I recently bought a domain from Porkbun (thanks to all of the comments on this post!) and I want to self-host some services myself. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and I’m not quite sure if it can handle these things:
- A matrix homeserver
- A lemmy instance
- A website with static HTML pages
- Privacy-respecting frontends (Piped, Redlib etc.)
I am thinking about getting a maxed-out Raspberry Pi 5 with a whole 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Is it worth it? I need a machine that is quiet, doesn’t draw that much power and is overall pretty good for the money.
Edit: I bought this Mini PC instead of the Raspberry Pi 5. Thanks to all the comments!!
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I replaced 4x Pi4 4gb with a single N95 mini PC with 16gb ram and wont look back.
Only PI left in my home is just running a 24/7 USBIP bridge.
the only reason to use a pi is if you need GPIO pins for custom devices.
USBIP bridge as in USB over ethernet?
Yip, I have a Linux VM running on one of my boxes in the garage that is plugged into a video matrix so I can bring it up on any screen in the house, I use the pi to connect Keyboard/Mouse/controllers etc to that when I’m using it.
Well that sounds cool
In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution anymore it used to be. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.
And you can upgrade a NUC with more RAM up to 32 GB if you pick a model which supports that amount.
My go to is a refurbished slim mini pc. Like a dell or HP for sub $100
I’ve got a BeeLink N100 system that’s just a bit bigger than a NUC, has two 2.5Gb LAN ports and came with a 512gb nvme drive. Works a treat as a Jellyfin server with TONS of processor and ram headroom. N100 is a great little chip, so long as you’re not expecting i5+ power.
Why not get a minipc? For the same cost you can get way more performance
If you don’t need the I/O pins, look into a mini PC. In the US, used can easily get you something under $100 US. New would probably be around $100-$150.
If you get a low CPU, they idle around what the PI would be doing.
A PC would give you faster, more durable storage, inside of a case. And maybe memory upgradability, if you need it eventually.
A PC would be bigger, but some are not much bigger, especially if you add any USB dongles or external storage to the PI.
The YouTube channel “Hardware Haven” has a bunch of random old “junk” computers he’s worked on.
I agree.
Pis are great for tinkering, GPIO things, or ultra low power.
Plenty of older hardware out there that is as powerful (or more so), more reliable (ie, not an sd card), and more maintainable (ie can swap CPU/ram/disks/fans/psu).
But, power consumption is always a concern. At $0.30/kwh, 10 watts is $27 per year.
So, if a pi draws 5w and an SFF draw 25w, thats $55 per year. Any price benefit of a larger/older PC is negligiable after a year or 2, so reliability probably wont come into it.Is there an intel/amd/x86_64 computer I can power via PoE?
A quick google found things like these:
https://things-embedded.com/us/edge-computers/poe-computers/Obviously tailored more to the industrial/automation/embedded side of things with odd IO. And probably a ridiculous prolice tag.
PoE++ (802.3bt) can deliver 60w. UPoE extends this to 100w. So, there is a LOT you can power from that!Neat, and agreed that the price is probably stupid money.
With that in mind, it’s why I like the Pi for smaller projects - I can power them via PoE.
The last video from “hardware haven” I saw (not the last released, just the last I saw) found:
Fuzzy memory on details: a 5th or 6th gen Intel idled at 7 watts vs an ultra efficient at 5 watts. He calculated out that it would take 2-4 years, depending on your electricity, to pay for the cost difference of a new ultra low power machine. CPUs and even graphic cards have gotten much better at idling very low.
5th and 6th gen are pretty ancient.
An i3-12100 motherboard bundle is about £160, will idle with dual NVMes about 20w, and will absolutely slay a similar 5th or 6th gen low power build.Anyway…
A Pi 4 will idle around 3 to 4 watts, and run 6 watts when the CPU is pegged. A Pi 3 is 2w idle and 3.6w pegged. (https://www.ecoenergygeek.com/raspberry-pi-power-consumption/)Here is a low power 6th gen intel build.
https://mattgadient.com/building-a-low-power-pc-on-skylake-10-watts-idle/
Idle draw is 10w. Total pegged draw is 50w.
They mention an i7-6700t has lower TDP (35w), so that power draw under load would be probably 25-30w.
Which is still 2x higher at idle, and 5x higher under load than a raspberry pi.
Chances are the i7 would run closer to idle when tasked with work that would be stressing the pi, considering it is twice the clock speed and twice the thread count. So, maybe 2x more draw on average (6w vs 15w)?As for costs, im seeing i7-6700t selling used for £60, new DDR4 is probably another £40, and a new cheap motherboard is £60. A quick ebay search shows refurbbed " i5 6th gens" (no model number) with 8gb of ram and 256gb ssd going for £140 (16gb of ram is £5 more, but for the sake of comparison).
I can buy a 8gb pi4 starter kit for £104 (psu, case, sd card, hdmi cable & pi4 8gb).
Which is cheaper than a refurbished i5 6th gen, and is lower power.If i was running virtualisation, i would absolutely pay more for something i can eventually stuff 64gb (or more) ram into, as well as multigig/10gb networking.
But for running some home services in a docker compose stack? A pi4 is going to be cheaper in the short and long term.
You can try a mini PC, you mentioned Germany so for example this https://amzn.eu/d/0Evab2M I think that should be a bit more powerful than a Pi, but not sure by how much.
By leaps and bounds
Not sure if that much, their CPU benchmark is pretty close.
It depends on the CPU however having an AMD64 type CPU means that you will have better performance
The question you should be asking is how much power will it draw
Is a Pentium powerful enough? I recently found a YouTube channel called “Wolfgang’s Channel” and he also has a home server with a Pentium. He says it is plenty enough for these kind of tasks.
If that’s not powerful enough a raspberry pi isn’t either, that CPU ranks slightly higher than the one on a pi 5 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5743vs2633/ARM-Cortex-A76-4-Core-2400-MHz-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4400T
Also I don’t know how I forgot about this (since it’s what I do a lot of the times), but you can buy from other Amazon’s in Europe, for example in Spain you can get this CPU https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6500T+%40+2.50GHz&id=2627 which is almost double the benchmark of a Pi for 127 https://amzn.eu/d/6UwsUqf
Those mini PCs are awesome, the only reason my home server isn’t one of them is because I have a 3.5" HDD which doesn’t fit in them, but I’m looking to switch to some other alternative because the franken-desktop I have now uses too much power for what it’s doing.
I personally recommend you to go for a GMKtec G3 instead, you will not regret it. Good luck.
I bought a CN62 Chromebox, and put MrChromebox’s Bios on it – I did the rounds comparing it with a Pi 4 and it was 2.5x faster, and could easily saturate my gigabit connection. It came with 16gb of storage, and 2gb of ram; but using ACTUAL DRAM slots. I could upgrade it to 16gb if I needed to down the line.
The whole thing, cost me like $45 shipped; power supply, storage, everything needed…and it’s an X86 instruction set - so I can use whatever version of Linux I want, without any crazy Raspberry Pi specific patches/builds.
