I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

  • @akrotEnglish
    3•11 months ago

    The mian issue with Mini/used PCs is the power efficiency. It’s just a waste of wattage and performanve/Watt is very bad, especially at idle.

    • @TCB13English
      2•11 months ago

      I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile “T” CPU that are very decent at idle.

      • @akrotEnglish
        0•11 months ago

        But idle still would run much more than 15w. There a very good compilation google sheets for the most efficient X86 cpus, but once you start factoring hdds and ssds, it’s only natural to go higher (20w-30w) at least. That’s at least double than rpis

        • @TCB13English
          4•11 months ago

          But idle still would run much more than 15w

          This isn’t true.

          • HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 9500T > idles at 4.5W
          • Optiplex Micro 3080 > idles at 7W
          • Unbranded Mini Atom C3758 > idles at 3.5W

          Either way, quick math, on a 7W range were talking about less than 10$/year to run the device.