Comment on good alternatives to raspberry pi which are cheap and efficient?
seaQueue@lemmy.world 1 year agoI 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.
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.
ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year 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.