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•10 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•10 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•10 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•10 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•10 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.