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I like the idea of getting more Raspberry Pis, but in Europe the model 4 is €165 ($162) on Amazon, and there are lot of ‘mini pcs’ for less that also come with storage and case, power supply, etc

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I think the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB is expensive at its original price of £85.50 (96 USD) + usb-c charger & cable (~ 9 USD) + SD card (~ $30 for 128GB). The only advantage I can see is that it's very small at a total price of $135, but the disadvantage is no case and the SD card will die very quickly when being used as a hard disk, I guess.

A mini pc (made in China) with a Intel N5095 CPU (more powerful https://cpu-benchmark.org/compare/raspberry-pi-4-b-broadcom-...), 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, dual HDMI 4k, Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet, 4 USB type A, 1 USB type C case, charger included (RAM and SSD are upgradable) costs $160.

> the SD card will die very quickly when being used as a hard disk, I guess

Nop.

I run normal linux, journald and all… they last years.

Of course I don't run facebook on it, just personal website.

4's are very scarce but 400's are fairly easy to find. They are around $80 and they are basically a pi 4 with 4GB and a keyboard. A reasonable alternative unless you need the SBC form factor. There is a $100 combo kit that includes a mouse, power cube, and SD card with the OS on it. I just wish they had made the keyboard include a built-in trackpad so you'd have a reasonable laptop alternative by just adding a screen.

Thats crazy, I bought my RPi 4B with 4GB memory for less than 60 euro (2019).

At the start of this year I got a 400 to play router as the other models were either stupidly expensive or simply not available and I wanted something "known good" rather than risking one of the cheaper alternatives riding on the rPi coat tails. The full kit version (coming with power supply, mouse, etc) cost me £90.91 with next day delivery (via prime). A quick look now, only 8 months later, and the same thing is £201.53¹.

The combination of shortages and scalpers had truly turned the "affordable mini-PC" idea on its head.

The original plan for my 400 was for it to become a proper little low-power PC², with its job as headless router and mini-server being taken on by a pi4 (or 3, heck perhaps even a zero-with-add-ons) or similar once their availability+price became more reasonable. Looks like it'll be sat where it is doing what it is doing for a while longer.

In mid-2019 the Pi 4 1GB that is my "set-top" Kodi+ box ATM cost ~£35. Now the cheapest 4 available for delivery in the next day or two, a 4gb unit, is £170.

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[1] though there are a few unit-only versions from other sellers at just shy of £100 once you add in the delivery, if you can wait one to two weeks for it to arrive.

[2] partly for nostalgia value: I find it evokes memories of the old Acorn Electron and BBC Master boxes that I cut my programming teeth on.

What are some mini pc solutions? I haven’t been able to get Pi4 yet!

Sadly, the alternatives in that price range aren't all that great. Mostly celerons or Arm SoC with bad to horrible software support.

I really liked my pi 3b+ but it died on me and I just can't justify the price of 4b. I've been looking at 5800u mini pcs but 500 euro for a barebone that will only serve a few local web apps doesn't sit well with me. It would be such a massive waste.

I've been in that limbo for more than an year. Where's that pi 5 :(

The Lenovo someone mentioned retails for 150 euros here refurbished, seems decent?

I've seen nothing about poorly supported celerons anywhere? Details, links? They all have UEFI, they all should boot mainlineinux easy, almost all drivers should just work.

I've had great success with Orange Pi boards, just check Armbian support before buying, otherwise you're stuck with their outdated Ubuntu images. The prices have gone up as well, but not even remotely as much as RPi.

The Nano pi line from friendlyarm has been solid for me. They're well built vs the jank that OrangePi tends to ship.

Pine64 sells pretty good boards as well, though I'd place them a half step below the quality of friendlyarm.

Secondhand HP T620 is pretty cheap and comes with sodimm and m2 sockets. T610 has weaker processor and sata instead of m2, but much cheaper than T620. I'm running homeassistant and pihole in a T610 with 8gb ram and 256 ssd and it's pretty great so far.

How much power do the T610 and T620 consume?

Online specs says T610 idles at ~12W and full load at ~20W [1], but I haven't personally measure it myself. I'll try measuring it myself when I got a chance later.

If it's really idle at 12W, it means the electricity cost is about $12/year. For comparison, I think pi4 averages at ~5W.

[1] https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t610/

Lenovo M600 Tiny. It's nuclear bomb proof, runs on virtually no watts, has no fan and runs headless linux fine. Also supports proper storage like M2 SATA disks and doesn't have the horrible power supply issues you tend to get from Pi's. Usually available relatively cheaply on eBay.

I was running a cluster of 4 of them when I was learning about Kubernetes

Spec sheet: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...

got a Fujitsu S740 for about 40USD (used, 2.5 y.o.). It's a thinclient (similar to the T620 below) and as such sadly doesn't have Wifi-onboard (but 1 SATA M.2 and 1 E-Key inside). Otherwise beats any SBC by an order of magnitude probably. The board inside is actually sold as a "SBC" by Kontron as well...

If you are fine with older stuff and adapt a PSU, you can probably get RPI-performance (even GPIO in a real parallel-port!) for the price of a coffee.

ODROID-H3 or ODROID-H3+. Know nothing about them other than that they exist...

I'm happy with my Quartz64.

Things like the Lenovo M93p mini PC are a great platform, and a good way to help recycle (re-use) old corporate purchases.

AMD is preferable to Intel for the highest quality Linux video support (tear-free 4k.) If your ambient environment and workload can handle it you can take the fan out and have them passively cool themselves too.

Here is a good resource for reviews of for these types of machine:

https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

One example would be the Gigabyte Brix line. These barebones start at around 70€ and you get a 4W Celeron 2C/2T, USB3, GB Lan, WiFi, VGA and HDMI output. You need to add RAM to the bill but you could easily find a matching 4 GB DDR4 stick for under 15€. You also need storage but thats also needed for the Pi. So you're starting at 85€ with this mini-pc. Still you need to figure out if it matches your application needs, like if you need to interface with hw via GPIOs etc.

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