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So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers?

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.

phanto ,

I have an x86 proxmox setup.
I stuck a kill-o-watt on it.
Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there's someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.

BearOfaTime ,

How bad is it?

My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.

I'm considering a TrueNAS box running either 2.5" ssd's or NVME sticks (My storage target is under 8TB, and that's including 3 years projected growth).

stevehobbes , (edited )

Go tweak your power and fan settings. 100w at idle is way too much unless it’s 15 years old.

Fans, especially small ones are very sneaky energy hogs. Turn them waaay down.

nezbyte ,

Depends on what your server is running. Multiple GPUs, HDDs, and other fun items start to add up to well over 100W. I justify it by using it to keep my 3d printer filament dry.

stevehobbes ,

If you have multiple GPUs in your home server you’re probably doing it wrong. But even then, at idle, with no displays connected, the draw will be surprisingly low.

Most systems with some ssd/NVMe, 2-4 DIMMs and maybe a drive or two should idle closer to 50w-60w.

nezbyte ,

Agreed, don’t do what I do if you value your power bill. To be fair, my network switch pulls more power than my cobbled together server anyhow.

DarkDarkHouse ,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

If you’re getting two gaming PCs out of one hypervisor, you might be doing it right.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble ,

Newer CPU’s tend to use a good chunk more power under low loads than some older ones. Going from 1st Gen. Ryzen to 2nd Gen. got me about 20 watts higher total system power draw with my use case. And 3rd Gen. is even worse.

Intel is MUCH worse at it than AMD, but every Gen. AMD keeps cranking up those boost clocks and power draw and it really can make a difference at low to mid range loads.

My Ryzen 3000 based system uses about 90 watts at “idle” with all my stuff running and the hard drives on.

stevehobbes ,

It’s probably more about aggressive default bios speeds. Tweak your c states / bios overclocking / pcie power management / windows power management features. Idle power has gone down on most chips.

The Ryzen 3000 should truly idle closer to 20-30w.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble ,

That is after tweaking bios settings. Originally I was at around 100 watts, now I'm closer to 80.

Keep in mind that's with a bunch of hard drives, and it's not a 100% idle, more of a 90% idle which is where modern "race to idle" CPUs struggle the most.

BearOfaTime ,

Nothing to be done. It's old. Only fan to adjust is cpu, and I can tell when the cooler is getting dirty because the fan stays at higher speeds.

Otherwise there's one large, slow rpm fan in the case, always on low speed.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

How bad is it? My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.

That's very bad haha. Most home servers for personal use are using 7-10w.

Although you'll have to do the math with your local energy prices to determine how important that is. It's probably not.

BearOfaTime ,

It's $1/day. I've done the math a few times

saiarcot895 , (edited )

$1/day? At 100W average power usage, that's 2.4kWh per day, suggesting that where you live, the price is 41.67 cents per kWh, roughly double that of California.

Is electricity that expensive where you live?

Edit: it's been a while since I lived in the Bay area, I hadn't realized that the electricity price now ranges from 38-62 cents per kWh, depending on rate plan and time.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Yeah so you'd make your money back pretty quickly picking up a dedicated PC for that.

krash ,

Holy crap! I have a n100 SFF that consumes 5-6 w idle (with WiFi on) and I have an old i5 (gen 6 I think) that consumes 30 at idle. Your rig is defiantly not meant to act as a server (unless you want to mine bitcoons or run boinc...)

BearOfaTime ,

Lol, yea, it's old, was built for performance, and hasn't run right in a while.

I'm looking to setup a NAS and turn that thing off

chunkystyles ,

My x86 Proxmox consumes about 0.3 kwh a day at around 15% average load. I've only had the Kill A Watt on it for a day, so I don't know how accurate that is, but it shouldn't be too far off.

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

huh? What happened? Who's shitting on ARM?

Marsupial ,
@Marsupial@quokk.au avatar

Man who sits upside on toilet.

loki ,

man reads few comments on the internet.

man takes it literally.

Anxiety sets in

ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

CaptainBasculin ,

If you're not doing stuff with them; not much point.

Since these devices have ARM processors, they can be embedded to places that doesn't need high power and contain smaller volume; unlike PCs. You can host your a Jellyfin server on one, host a pi-hole so that you filter out every internet traffic from ads on another. Maybe a small FTP server that you can use as cloud storage?

socphoenix ,

Man my home server IDLES at 76 watts per hour running x86. Now mind you I need the x86 to perform some of the functions I want. This thing works as an NAS, nextcloud, media server, kiwix, security camera (zoneminder), remote desktop (xrdp), runs home assistant, gpu AI upscaling for photos, and finally screeches along running a virtual pipe organ I built that takes 69 GB of RAM to run.

If I could do that with raspberry pi's I would in a heartbeat! the power savings alone would eventually pay for them. If it's doing what you want then don't worry about them. My pi400 works as a remote desktop client and one day I hope more of this stuff will work well on it/a future generation so I can ditch the tower, energy usage, and noise.

notfromhere , (edited )

What is that virtual pipe organ and why is it using 69 GB RAM when running?

socphoenix ,

It is software (grandorgue) that pretends to be a pipe organ (the instrument). In order to run fast enough it needs to load every sound sample into memory to play, as well as usually multiple kinds of sound endings. I play professionally on a "small to mid sized" pipe organ with 1,438 pipes. The one I load for use at home has more than that!

The instrument was from the 1960s and I rebuilt it with a pi pico that you can see here, and you can hear the before (analog sound cards) versus one of the organs I've loaded into it here.

nilloc ,

That’s amazing sounding! Worth the watts, even if I did get church ptsd listening to it.

socphoenix ,

Hahaha yeah…it’s in many ways unfortunate that if you want to play/enjoy this instrument churches are the only option most of the time :/

Definitely worth the watts though!

nilloc ,

I’ve been recently bingeing Look Mum No Computer’s rescue/re-build/midi-fication of an organ that had been shoehorned into an organist’s home, after the church had been converted. I’m more of an engineer than musician, but it’s amazing how much goes into the layering of sounds from so many different pipes.

My 6 yo loves learning with such a cool soundtrack too.

constantokra ,

People are shitting on them because the price point for arm sbcs has risen, while the price point for small x86 computers has come down. Also, x86 availability is high and arm sbc availability has become unreliable. They also aren't generally supported nearly as well. If you don't need more power and you already have them on hand there's no reason not to use them.

TrickDacy ,

I'm curious, what's an example of a mini x86 machine comparable to a raspberry pi? I just did research and ended up buying a RPI 5. I may have not known what to look for, but what I found in the x86 space was $200+ and seemed pretty underwhelming compared to a $80 SBC on arm.

tburkhol ,

https://www.acepcs.com/products/mini-pc-intel-n100-ultra is only $140, and it looks to me like Pi5+ is $160 with PS/case/microSD.

TrickDacy ,

This looks cool, is it getting good reviews?

I don't know what a pi5+ is, unless you mean orange pi 5+?

I just bought a RPI 5 8GB (base price $80), all accessories in, for like $115. It never occurred to me that this would've been considered "expensive", but a lot of people in this thread are saying so because rpis used to be $30. I mean the price has increased, but hasn't the price of literally everything increased noticeably at the same time?

tburkhol ,

Pi5+ just because I'd originally written Pi5+PS/case/SD.

And you're right that everything has gotten more expensive, but $35 in 2016 (Pi-3) is only $45 today (and you can still get a 3B for $35). The older Pis hit, for me, a sweet spot of functionality, ease, and price. Price-wise, they were more comparable to an Arduino board than a PC. They had GPIOs like a microcontroller. They could run a full operating system, so easy to access, configure, and program, without having to deal with the added overhead of cross-compiling or directly programing a microcontroller. That generation of Pi was vastly overpowered for replacing an Arduino, so naturally people started running other services on them.

Pi 3 was barely functional as a desktop, and the Pi Foundation pushed them as a cheap platform to provide desktop computing and programming experience for poor populations. Pi4, and especially Pi5, dramatically improved desktop functionality at the cost of marginal price increases, at the same time as Intel was expanding its inexpensive, low-power options. So now, a high-end Pi5 is almost as good as a low-end x86, but also almost as expensive. It's no longer attractive to people who mostly want an easy path to embedded computing, and (I think) in developed countries, that was what drove Pi hype.

Pi Zero, at $15, is more attractive to those people who want a familiar interface to sensors and controllers, but they aren't powerful enough to run NAS, libreelec, pihole, and the like. Where "Rasperry Pi" used to be a melting pot for people making cool gadgets and cheap computing, they've now segmented their customer base into Pi-Zero for gadgets and Pi-400/Pi-5 for cheap computing.

TrickDacy ,

Ok.

This looks cool, is it getting good reviews?

I really was asking. I did a little research and concluded any x86 machine I could buy would be too slow for reliable video playback unless I spent over $200. I am open to actually being wrong there though.

tburkhol ,

No idea, honestly, what the popular perception of N100 platform is. It only came to my mind because I'd watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hekzpSH25lk a couple days ago. His perspective was basically the opposite of yours, i.e.: Is a Pi-5 good enough to replace an N100?

FailBait ,

In 2022, when Pi4s were going for $150-200, I managed to get a 7th gen NUC for about $150. I was looking to start Home Assistant, so both were viable options, but even the Pi5’s coming close to $100 retail, spending 50% more gets you a lot more performance for a 7th gen intel i5/i7 mobile chip, 16gb of RAM and a 256GB NVME.

constantokra ,

You'd be looking at used mini PCs. I've heard really good things about lenovo. It's not necessarily exactly comparable in price, but the reason people are souring on arm SBCs, and especially PiS, is that it's only a little more for a more powerful lenovo, and there are never any supply issues.

Grippler , (edited )

I bought an old Intel NUC with a 2.x GHz i3, 8gb ram and 120gb nvme used for $65, upgraded it to 16gb of ram and 1tb nvme for another $50. I run everyting from that in either VMs or LXCs (HA, jellyfin, NAS, CCTV, pihole) and it draws about 10W

MangoPenguin ,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

It's because the price point is really high now. There's nothing wrong with the hardware you have.

BearOfaTime ,

2 - 8 watts of power for a Pi vs 9-150watts for an x86 system. There are definitely use-cases.

I use a Pi for DHCP, DNS with PiHole, Tailscale Subnet Router, Rustdesk server, Vaultwarden, Syncthing (connects to local device shares, rather than run ST on each device), ArchiveBox, and working on instant messaging (maybe SimpleX, not sure yet). It's kind of maxed out.

But all this runs under 8watts (actually it's so low my smart switch doesn't even register the consumption).

westyvw ,

Uh, my server is an x86, is fanless and the cpu idles at 9 and maxes at 12. Is much faster then my pi and has quicksync.

I run plex, jellyfin, smb shares, mealie, tailscale and rerouting, notes, and books.

I like my pi but performance per watt isn't as drastic with x86 if you build for it. Did I mention it's also fanless? Passive heating that just works on the cpu.

BearOfaTime ,

Nice!

Yea, I've been eyeing a box like that, looks like it could be useful.

Yep, it's all tradeoffs, gotta know what you're shooting for. My Pi cost $5, I'm using an old phone charger (I have many), and an old microsd. If anything fails, I just grab another from the junk box.

All I know with my current use-case is I can't measure the power consumption with the tools I use. I imagine that means under 5w draw (not really sure what it's capable of measuring).

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

New X86 processors are as efficient as the Apple M series. They are far more power efficient than a Pi under load, though they will consume slightly more at idle. But not nearly as much as you're suggesting.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
LXC Linux Containers
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex Brand of media server package
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC Single-Board Computer
SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
k8s Kubernetes container management package

16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 24th Jan 2024, 01:45]
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tburkhol ,

Pi 4's were hard to get there for a while. Pi 5's are expensive. Lot of other SBCs are also expensive, as in not all that much cheaper than a 2-3 generations old low-end x86. That makes them less attractive for special purpose computing, especially among people who have a lot of old hardware lying around.

Any desktop from the last decade can easily host multiple single-household computer services, and it's easier to maintain just one box than a half dozen SBCs, with a half dozen power supplies, a half dozen network connections, etc. Selfhosters often have a 'real' computer running 24/7 for video transcoding or something, so hosting a bunch of minimal-use services on it doesn't even increase the electric bill.

For me, the most interesting aspect of those SBCs was GPIO and access to raw sensor data. In the last few years, 'smart home' technology seems to have really exploded, to where many of the sensors I was interested in 10 years ago are now available with zigbee, bluetooth or even wifi connectivity, so you don't need that GPIO anymore. There are still some specific control applications where, for me, Pi's make sense, but I'm more likely to migrate towards Pi-0 than Pi-5.

SBCs were also an attractive solution for media/home theater displays, as clients for plex/jellyfin/mythtv servers, but modern smart-TVs seem mostly to have built-in clients for most of those. Personally, I'm still happy with kodi running on a pi-4 and a 15 year old dumb TV.

brygphilomena ,

This is how I feel.

I would much rather have a single machine running vms which I can easily snapshot and back up rather than a dozen small machines I have to deal with power supplies and networking.

SBCs have specific use cases, usually where they need to interact with hardware. That's what made the rpi so great with it's GPIO and hats. But that's a rather small use case.

BCsven ,

I have pi4 with OpenMediaServer for SMB shares and videos to TV, it has docker and portainer add ins; so that single Pi has CUPS, Trillium Notes, PaperlessNG, homeassistant, kanboard, pdftk converter, syncthing. It could have more, I just ran out of applications I might need. no issues with performance.

JustUseMint ,

My pi4 8gb is awful as a jellyfin client am I doing something wrong? Pi OS, and just using Firefox to watch. CPU/GPU were maxed out, ram usage like 1gb

JASN_DE , (edited )

Which codecs do you have in your library? Also which resolution/bitrate?

Also, have a look at Kodi as a client.

tburkhol ,

My guess is Firefox. I'm using Kodi - OSMC/libreelec - and it coasts along at 1080p, with plenty of spare CPU to run pihole and some environmental monitors. Haven't tried anything 4k, but supposedly Pi4 offloads that to hardware decoding and handles it just fine. (as long as the codec is supported).

Haha ,

I bought a dozen of pi4 when they were so cheap but i actually dont know what exactly to do with them. I actually would love some ideas

taaz ,

I had the same question few days back here

https://biglemmowski.win/post/546746

Haha ,

I’m more lost reading this hahaha

PrettyLights ,

The next pi I get will be turned into an MT32-Pi for use with my Mister retro setup and classic PC games.

https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi

It can also be used as a midi synth if you're into that

Haha ,

Hell yeah! I had bought a front end called lunchbox a long time ago but i havent got to install moonlight streaming either :) for midis that’s an awesome idea too. Maybe one raspberry PI for all music stuff… thats one way to organise things too

notfromhere ,

I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.

colt45 ,

Still got'em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I've really only done some hardware dev on. I'll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn't seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it.
But yeah, five liters of fun...

empireOfLove2 ,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn't shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you're literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.

Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC's from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.

wagesj45 ,
@wagesj45@kbin.social avatar

The problems I've had with my RPis have all revolved around the fragility of their SD storage. I got burned one too many times trying to host something important in my house with these things, just for them to get corrupted and lose everything. Backing up these systems was its own nightmare, which failed as much as it succeeded.

Peffse ,

It didn't help that when they enabled USB boot for RPis, the first thing everybody did was connect cheap USB flash drives that corrupted even faster.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

The price is what happened. A pi 5 costs almost as much as an old used computer.

Toribor ,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it's really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.

If you're just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.

MalReynolds ,
@MalReynolds@slrpnk.net avatar

less so with TCO considering the power budget...laptops however..

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

The Pi 5 isn't very power efficient. X86 CPU's from a few years ago were already on a more efficient process node

MalReynolds ,
@MalReynolds@lemmy.world avatar

You're quite right about the Pi 5 power efficiency, an Alder Lake N100 / i3 will smoke it in ops / watt given the right board, but the context was 'a several year old used desktop' which the Pi will handily beat.

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Depends on what it's doing. The Pi5 has lower idle power usage but if it's under constant load it's actually very inefficient. Keep in mind that the Pi5 has a 25W max TDP, almost as high as the N100.

The reason that the N100 is seems less efficient in Jeff's video is because it's clocked a lot higher. And power usage increases exponentially with higher clockspeeds

The Pi5 is made on the 28nm node, which is from around 2011. Of course it has other efficiency improvements like the GPU and the ARM architecture, but pound for pound I don't think the Pi5 even beats a 6 year old desktop in efficiency if the desktop was properly downclocked and not running some inefficient HDD's or the likes.

Rockchip boards on the other hand are made on 22nm, which is why they tend to be a bit more efficient.

Toribor ,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you're not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

And then there's still all the crap it needs to work, if you don't already have it. Power supply, adapters, storage, case, hats, etc.

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