Hey all, I’m looking to build a couple dashboards out around my house. I’ve done this before with rokchip boards and they are… fine, but not great. Is rpi the best option right now? Are there alternatives you really like? I’d like to keep it a single board to easily mount behind things where it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and I won’t lie I like the DIY feeling of it over something like a thin client.

    • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social
      71·
      9 months ago

      A refurbished tiny/mini/micro PC will use more power in terms of sheer numbers, but the cost is still so small on them that it’s really not worth considering for most.

    • mea_rah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      If you search ebay for Intel based thin clients, many are more powerful than RPi while being passively cooled and having very similar power consumption.

        • mea_rah@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          Thin clients based on J5005 or J4105 generally idle under 5W. (Futro S740, Wyse 5070,…) They consume a bit more when 100% loaded (11W vs 8W), but they also provide about 2x performance of Pi4.

          (That article you shared is measuring power consumption on the USB port, which does not take into account overhead of USB adapter itself)

          • ShortN0te@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            Pls, provide some proof for those numbers. The ‘under 5W mark’ gets often claimed but i still have not seen a valid proof (a simple measurement with a wattmeter) of it other than some spec sheet.

            The overhead does not matter really. USB 5V power supplies are cheap and efficient these days, yes you need to look out for an efficient one but even one with only 50% efficiency (which is really really bad) would only add 1W to the (lower than) 2W power in idle. That would still result in lower power in idle.

            • DreadPotato@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              4·
              9 months ago

              Anecdotally my NUC runs 2 linux VMs and a couple of LXCs, so it’s never truly idling, and pulls an average of 7.5W.

              • ShortN0te@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1·
                9 months ago

                Thank you. Would love to see the true idle. The difference between idle and light load is often not that high. I imagine the CPU supports virtualization?

                And would also love to know some more specs of the NUC.

                • DreadPotato@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  It has an older i3 quadcore @ 3ghz max with 16gb ram and 1tb nvme, can’t remember the model number.

                  I think idle without any VMs or containers running is around 6.5W, so no it’s not much lower.

            • mea_rah@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              I have a bunch of these myself and that is my experience, but don’t have any screenshots now.

              However there’s great comparison of these thin clients if you don’t mind Polish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLRplLPdd3Q

              Just the relevant screens to save you some time:

              Power usage:

              Cinebench multi core:

              The power usage in idle is within 2W from Pi 4 and the performance is about double compared to overclocked Pi 4. It’s really quite viable alternative unless you need really small device. The only alternative size-wise is slightly bigger WYSE 3040, but that one has x5-z8350 CPU, which sits somewhere between Pi3B+ and Pi4 performance-wise. It is also very low power though and if you don’t need that much CPU it is also very viable replacement. (these can be easily bought for about €60 on eBay, or cheaper if you shop around)

              Also each W of extra idle power is about 9kWh extra consumed. Even if you paid 50c/kWh (which would be more than I’ve ever seen) that’s €5 per year extra. So I wouldn’t lose my sleep over 2W more or less. Prices here are high, 9kWh/y is rounding error.