonder if the competition has caught up.
Seems like lots of other options with more power, cheaper. Or maybe not. I'm kind of looking for an opinion on this.
I have an Orange Pi 5 16G, which was a lot more powerful than an RPi4, and more available when I purchased it. I generally like it. It does the headless server things I'm looking for, but it has had a few quirks over time. Distro support isn't great but Armbian runs well.
For the price, and what I use, I would probably buy a mini PC at this point.
In general, with boards that aren't Raspberry Pi, always focus on the now, and not the things it should be able to do later. Often they're stuck on a kernel with whatever patches they run at release. Sometimes the community fixes that, but not always.
What do you do with your Mini PC? I was interested in one but I just used an old thinkpad to run some stuff instead
I'm not the OP but have a little collection of mini pcs (5 of them) so, if you'll allow me, I'll comment on why I have them...
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
I'm interested in your TV box. What OS are you using? I assume it has a remote control of some kind? I'm guessing it doesn't run apps like Netflix? Do you have a browser or something for that instead, or do you just run local media?
I ask all this because I'm sick of my android tv boxes locking up about once a month, and I'd like something a little more powerful.
I have used the ASRock N100DC-ITX with some ram, ssd and an old disk.
I run: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, VPN, Nextcloud, Qbittorrent. More things are on https://selfh.st
Everything is in Docker + Portainer. Makes it super easy to manage. The setup uses 17 watts.
This is the kind of stuff that is perfect for some old laptop you have lying around. Good power efficiency and no e-waste :)
For me, its price/space/performance per watt.
THe n100 is tiny, but has enough power to run 3-8 VMs. I used to use KVM, but moved recently to proxmox after I wore out the disk.
I still have some Pis about to do GPIO stuff, but for _serving_ I used x86
Each n100 has an average power draw of < 8watts at the wall (thats when doing lots of CPU.)
At my work we use NUCs a lot - we put them into custom enclosure together with touch screen (1920x1080, not something small), then mount that on CNC machines to let users browse work plans, access ERP etc., get measuring data from dislocated unit, etc.
NUCs are underrated IMHO. I picked up a NUC7 mid-2020, mounts on a VESA plate behind my monitor, used for media, fileshare, general Linux tinkering and VMs. Zero problems (except for a secondary disk failure last year, spinning rust type).
Nice to see Asus have finally started doing something with them.
I see there's lots of competition (or at least, lots of options) in that space now.
They are suprisingly reliable - the only problem we repeatedly have is CMOS batteries draining if they are turned off during vacation period (happens for less than 5% of our rigs though).
I just bought one for 120€ (from AliExpress). I will use it to replace my small 2-disk NAS by adding an usb HDD dock and to host some small personal servers (for managing recipes, groceries, tools, downloads, etc, nothing fancy).
I initially considered a rpi5 + SATA HAT because I don't need much power and the N100 is definitely more power hungry than a RPi but the price tag that included 16gb ram and 512gb SSD convinced me to buy the minipc.
I also considered buying a N100 motherboard with 4-6 SATA port to not rely on a single usb port for the NAS port but it was more expensive than the PC and without RAM or hard drive
Note that I was surprised to discover it was not possible to install Linux headless easily like on the SBCs. Also I decided to try out nixos but I don't really have the time and energy to learn a new paradigm and I will probably go back to Debian or similar when I have the time
I bought 3 Dell Optiplex Micros just a few weeks ago. The ones I got have 6c12t and support up to 64GB of ram + one sata and one nmve drive.
I use them as xcp-ng hosts.
I have Optiplex Micros too. If they have a Wifi card then you can convert that to a 3rd SSD drive, perfect for RAID, mirrored ZFS etc
What models are new enough to consider? Do any of these support ECC ram? And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use? Most of my storage is media for Plex or edited in Resolve and such. I have a 6x3TB zraid2 setup at the moment with aging disks (2015~), but looking to upgrade that. Not sure if I can go the route of just having 2x10TB or something instead, perhaps with a off-site backup to a identical system for the important stuff. Currently I rely on having the important bits copied several places, and just accepting I'll lose some data if everything catches fire here locally
>What models are new enough to consider?
Depends on really what do you want to do. For just data storage, NAS, pretty much anything goes. If you want to run VMs, Docker etc. you want something newer. Personally I use Optiplex Micro 3080 with i5-10500T. That was 270€ refurbished.
>Do any of these support ECC ram
No, as far as the Dell, Lenovo, HP mini PCs goes.
>And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use?
Yes but reading your use case you probably don't want a mini PC. You can only have 1x 2.5" SSD and 2x NVMe SSD. A single 8TB NVMe SSD is currently 1000€ and you would need two. Unless you want something smaller of course.
I have a older Intel S2600CP dual Xeon board now, which still works fine, but is a huge SSI-EEB board and draws like 90W mostly idle.
I think most of my use-case could be covered by one or more mini pcs, since I mostly run stuff like Home Assistant and other small things in containers. But for storage I'm not sure what makes sense now. I went with zraid2 back then (in 2015) because I already had four of the 3TB disks, so purchasing two more was worth it for the cost and extra parity drive.
But now I'm not sure if ZFS is the right choice. I think now you can expand pools with more disks, in theory anyway, but I never tried it.
I don't know what options I should consider, and why. Unraid for example looks promising, since you can just keep adding disks.
Realistically most of what I have on the server is replaceable, I really only care about personal photos/videos/documents.
If I am replacing hardware to lower power consumption/electricity cost, spending lots of money to do so does not really make much sense. I would very much like to get 90W+ of heating power out of my home office though, it's noticeably cooler in the room if I turn off the server and other computer(s). Less spinning disks and less hardware would help with that part, but other than making the office cooler I don't think I would save that much money (initially anyway).
The disks I have are from 2015, so probably better to make a choice for hardware/disks now than having to emergency purchase one or more of them to replace failing ones.
I'd probably just buy a Synology station. Yes it's proprietary but the system itself is really good. I know a lot of people buy one just for its own photos system alone https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/photos
The problem with those is that they are insanely expensive for what you get. Here locally the DS423+ (4-bay one) is like $614 USD + shipping without any disks, and has a Intel Celeron J4125 and 2GB ram. They are unfortunately ridiculously overpriced
Yes that's true!
You should look around on /r/homelab there are some nice low power consumption builds there, for example this one
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1935nar/homelab_na...
Thanks for the tip! Good to know since I don’t need wireless, I even disabled it on the BIOS.
You need this for converting the AE key to M but otherwise works perfectly (though ymmv depending on the motherboard chipset) https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004762924052.html
What model did you get? I've been looking at various micros on eBay/local sites, but none that I find are actually available for reasonable prices shipped to me (Norway). Finding lots of machines around ~$220 USD, but then add in $50 shipping + VAT and it adds up
7060 with i7-8700T. Got two from eBay and one from a local classified ads service.
Some vendors on eBay allow you to make an offer for a lower price, it’s worth a try.
The Lenovo equivalents are nice too (M720q/M920q) and you can get cheap PCIe risers to install a single slot, low profile card.
For me it’s TrueNAS. Dell Optiplex Micro with 3x SSD. 2 mirrored ZFS drives storage for media, downloaded stuff etc.
not OP, but: Home Assistant, zigbee2mqtt, Arr-Software-Suite, navidrome etc.
Basically a small server for self-hosted applications.
There's been much debate about Raspberry Pi straying from its mission to provide affordable computers. I disagree.
Raspberry Pi offers models ranging from $10 to $120, all readily available — more so than ever.
Adjusted for inflation, the original $35 Raspberry Pi Model B (launched 2012) would be $50 today. The Raspberry Pi 5 2GB is also $50 today and vastly outperforms the original, delivering far greater bang for buck.
Though I can’t speak to their internal decisions, it’s seems from the outside that they continue to try to maximise the value of the Raspberry Pi while maintaining the original price point.
Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni, one of the first Raspberry Pi resellers.
I hope this is a one-off expensive Pi and not an indication of a new pricing strategy. It would be very disappointing if these hacker computers became expensive toys.
The article is very feel-good with the carbon credits and all, but the inflating pricing is a disservice to the hacker community. It shouldn’t be sort of greenwashed.
Locally (Spain), the new 16GB model costs ~140 EUR, while the 2GB model costs ~60 EUR. So if you just want a very cheap RPI, seems it's still out there, you just cannot aim for 16GB (or go for something else than RPI).
Indeed, there are options. But rpi 3 was launched for €32/$35. I hope rpi 6 is not launched starting at €120/$120+, that’s all I’m saying.
It would make it inaccessible for hobby projects that need more than one and to most kids that need to buy it for computer science classes (or schools that budget for these things). Those were very important purposes for pi, the main purposes, according to some.
And yes, one might say — but inflation. To which I would say — bust cost of living crisis. Anyways, computing should be accessible to everyone, it’s what Steve Jobs called a bicycle for the brain. If raspberry cannot afford do make this pi cheaper, they should design one they can afford.
So long as there are cheap pis (as you mention), I will continue to love the brand. Even if they have premium models. But if they shift to more expensive pricing for all pis, which is sort of what seems to be happening very gently, that would be disappointing. That’s my point.
> But rpi 3 was launched for €32/$35
It also had 1GB RAM, 1.2GHz CPU and 100mbit Ethernet, while the RPI 5 has 2.4GHz CPU, iGPU, hardware HEVC decoder, 2GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and more.
But yeah, overall I agree, they seem to be slowly raising the prices (even when accounting for inflation) which isn't too hopeful to see, but at least they seem to have some footing to raise the prices, as the new ones has a lot more features than the old ones.
In the end, there are alternatives that will give you more performance/spent money, although probably with worse software support...
But it was so long ago that 1GB RAM, 1.2GHz was really good in comparison.
> expensive
It costs $120. If you're not an impoverished person living in the developing world, this is not "expensive."
It depends on intended usage. If I want to run it as a desktop computer - this is one case (who would do it - another question). It is very different if I want to deploy it in every room of my home. RPi used to be the solution for the second type of problem: ad-hoc smart things with exceptional connectivity and above-average computing power.
It's worth remembering, we're talking about the most expensive member of a pretty full product line. I have had a few "every room" applications (streaming music with some pretty inefficient software) for these things, and I found the original Zero to be a little underpowered, but the 1GB RPi 4 that my local Microcenter sells for $30 would work fine.
(I think I'm actually more irked than most people about RPi going public, but their product pricing still seems okay to me)
Finally. I was seriously looking at competitor's boards for more RAM. Now despite some of the competition being faster, the convenience and ecosystem factor is in favor of the RPi, and I'm in. Now, if I can actually get one...
I agree. While the hardware is a bit lower spec'd than what other SBC manufacturers like Radxa, Banana Pi and others have to offer, even at a better price, nothing comes close to how Raspberry Pi supports their products.
You get solid OS support right from the beginning, and HATs are designed for their boards.
I still have a Raspberry Pi 1st Gen running as an OpenVPN server, which I upgraded last year to the back-then latest official Raspbian 12.
I also have a Radxa ROCK 5B with 16 GB RAM which is crazy fast compared to the Raspi 4 (this R4 is currently the core of my network), but the OS support is a horrible experience.
So I just ordered mine, which will allow me to finally upgrade and merge 2 Raspi 4, and move the MongoDB database from the Radxa over to the Raspi again, since MongoDB stopped supporting devices up to and including the Raspi 4 around 3 years ago.
The only two issues I had with Raspberry Pi was the problem they caused when they upgraded the camera stack, and now the move from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS, which will affect around 5 of my older, low memory boards (mostly Zeros).
> You get solid OS support right
One thing that frustrates me after running Raspberry Pis for years is that RPiOS doesn't really support in-place upgrades. You have to more or less set them up a new with each major release, despite the Debian origins where this is of course robustly possible.
Bluetooth is serious issue on older models, at least. It is very unreliable. I wonder if it is finally fixed in the latest model…
It's been solid for me on the Pi 5.
Who are these for? Raspberry Pi made sense as an educational and dirt cheap hobbyist platform when it sold for ~$30. At $120 + accessories it's just another expensive toy.
We use them for all kinds of one off R&D projects at work. University students and researchers build all kinds of stuff with these. I know several companies who build low volume specialty industrial applications powered by RPi hardware. In all these cases the difference between $50 and $150 is meaningless
It's still a reasonably competent very small desktop computer, and the best supported small ARM machine you can find.
Yes but at this price it competes with machines with real nvme storage and upgradeable ram.
And it’s not even low power any more.
2W idle isn't low-power?
It requires active cooling doesn't it...
I've had good luck with entirely passive cooling for a pi5. It was 12 bucks for a the osb cnc aluminum version. https://www.digikey.com/en/blog/edatecs-two-fan-less-cnc-cas...
Pi 4, depending on the environment, also needed active cooling, in my experience. Especially in summer, with room temperature above 28*C, it couldn't handle any load until I added a fan. (The good thing about it was that I could control the fan with PWM easily - it was fun :))
But the Pi 3 didn't. You'd think with the process improvements they'll be able to have more performance in the same heat envelope, but they want to do their own Pentium IV...
Process improvements can only go that far - register banks, speculative execution, instruction reordering, many execution units and so on use power, but are needed because the processor can be faster, but the memory is still much slower.
The Pi500, which is essentially the same hardware, works with passive cooling.
Active coolers exist to fit within the tiny footprint. If you have the space, you can go with passive cooling or a cooling case (essentially a large heatsink).
No, it does not.
> the best supported small ARM machine you can find.
Wouldn't that be the new Mac mini?
It means running Linux or BSD comfortably on it.
This is true of M2 mac minis at least
Should have specified "for Linux".
No, this is https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/project-digits/
I really want one of those machines, but I will be shocked if they are even "well supported," let alone "best supported."
They ship with linux. Macs have zero linux support from Apple
It costs $3000, and Nvidia is known to drop support for their developer platforms quickly.
You can find plenty of YouTube videos for that but I bet you rarely find anyone who actually uses it that way on a daily basis. The performance and desktop experience are just miserable.
Who needs 16GB ram on a PI! Like what are the actual use cases?
I covered a few potential use cases in my blog post [1], but I'll list them here for brevity:
1. LLMs / AI: you can run llama2:13b on the Pi 5 natively, though at a pokey 1.4 t/s or so. Training small models for use with camera projects is easier too.
2. Web apps / consolidating containers: You could run a few 'beefy' websites off one Pi, as they're often memory constrained more than CPU-bound nowadays (my Drupal site requires 256 MB per PHP thread). (Though an N100 mini PC could be a better option if you care less about the energy efficiency).
3. Experimental gamers (probably like 1/10,000th the size of the other markets) who want to run modern AAA games with eGPUs on arm64... I'm one of like 10 people I've heard of who have attempted this lol
4. Clustering enthusiasts: usually we have more dollars than sense, and having arm64 nodes that cost $120 new with 16 GB of RAM per node means we can have more raw container or MPI capacity than with 8 GB nodes...
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/who-would-buy-raspber...
However you can get an N100-based box for about $150 (including shipping) with 16GB RAM and 500GB NVMe storage[1].
The N100 has a more powerful CPU[2], and can use OpenVINO which llama.cpp supports, so better token performance than the Pi. The N100 has far better storage performance due to x4 M.2 slot, and if you need even more RAM you can upgrade[3] it to 32GB.
The RPi 5 was a very niche board to begin with, the 16GB option at $120 even more so IMO.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007511663921.html (semi-random example)
[2]: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Raspberry-Pi-5-Benchm...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/179c9m1/comment/k5... (needs to be single module, not dual)
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted; If you're not using a Pi for the GPIO/HATs and tinkering of that kind, but for hosting software/services, a mini-PC destroys the Pi in every regard.
I have a couple of dozen Pis, I typically buy 3x of each generation, but recently I retired everything below a Pi4 and use a Minisforum mini-PC I got for ~£260 with a 8c/16T Ryzen 7 mobile, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD, it can do what all of the Pis were doing before and still have a tonne of CPU headroom, and I can double the RAM to 64GB if I need more.
Factoring in the cost of the Pis, coolers, PSUs, storage etc it was literally cheaper than all of the Pis and has performance and features in a different league to the Pi.
Power consumption is lower than the number of Pis required to run the equivalent workload by some way.
Great!
All of these are quantitative metrics I (and many others) don't care about.
- All save for one machine in my home are now ARM. I like the consistency, e.g I can share Nix derivations or Docker images.
- N100 has no GPIO, which I like to tinker with from time to time.
- N100 does not support my favourite HATs that I own or consider as potential buy.
- N100 are one size fits all. There's a whole array of Pi cases and thermal management that can be picked up for any reason ranging from purely technical and practical purposes (fan vs passive, sealed vs open, human/environment protection...) or simply because it's fun and engaging (e.g NESPi case with SSD cartridges)
- N100 come in subtle variations that you have to care about. Pis are "fixed targets" physically, hardware-wise, and culturally, which makes them easy to consistently target, support, recommend, educate about, or find books for (e.g gifts for kids).
- N100 are this century nondescript dull beige boxes, while Pis are engaging through and through.
Pis and N100s are qualitatively different. A Pi5 is simply an upgrade over a Pi4. All that matters is that they're fast enough.
If you don't care about performance, which you just said you didn't, then the RPi4 ticks all the boxes you mentioned.
Given the list of things you care about, the RPi5 is not really an upgrade over the RPi4. Hence why I think it's a very niche board.
Had they instead made the RPi5 be a cheap RPi4, I think it would have been much more interesting. I bought some RPi4's 2GB boards when they were $30 each. That was a great price and enables a lot of fun and interesting use-cases.
> I bought some RPi4's 2GB boards when they were $30 each.
$30? That was a great price indeed.
In 2019 I bought a 2GB Pi4 from an approved seller for £44, which is about £56 in today's money. The 4GB Pi5 now sells for £57 from that same seller (the 2GB Pi4 sells for £42, or £32 in 2019's money)
Focusing on cheap would be the real “niche” area here. There are plenty of alternative boards if price is your driving concern.
The cheap ones I've seen are almost all Chinese boards with limited support. The appeal of the RPi has always been that you can have some confidence it will work.
It also uses a lot more power all of the time for something that will be on 24/7. There is a trade off between these devices, the pi is more expensive to kit equivalent to the N100 machines (which are a bit quicker) but it uses less power all the time especially under load.
Of course if you're powering this off solar in some remote location then we're into the niches where an RPi 5 might make sense, but otherwise it's just down to electricity cost.
How that works out in practice depends on workload though, while the N100 consumes more at idle, it can also finish workloads much faster so can potentially spend more time at idle. While the RPi 5 idles at around 4W (including a NVMe) and the N100 at around 15W, the RPi 5 uses 12W at full tilt[1], ie close to N100 idle power draw.
Alternatively the N100 with 32GB of RAM can replace two or more RPi 5's in terms of performance, so in that regard might even come out ahead.
[1]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21#issueco...
The cost difference in power probably works out to much less than $50/year. Modern PCs are very power efficient when idle.
Based on my current unit prices the difference in idle performance alone would come out to about £30 a year, so you would get the difference in price back within the life of the device. Europe has much higher KW/h prices for power especially in the past few years and is more advanced in transition to green power technologies and as such we tend to care more about the cost of power than those in the USA.
$50/yr means you make up the entire cost of the RPi in a little more than 2 years if you’re running it as a home server of some sort, for example.
This probably depends more on what hardware is being used rather than the SoC itself.
A bare RPi5 seems to idle around 3 W, which a bare N100 can absolutely (out)do (these are designed with S0ix/s2idle after all).
If you add gigabit ethernet, you'll add 0.5 - 2 W (depending on the controller).
If you add NVMe, you'll add 0-4 W - NVMe SSDs vary wildly in both their own power consumption and how they interact with CPU C-states and ASPM. Some SSDs prevent low C-states and thereby increase CPU power consumption a lot, for example (even in S0ix). This is generally true for every PCIe peripheral (including network controllers), but NVMe SSDs are popular troublemakers in this area.
I honestly don't believe any of the "N100 idles at 15 W" numbers. First of all, that substantially exceeds the power limits of the N100, by like a factor of three. So clearly the vast majority of that power isn't being dissipated by the N100. Seeing how N100 boards generally have only one heatsinked component, the power is dissipated elsewhere. Second, people rarely post their exact hardware and how they measured this. "Idles at 15W [because there's a spinning hard drive attached]" is not very interesting. Third, many of the N100 boards have ATX power connectors, and if you use any old ATX power supply, that alone can cause such a number. Fourth, if you're using a cheap power meter, many of them are still wildly inaccurate at the low end. And, fifth, as a reality check, even much older 1L PCs using actual desktop platforms, even with separate chipsets and all that jazz, don't idle at 15 W. Unless you're using Windows, then, maybe. But Windows can't and shouldn't be the yard stick for power efficiency.
From the 5 N100 systems I've run, they all idle between 5-8W, PSU inclusive (measured at the wall). The SoC might idle slightly lower, but I compare total system power draw when I test SBCs since that's the only fair comparison.
Now you made me want to hook up my N100 box to my lab PSU so I can get some accurate numbers of what it does and how it compares to the wall.
My minipc idle (with nothing added) idle at 6W and works at 22w
Jeff,
Price is precisely linear, not polynomial! $5/GiB (price= $40 + $5 * xGiB)
The graph isn't spaced correctly on the x axis, which causes confusion.
If you want cheaper (sort of) K8s nodes, with similar more compute power / RAM you can reuse old devices (smartphones, tablets) and run postmarketOS on them.
Shameless plug: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/
More RAM for ZFS perhaps, Jeff?
Heh, indeed—that's my plan for the 16 GB Pi 5, to swap it out for the 32 TB all-SSD Pi NAS setup I've been running for the past year! https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas
I mean it's funny that people even have to ask, pretty much every piece of software treats RAM like it's free and unlimited nowadays. Even the most memory conscious cpp programs are so bloated at compile time that you need swap to even build them on <8GB boards.
16 GB is really a minimum for anything that's not embedded.
Bigger caches. Making entire RAMFS or tmpfs partitions (filesystems but in RAM) for applications or tinkering with things. https://wiki.debian.org/ramfs , Virtualization / VMs, databases. Loading large files into RAM instead of having to read by row/column on a HD.
I'd rather have more RAM available unused than not have RAM available and need it. Been the general rule of thumb for me for the last 30ish years.
RAMFS is a genius idea. That solves most of the SD card health and speed issues without needing to get a whole hard drive. I know Puppy[0] and MX Linux[1] were made to run like that too.
[0] https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ [1] https://mxlinux.org/
I used to run a Pi as a Wireguard entrypoint to my home network, I made the filesystem read-only and created a RAM disk and moved logs and any other writes to it to protect the longevity of the uSD, it had the added benefit of security of a read-only FS. I'd remount it r/w occasionally and run updates. It ran flawlessly for years (at a time when I was killing a Sandisk uSD in Pis roughly once per week) until I decommissioned it.
I've been running a public facing weather website on my RPi2 since 2014. I am still on the same SD card since all HTML assets and logs are on tmpfs. The only thing being written to the SD card are entries to the DB once every 5 minutes.
That's pretty sweet.
My suspicion about the many uSD cards I've killed is power issues, power loss, etc. In terms of wear, I don't think a typical Pi would be doing enough to wear them out unless it was being hammered.
Your kernel will already cache all IO in memory.
You can decrease the to-disk syncing to e.g. once per day.
```sysctl.conf vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 86400000 ```
Thanks for this information. That's actually really helpful for me to know in my server administration dealings. I _hate_ disk IO and disk thrash. I was aware of kernel stuff but completed eluded me that I could modify it. I put it to 7200
Good point, but I was more talking about distros designed for a smooth day-to-day experience. A user would probably want something like SquashFS (to save space on the SD card) and ZRAM (to conserve RAM) since all their files would be living there.
Now you can finally run basic Electron applications, like Slack. If you're lucky, you might even be able to run 2 at the same time!
Outside of a real use-case, RPi products are well-polished and fun to play with. There are few other products with an overall presentation - from design to marketing - that are as clean and well done. Personally, I enjoy supporting that.
>Who needs 16GB ram on a PI! Like what are the actual use cases?
If you use it as you would a PC then it's actually not enough RAM. I have 16GB on my laptop and desktop computers both, and as I always keep browsers running they're always out of memory, even with 16GB swap added.
Just came in to my office.. and my office computer with the same spec had killed all the desktop applications due to memory overuse, just as it always does when I leave it alone for a few days.
Granted, I do have a lot of windows and tabs open, that's because I need to move away from stuff and do other things for a while, but when I go back I need it to be there just as I left it. But browsers are eating memory. All of them. Chromium, Firefox, Vivaldi.. you name it.
For something working as a desktop PC I'm looking for way more RAM than a meagre 16GB. For a Pi which I use just for a single purpose I'm fine with those I have.. 2GB , 4GB, 8GB (which I use for different things). I'll never run a browser on any of them though. No way.
It's theoretically viable to run a 16TB ZFS NAS, which would be perfectly respectable for SoHo/homelab workloads.
I've been looking to upgrade my aging PowerEdge T20 (also hate the fan noise), this is looking very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Geerling makes a video about this exact use case.
The latest android phones are adopting 16GB now, so the SBC's for equivalent performance are going to do so too. One use of them is running android for development purposes among many many others. They make great self hosting servers that are really low power.
It's just a bigger hammer, the only tool you will ever need in your life.
The use cases get born once you have such amount of ram...
Would it still make sense to use a raspberry pi over an x86 mini PC in those cases, economic and performance wise?
Only your use case can tell you if it makes sense :) If you're looking for a cheap in-house CI cluster for building/testing on ARM, it makes a ton of sense, just as an example.
Seriously, these days, running a few dozen containers requires so much ram, I'm running a Odroid with 32GB ram and finally feeling safe from memory exhaustion.
I can't think of a single use case that wouldn't be served by a much faster MiniPC that after counting power supply, storage, box etc. would fall in a similar price ballpark. RPi and similar boards are a godsend when one needs easily accessible GPIOs without external interfaces adding points of failure and cost, but usually the amount of memory required in those contexts is much lower.
The bigger the system, the smaller the role of the CPU/GPU power consumption has in the overall sticker price. I would expect a 10TB-memory server with a couple hundred petabytes of flash storage to cost more or less the same regardless of what's the CPU inside it.
I think it's mainly for embedding into products that require a standalone AI dataset of some sort. Robotics, perhaps, or production line defect detection.
Running Chrome?
K8s control plane node or even worker node. 4 get you a single cp and 3 workers which most helm charts require. There's a pi hosting provider which is reasonably cheap, like 7€/m, yearly payment, but only 100mbit connectivity. Still good enough for a learning cluster. Where can you get that for less than 28€/month?
With more memory available, the cross-compiling constraints become less relevant.
Add one of these to your development environment, use it for building and packaging, deliver to the lower-spec memory devices being shipped.
This can be a massive productivity boost.
Wasn't the whole point of Raspberry Pi being cheap and accessible?
It is still cheap and accessible. The cheapest Pi model is just over $10 [1], the most expensive is $120 [2].
And within that range there are a number of options with different CPU power, connectivity options, and RAM. Take your pick!
[1] Raspberry Pi Zero - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero
[2] Raspberry Pi 5 16GB - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5
As a homelab guy, the only thing I wish is multi-gig ethernet. (2.5gbe)
2.5 GbE is too slow for my home lab. I want 10 GbE-T PoE++ without having to add a craptastic hat that has a lot of failures.
My network test boxes run 100 GbE of various flavors supported by E810-CQDA2.
Right. PoE will be fantastic.
With you there, the Pi 5 can handle 2.5 or even 5 GbE pretty adequately.
I think that’s a fair price for a 16GB RAM Raspberry Pi 5
I wonder if this means the 16GB Pi 500 wedge computer will be $150?
16GB is fine, although I would prefer an rpi5 revision B with onboard nvme connector. I've always wondered why they didn't do it in the first place when there is enough room for a 2230 disk.
I hope that rpi6 goes nvme and usb c. I would love full size hdmi but I can see going usb c for displays as well
I think they sell those connectors as addons/"hats" or something now.
They should also sell the dusty drawer it’ll end up in.
I am surprised my local reseller seems to actually have stock. Usually whenever RPi says "now on sale" that means "check in half a year".
The price is still way off though, as always.
At $120 it's just not a very attractive price. You can get more powerful mini-pcs for $150, and microcontrollers with as many GPIOs for $5.
I can't remember, how exactly we got from $20 RPi to $120 RPi?
Because now there is a large range of options.
Here's your $20 Pi (still supported and available to buy): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w
Here's your $120 Pi (many times faster and with 32 x the RAM): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5
The choice is right there for you with many other options in between...
Is there pi5s with the arm cores which were hardware-fused-disabled, namely without the royalties paid to arm? (In other words, with a RISC-V firmware)
Now do one with ECC!
... and one with 32GB/64GB/128GB ECC RAM ... and one with USB4/USB4 2.0 ... and one with 2.5/5/10Gbps Ethernet ... and one with M.2 SSD port ... and one with 2nm litography
Orange Pi has more bang for the buck.
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...
I would respond but HN is limiting how much I can post per day, only 4 posts.
Orange Pi 5 is the go to solution for IRL streaming right now as well as router. The openwrt project has created a special variant of the orange Pi, but the regular one is cheaper and has more features. Both are very well supported. Claiming it's an eventual paperweight is FUD and not true.
Orange Pi is pointless as a competitor even with vastly better specs, since it doesn't maintain a good support ecosystem and is just an eventual paperweight.
The choice is really between Raspberry with good custom software support, and an x86 minipc that will run literally anything generic effortlessly.
It's usage case dependent I guess but I haven't noticed much of a difference.
Both my raspberry pis and orange pis run armbian so they're isn't much difference on a software level for just running software (k3s, docker etc).
You have no idea how common Orange Pi is in low MOQ custom devices that comes out of China.