Comment on good alternatives to raspberry pi which are cheap and efficient?

• seaQueue@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I wouldn’t recommend anyone go older than 6th Gen Intel CPUs these days. They’re already 6+ years old, anything before that doesn’t usually support x86-64-v3 and the perf/watt just isn’t worthwhile. Your total cost of ownership on, say, a Haswell i7 is going to be significantly higher than a Skylake machine even over the first year once you account for energy costs.

  Preferably you’d use Intel 8th gen (when the i3s stepped to 4c/8t and the i5/i7s went to 6c/12t) but I don’t know how competitive pricing is on those these days. I’d try to stick with Zen2 on the AMD side if possible, that’s about when their perf/watt really started to get good - I do have a soft spot for Zen1 embedded though, you can get great prices on v1756b boxes on eBay now (the HP T740) and those make nice virtualized 10Gb router platforms.

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  • ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Used “1-liter” business PCs which come with a modest amount of RAM+storage (assuming you’re likely to replace/upgrade after buying anyway) and an 8th gen Intel CPU should run between ehhh like $125 to $250 depending on which model CPU, how much RAM etc. Totally worth it IMO, I use one with an i5-8500T as a Proxmox host for my web services and so far I’m quite happy with it. Snagged a deal on it a couple months ago, $110, shipped with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD which I immediately replaced.

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Preferably you’d use Intel 8th gen (when the i3s stepped to 4c/8t and the i5/i7s went to 6c/12t) but I don’t know how competitive pricing is on those these days.

    I bought a small form factor PC on eBay (HP ProDesk 600 G5) with a Core i5-8500, 8GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD for $199 around a year ago. I upgraded it to 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe. Made a great home server with a bunch of stuff running on it. I actually want to sell it soon since I built a new server/NAS system.

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