I have an 8gb Raspberry Pi 4 that has been a workhorse for years. I keep it for my not intense but essential networking purposes, NetBoot.xyz, Homepage, etc., because I can run it over PoE (edit: Power over Ethernet), so it is always on as long as my network is up.

It is growing long in the tooth, and I find myself wanting to replace it with something a bit more capable. Looking at the 8gb Pi 5 at $80 plus another $30 for a PoE hat, I wonder if there is something out there that would be a better value for running PoE? Can you convert a micro pc over to PoE? Does anyone have any recommendations for computers that run off PoE or can be converted to PoE?

  • @DeckweissEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    Personally I am a fan of the soquartz blades

    But I doubt one of those is more powerful than a pi. I run a cluster of them with k3s and distributed nvme storage, but that may not be useful for your particular needs.

    • @snekerpimpOPEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      I have three Raspberry Pi 4 4gb and 1 Pi 4 8gb at my disposal, and I still have moments where the thing I need to do will hiccup, or be slower than usual. The Pi 5 has been said to be two times as fast, which is plenty for me. just with the price all in of over $100, curious if anyone else has a better option/opinion

      • @DeckweissEnglish
        3•9 months ago

        What things do you do that hiccup?

        It honestly reallt depends whether your task is hindered by storage speed (sd card), io speed (lan + usb ports), single core speed or lack of threads/cache. It would be good to find out what the limiting resource is, to understand the best upgrade path.

        • @snekerpimpOPEnglish
          2•9 months ago

          Webpage loads are slow, especially images, netboot is a bit slow. I’m sure it’s i/o bottleneck and that everything is running in docker containers. I could probably optimize things a bit better, I just don’t have that kind of time for these projects, and getting an old dell micro would be faster than what I have. but they don’t run on PoE+ that I know of.

          • @DeckweissEnglish
            4•9 months ago

            I think pi 5 might be pretty good for you.

            If I am not mistaken, they improved the io A LOT in the pi 5.

            Also, you might be able to use the old HAT, at least it worked with pi3 poe hats on pi4.

          • @AtariDumpEnglish
            2•9 months ago

            … they don’t run on PoE+…

            They do not; the power requirement is too high. You’re not going to find a computer with a “desktop class” CPU that can be powered via PoE.

            • BombOmOmEnglish
              1•9 months ago

              Laptop class CPUs can though. AMD Ryzen chips are useful all the way down to 15w. There is a post in this thread of a mini-PC with one and PoE. Real happy that exists.