When the first Raspberry Pi came out back in 2012 it was groundbreaking because it offered a usable little Linux machine with the proud boast of a $25 dollar price tag. Sure it wasn’t the fastest kid on the block, but there was almost nothing at that price which could do what it did. Three leap years later though it’s surrounded by a host of competitors with similar hardware, and its top-end model now costs several times that original list price.
Meanwhile the cost of a “real” x86 computer such as those based upon the Intel N100 has dropped to the point at which it almost matches a fully tricked-out Pi with storage and peripherals, so does the Pi still hold its own? [CNX Software] has taken a look.
From the examples they use, in both cases the Intel machine is a little more expensive than the Pi, but comes with the advantage of all the peripherals, cooling, and storage coming built-in rather than add-ons. They rate the Pi as having the advantage on expandability as we’d expect, but the Intel giving a better bang for the buck in performance terms. From where we’re sitting the advantage of the Pi over most of its ARM competition has always been its good OS support, something which is probably exceeded by that on an x86 platform.
So, would you buy the Intel over the high-end Pi? Let us know in the comments.
I bought an N100 based pc to dual boot windows and Linux. It was a nightmare. I struggled with audio over HDMI support amongst other issues. That, coupled with a lack of GPIO, I don’t think we’re quite there. I use all 5 of my Pis to feed Toslink audio using CMUS, which can handle multiple TB audio libraries well and has DBUS support. I’m happy to take feedback though.
What HAT/chipset do you use for TOSlink, WM8804?
N100 linux support is 1000x times better than rpi5 will ever have.
Someone please help me. For $93~86€ I get on ebay.DE a Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny formfactor
M92p Tiny PC Core i5-3470T 2.90 GHz 4GB 320GB HDD Win7 (70 €)
M93P Tiny i5-4570T 8GB 128GB SSD W-Lan ohne Betriebssystem (75 €)
M93p TINY Core i5-4590, 2,0 GHz 8Gb / 128Gb SSD Mini PC Win10 (85 €)
M92p Tiny i7 3770 3,4GHz 4GB 320GB Tiny Win 7 Pro Desktop USF (88 €)
So if we do a speed/power for price comparison, why not go for such stuff?
Personally, I would not go older than 6th gen Intel (or equivalent) or, preferably 7th gen (as I actually did with an SFF).
Alternatively, only DDR4 and above.
Of course the configs you’re listing seem quite powerful.
Yes. 7th gen is the first to offer ‘full fat’ x265 encode/decode.
That’s the minimum to get, unless you KNOW that the machine will never ever be used for that purpose. (And how do you actually know that?)
The really cool thing is, most of the 6/7th gen machines can easily be BIOS hacked to support 7/8/9th gen CPUs.
I have several Lenovo m710 machines that are now happily running 9th gen refresh engineering sample CPUs.
These USFF machines cost me $130 each INCLUDING the upgrades.
6core/12thread CPU with a great little iGPU (no sriov support, but they do support gvt-g)
32GB ram
512GB SATA SSD with DRAM cache
A dual 40GB NIC shoehorned in there too.
And comes with a case and power brick.
You aren’t getting a Pi for under $100 after you add all the accessories like a case, sd card, cooler (which is now required…), Power, etc.
Pis are a joke.
I literally know ZERO people that use them for education or “maker” stuff now.
If you go for used/refurbished stuff there is ton of thin clients in 20-100EUR range like HP T620,630,640,730,740 or FS S920,S940 or Dell/Wyse 5060,5070, Optiplex 3000 thin client. All of them passive with no fan and quite expandable regarding ram,ssd,network with low power draw (4-8W idle at AC socket, including power brick). All run Linux pretty well (or Win 10 if you feel so) and performance is similar/better to Pi4/5 for less. Check https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ for more old thin client info. If more performance is needed then Intel N100/N200/N305 or Ryzen 5600U/5825U/7730U boxes go up to 300 EUR on aliexpress. If fan/noise is no problem then the selection is much much wider.
Personally I tried T620,T630, Wyse 5060,5070, Optiplex 3000, S920 and they are all nice little Ubuntu 22.04 machines running with no issues at all (some also dual booting to Win10 with WSL). S920 (with GX-424CC or 222GC) even has one extra pcie 4x gen 2 slot for extra expandability. All are much better generic Linux boxes than Pi4/5 can be.
Recently I also ordered Ryzen 5825U passive box from Ali for 265€ including tax/shipping which should be much better than N305 for less, so looking forward to that one. Optiplex 3000 with its N6005 is very nice for most stuff including light/moderate gaming but not that great for some slightly heavier/modern gaming or heavier CPU stuff that needs AVX2 (and N6005 -> N100 is not worth the upgrade).
sorry for double post, it took very long time for this first post to appear (possibly because of the link?) with no feeback at all after posting it, so I was thinking it is lost and reposted about 30 minutes later. please ignore this one
I was worried that you hadn’t posted in a while because I thought it was vital to get my feedback to you as soon as possible. I’ve been so so worried. If your request is to be ignored how can I refuse?
———–
It’s a joke. Don’t stress, don’t apologize, don’t repost.
Well there are a few reasons you may not want to consider such old stuff – the performance is probably fine, but the computer (most probably the motherboard) may be on the verge of death most just from age, with compatible spare parts being equally old and so potentially already with one foot in the e-waste bin already themselves. Your upgrade potential is dramatically lower – probably can’t use faster or larger RAM, might be stuck at Sata3 drives etc. Plus the power consumption will be huge in comparison for performance, and quite likely the idle power draw will be really substantially higher as well.
But if you don’t care much if the system fails or how much electricity its using in the process you just need something to do a job for a while and then replace it one of these sort of machines could last you a very long time… Though as I assume you are in Germany you probably don’t want the electric bill such a system could generate.
Oh also some of the very useful features for things like virtualisation don’t exist on the older CPU.
Depends on what you need. If you need something “cheap” to play around with, with GPIO, go for the Pi, maybe even the lower end ones. If you need something like a fileserver, webserver, ssh server, etc, go for the M93p. I have two of them.
As an alternative, if you just need “gpio” add a USB Raspberry PICO, wireless or not. it’s $5/$8 and has more, better gpio than the Pi does.
If you go for used/refurbished stuff there is ton of thin clients in 20-100EUR range like HP T620,630,640,730,740 or FS S920,S940 or Dell/Wyse 5060,5070, Optiplex 3000 thin client. All of them passive with no fan and quite expandable regarding ram,ssd,network with low power draw (4-8W idle at AC socket, including power brick). All run Linux pretty well (or Win 10 if you feel so) and performance is similar/better to Pi4/5 for less. Check https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ for more old thin client info. If more performance is needed then Intel N100/N200/N305 or Ryzen 5600U/5825U/7730U boxes go up to 300 EUR on aliexpress. If fan/noise is no problem then the selection is much much wider. The stuff you list is all higher TDP and probably has fan inside.
Personally I tried T620,T630, Wyse 5060,5070, Optiplex 3000, S920 and they are all nice little Ubuntu 22.04 machines running with no issues at all (some also dual booting to Win10 with WSL). S920 (with GX-424CC or 222GC) even has one extra pcie 4x gen 2 slot for extra expandability. All are much better generic Linux boxes than Pi4/5 can be.
Recently I also ordered Ryzen 5825U passive box from Ali for 265€ including tax/shipping which should be much better than N305 for less, so looking forward to that one. Optiplex 3000 with its N6005 is very nice for most stuff including light/moderate gaming but not that great for some slightly heavier/modern gaming or heavier CPU stuff that needs AVX2 (and N6005 -> N100 is not worth the upgrade).
Oh, those HP T630 are nice home servers. Cheap (less 40 € sometime here). Easy to upgrade memory & storage. Works well with Windows.
A European product like the raspberry pi will never be as cheap as something direct from China, even considering price/performance. But the consistency of what you get, and the support for the pi are both far better.
It’s like buying a prusa 3D printer.
I’ve never regretted choosing a pi over something with no name that was 20% faster.
Loos like they tried to make Pi cheaper in both cases by carefuly picking apples and oranges. In cheaper variant they took 4GB Pi while the N100 had 12GB ram and 500GB ssd.
It is very clear than as generic linux PC the Pi5 is more expensive and you get slower machine with many limitations (no suspend to ram/hibernate, limited OS selection, no RAM expansion, only 1x pcie, ..), also the power draw and size are no significant advantages anymore and same for noise, you also can get fully passive N100 boxes with no fan. Pi5 (or CM5 when it comes) may still be great for cases where N100 box is overkill and where it solves the problem without need to add extra stuff. But once you need the 8GB model and plan to add fan, box, ssd and need good 5v/5A power adapter it may no longer be the best soution.
Pi has GPIOs and is not tied permanently to screen, keyboard, case etc. The 2 are not really comparable as they ‘should’ do totally different things. Using a Pi to read emails, browse the interwebs etc. is not really it’s USP is at all.
I run all of my RPIs headless most of the time. While the RPI is now capable of a decent low end desktop, that isn’t the purpose of mine. I use them in ‘projects’. Like I recently upgraded my PDP 11/70 simulator machine to a RPI 5. Besides the simulator, the machine also runs Pi-Hole and is my redis and ntp server for the network… with plenty of processing power left over… Just sits on the desk and does it’s job. So between the RPI 3, 4, 5, zero and Pico boards, I am covered for any project I can think of.
Same here… I have a few sitting around waiting for ideas. They are a great platform for PoC. I use them at home and at work. My desktop at home is a pi 4. It got me through covid–had what I needed to remote in and connect to all my servers. I have a pi 5 waiting to take over but then I’d have to migrate everything…
Sounds like while you are ‘using’ your pi 4, you can ‘leisurely’ migrate your data/apps to the new PI 5 :). I now have four RPI 5s up and running and 1 more on the way. I want this last to be my floater, that I can easily be used for testing things. Won’t be installed in anything. It will just sit on the bench within easy reach. I do that with my Pico’s too. Have a floating Pico-W sitting there that I can load anything on it for testing sensors, programs, or whatever.
The RPI-5 solved the RPI-4 USB power problem and also the USB bandwidth problem. A couple of my 5s I boot off a USB 3.0 Samsung T5 or T7 and are working really well. The PDP 11/70 sim, for example, is actually is booting from a 2TB T7. Another one I boot off a NVME 1TB SSD for a nice compact package. I try not to boot off the SD card interface unless I really need to for space constraints.
I use few thin clients for same thing when the testing is more physical or is impractical to do with docker or VMs. I boot them off ISOs on usb or install the stuff to spare small capacity msata/m2 ssds, just like Pi with microsd cards. They are slighly bigger but not that much and the variability and expansibility is better than with Pi (more usb/sata/pcie/voltages/space inside/…)
Only thing your missing fanoush is being able to leverage RPI sensor Hats, cameras, and the important GPIO for i2c, spi, and inputs and outputs.
I’m not missing those, I do have some older Pis and Pico and many other microcontroller boards that I can use alone or over wifi or BLE or plugged into USB. No need for expensive Pi4/5 to use spi/i2c/gpio. Also It is better to kill Pi Zero/2W when something goes wrong than Pi4/5.
The x86 machine isn’t tied permanently to a screen or keyboard either. Did you think they were comparing the Pi to a laptop?
As Intel and AMD currently are I’d probably pick an AMD board if I’m buying a new computer brain for a battery powered project and for some reason didn’t think the Pi (or similar SBC) was the right choice. AMD are just better at high performance for low power draw as a rule at the moment. But ultimately I think the way Pi supports their boards and the long term availability means I’d pick a Pi – If I put the effort in to build something I’d like to be secure knowing I can get replacement hardware that just drops in for a good while. The only similar option I know of beyond that is the framework folks – but that is a different price and performance bracket really.
And if I’m not buying a ‘brain’ for my project and just want a functional computer for something I don’t know why I’d buy a Pi at all – when you just want a computer to use as a computer, laptop, handheld buy a computer in the appropriate form factor. Doesn’t need much justification to use a Pi over an off the shelf PC now they have such high performance models that can do almost any task you may want comfortably for a still reasonable price, but…
A garage sale computer has ALWAYS beaten every version of the Pi every year since its release where form factor and low power aren’t considerations. The Pi held a sweet spot for a time on price compared to other things with the same form factor and other specs. Where they stood out was the exceptional job capturing the market and narrative and getting fanboys proselytizing for them (plenty of examples coming in replies below).
It’s a study in compromises, most of them by the vendor. A Pi can be an ok (never great) solution, but they became a religion.
This is true only when power consumption doesn’t matter. The x86 family never achieved traction (and never will) against ARM where power efficiency is concerned. When’s the last time an x86 based phone or sensor platform was successful in the market? A long time ago, even with Atom. A lot of Pi projects are along the lines of smart sensors and ultra-portable applications rather than general computing, so x86 is a poor choice for those.
Well Pi is also poor choice for those, it has very poor power management when compared to other ARM platforms used in mobile devices, it basically has no sleep modes so will such you bsttery in minutes/few hours. Actually their RP2040 chip is similar, it can sleep but still draws 200x times more in sleep than any other sane microcontroller. All their products are really not designed for battery (=ultra-portable applications).
x86 is not used that much there because there is enough competition and there is no need to pay higher prices when bios/msdos/windows compatibility is not needed. some x86 chips may be good with power but why to add unneeded hw/sw complexity and limit yourself to one or two vendors and their limited set of products
Any garage sale old PCs with GPIOs? If not, there is nothing to even compare.
Why do you need GPIO when you have a ton of serial and parallel ports? LPT1 alone has seven data pins.
If you’re hobbling on that crutch, yeah, stick with something someone else built for you.
As many have commented, they excel at very different things.
I use all my Pi’s as headless, low-power (some PoE), single-purpose devices. It doesn’t make sense to me to run a Pi desktop/workstation. With those constraints, even a Pi3B is sufficient and 4 and 5 just add more noise and power consumption. Occasionally, I’ll go even lower power and get an ESP32, STM, ATmega, or such depending on the project.
For something more power hungry, like a NAS, dedicated router, or AI engine, that’s when I reach for a SFF x86_64 PC. They generally have better PCIe support (eg. for SATA/NVMe, NICs, NPU, etc.) and better support options and availability for software.
“As many have commented, they excel at very different things.”
Exactly. Want a desktop? Buy a desktop. Mine has 12/24 cores 64G of RAM and works very well in that role as a Linux box. On the other hand, it doesn’t ‘fit’ on a robot chassis or interface to the hardware — where an RPI comes into play. Comparison is (in my mind) trying to compare apples and oranges.
And here’s the obligatory link to https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
which is a well of information on thinclients from between >10 and only three years old.
Hardware specs, BIOS hints/hacks/tips and so forth.
Why not use a laptop motherboard as a SBC? They seem very inexpensive and very small/powerful.
That’s basically what the x86 mini computers are, laptop parts rearranged to fit in a smaller “cubish” case.
Some decent Ryzen 5 boards with expandable RAM and modern ports on Ebay for like $25.
Why run a PI for anything that doesn’t need I/O??
can you link some examples of suitble cheap laptop boards? how do you power them and how you solve cooling and enclosure?
I think you are capable enough to search for yourself, and as to how to power and enclose, I’d say that since this is HackADay, you may need to make something DIY…
What a poor response, hackaday is also for sharing your hacks. I did look at laptop mainboards some time ago but due to their shape and fragility I decided for thin clients. I think it is best to keep laptop MB in original case where it has support for connectors (often on various daughter boards) and the fan – it needs it and the case often has right cavities for good air flow. If you found some specific ones that are easier to reuse – preferably no fan at all, good shape, sturdy connectors in good locations, good bios that does not complaing with half the stuff missing and preferably has way to not charge battery to full when you keep it attached then feel free to share. The Framework laptop motherboard is good for this but it does not cost $25.
There are no GPIOs, useless.
I’m juggling with the Idea of building a custom tablet at the moment. It’s going to have a 14″ screen (+ touch), so size of the PC is not really an issue, and It will probably be a standard micro-itx. I don’t have much choice locally. I still despise intel for their anti-competitive behavior some time ago, but I can’t find a low power micro-itx board with an AMD cpu.
For this application (mostly standard hardware, but in a luggable format and battery powered) those small formfactor thingies are not so handy. At a minimum I want M.2 NVMe and that is very rare on those credit card sized boards.
With Linux I could do either ARM or x86, but I guess that staying more main stream and using x86 avoids compatibility problems. For example, I don’t know if FreeCAD has be pre compiled for ARM, and I don’t want to spend too much time on getting several programs to install and run properly.
FreeCad is available for AARCH64 (see their website as an appImage). So have to run on 64bit PI OS (or other distro). Also I’ve read you can do a ‘apt install freecad’ (found that in a 2017 article on line in a search) as well, but may not be latest version. I have not tried to on RPI5 as I have my Linux workstations for that.
Something else worth discussing: every generation of pi has had power issues; and they has gotten worse over time. At this point, I consider the design unacceptable and will not recommend a Pi 5 for any use case. That being said, I’m currently an SBC “exile” as the only other SBC family I have experience with is BeagleBone, which doesn’t match the Pi in computational capacity (though it has superior I/O).
I’m glad someone mentioned this fact!
I’ve owned every PI until 4 and they all had supply issues. And yes, I was using good power supplies!
USB HDD or SSD support sucked for a NAS being unstable after a while.
My NUC gen 4 CPU has uptimes of months while handling multiple VM at once(Proxmox).
Never looked back
The RPI-5 has way better supply capability. As a test, using the stock 5V-5A power supply, I booted from a USB 3.0 1TB SSD, and hooked up an external WD portable 4TB HDD (not independently powered) off the other USB 3.0 port and it ran just fine. A keyboard and mouse were using the other two USB 2.0 ports, plus one HDMI display was in use. I kicked off a 1.8TB rsync backup to the 4TB and it never missed a step. Data traffic was ‘normal’. No stutters, errors, etc… The RPI-4 puked on that configuration. Anyway big improvement in both supply power and USB data bandwidth. That is my experience! YMMV. I too own every RPI board since the company started as well.
I never bought a raspi because of their broadcom alliance. (I’m one of the few I guess). I do have some beagle bones, but those are becoming a bit old. I have run a cubie board (with an A10 for years, and I regularly had uptimes of half a year or more, and that was usually limited by me pulling out the plug for some reason. A10 is not supported anymore though. But there is still a cubie board with an A20.
I also have very limited experience with an Olimex Lime 2 (Also with A20). I basically booted it, and saw it worked, and I could log in. The Lime 2 also has a battery connector, and the Freedombox set I have has the battery included. It also has plenty of I/O, but it goes through somewhat unusual connectors. Unfortunately It is not fit for what I wanted to use it for. I wanted it for a file server, but due to hardware bugs, it’s SATA port is so slow that it can’t saturate it’s Gigabit Ethernet port.
An N100 won’t have any such problems, and next to it’s M.2 it also has two Sata connectors and you can stuff something in PCI-Express if needed.
Another really solid option is a thin client such as a Dell Wyse 5060 or 5070. Quad-core, typically 4GB or 8GB of ram and a small SSD, available in quantity for about $50 each on eBay (sometimes much cheaper, especially without an SSD preinstalled).
Hardkernel Odroid series has a solid reputation. They have several variations instead of one-size-fits-all. The Odroid M1 and M1S look quite good, not the fastest but an intelligent selection of ports and features for a reasonable price. I have an M1S on the way, I think it will be a perfect media and emulation box for my TV.
> So, would you buy the Intel over the high-end Pi?
Note: speaking for all Linux Pis (that is, no RP2040 which I plan to use in the future) up to the 4 since I found better solutions before the 5 was out.
All my Pis are sitting in a drawer right now. I may use a couple for some interesting projects that wouldn’t run on other boards, namely bare metal music synthesizers like MT32-Pi, MiniDexed, Minisynth, etc. But for all other purposes, from small embedded Linux boards to server, NAS and other uses, I found small and cheaper boards from other manufacturers or Mini PCs a lot more interesting. My NAS is now a mini PC running Xigmanas, my Kodi media player also another mini PC, ditto for the server machine.
Also, if you don’t rule out the 2nd hand market, finding excellent condition and cheaper mini PCs that vastly outperform a Pi5 is way easier than finding a used RPi at decent prices.
Consider a Chromebox with upgraded ram/storage and alternate firmware. $20-100.
Unless you don’t actually need it to be so small. Then I highly recommend Lenovo Tiny, HP Mini, Dell Micro. Shop around and the bare bones and parts are quite reasonable. If around $100 barebones you’ll probably be looking at Intel 8th/9th gen, or a Ryzen+ system. RAM is easy and they are quite snappy. I’ve even been running a Pentium 5400T in mine (I have 8500T and 8100T, but hasn’t been necessary to play streaming videos on my TV. It is much more responsive than a Roku, and we see less ads.)
I’m running a Kamrui Mini-PC; like those reviewed above, it’s an Intel N100 12thGen chip, and came with 16GB RAM (theoretically some N100 boxes can be upgraded to 32GB, but it’s … tricky.)
It’s way faster than an 8th/9th Gen box and those generally don’t support enough RAM.
(I’d recommend a different box – this one was a bit more expandable, but doesn’t support USB-C, and I needed a storage box.)
For me the use case for the Pi has always been where I need something more powerful than a microcontroller but still low power for some embedded project. Though I am using a Pi 4 as a minimal backup & media server.
I find rpi-4,5 and orange pi 5 very compelling and used for server brilliantly my problem with them is just lack of HW support for 4k video transcoding (Plex) so I cannot abandon fleet of i7 gen 7, 8, 10 I am using on various mini PCs (nuc and other). When this is resolved I will move to arm. They are substantially cheaper and use so much less power
Arm is not cheaper, as myself and many others have directly pointed out.
Arm is also less performance per watt.
The only time Arm wins the power game is in the tiny space between a microcontroller and the lowest power x86 CPUs.
If you need a Linux machine with a 3w TDP, Arm wins.
If you actually need the power of a 10w CPU, the x86 ones will be more power efficient.
Arm being more efficient hasn’t been true for nearly a decade.
Please stop spreading this falsehood.
The question is simple: if you do hardware related stuff buy a rpi5. If you work only with software buy an Intel N100.
It seems the question of which is better can be repeated every one or two years ;
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/when-pi-supply-falls-short-thin-clients-stand-tall-for-home-automation-and-low-power-computing/
The RPi has reached it’s pinnacle with the 4. When you need something that the 5 has over the 4, look elsewhere. If you can get by with a 2 or 3 most often you are better off with an ESP32 device.
as for the competition between the two…the only real rpi advantage is form factor, and i’m not sure if i did shop around for an intel sbc i couldn’t find a good competitor on that too. on power consumption, the rpi will obviously beat some intels but even very hungry intel NUCs have better *power management* than rpi, which frankly still stuns me. on cost, some pluses and minuses because to get a cheaper intel you give up some repeatability (you buy whatever’s cheapest, even if it’s not exactly what you wanted), while rpi has *finally* saturated the rpi4 supply so you can get a known quantity each time.
but practically speaking, i just wanted to add that the idea that intel is short on GPIO is comically wrong in my mind. and ironically so, too. just buy a pico rp2040 board and hang it off your intel’s usb port. there are some pluses and minuses to that approach but i think it’s awesome, and superior to rpi GPIO in almost every way.
The ability to run Windows is a big advantage to some users. Also, N100 is a computer and the Pi is a hardware interface, different things.
The advantage of a Pi over those tiny PCs is that much like the tiny PC’s desktop cousin it is a standard motherboard. Sure, you spend as much buying all the accessories to go with the Pi. But you know that in a few years you can swap out just the pi to get an upgrade while you will pretty much be buying a whole new mini-pc to get that same result.
Of course.. I’m assuming you aren’t buying it for the GPIO. But personally.. I would rather use a separate micro-controller for GPIO stuff due to it’s real-time nature.
“…almost matches…” The price?
I have several Lenovo m710 machines that are now happily running 9th gen refresh engineering sample CPUs.
These USFF machines cost me $130 each INCLUDING the upgrades.
6core/12thread CPU with a great little iGPU (no sriov support, but they do support gvt-g)
32GB ram
512GB SATA SSD with DRAM cache
A dual 40GB NIC shoehorned in there too.
And comes with a case and power brick.
You aren’t getting a Pi for under $100 after you add all the accessories like a case, sd card, cooler (which is now required…), Power, etc.
A used corporate desktop with an 8th gen CPU, ram, and power brick can be had for less than $50. A cheap SSD can be had for $15-$20.
That $70 machine will not only wipe the floor with the Pi in performance, it will also keep useful electronics out of a landfill.
Pis are a joke.
I literally know ZERO people that use them for education or “maker” stuff now.