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Comment by PaulWaldman | Hacker News Reader

What is the point for a consumer to use a Raspberry PI 4 today?

I recently purchased a mini PC with an Intel N5105, 16GB of Ram, 512GB NVME SSD, two gigabit ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, many USB ports, and Wifi 6. This system was $180, all in. You can't find a Pi 4, much less one with equivalent specs for anywhere near this price. If you can find it, an 8GB PI4 is $75 and then you need to buy the case, power supply, sometimes storage, etc.

The N5105 system when under full load is only drawing 7 watts, I've seen it as low as 4 watts when idle. The Pi 4 uses a BCM2711, which according to Passmark, is about 4X slower than an Intel N5105.

I do think the PI is great from the hobbyist and industrial perspective, but to just use it as an inexpensive PC seems like a waste.

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> I recently purchased a mini PC with an Intel N5105, 16GB of Ram, 512GB NVME SSD, two gigabit ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, many USB ports, and Wifi 6. This system was $180, all in

That's an unusually low price, assuming it's new. Can you give a reference of the shop where you purchased it?

For example, the first price I've found of a Gigabyte Brix (a relatively common mini PC) with an N2807 + 8 GB RAM + 512 GB SSD + no wifi, is 210+ USD.

One of the cheapest x86 systems that I'm aware of, is the Odroid H3 (+), which still costs 129$ without RAM/disk/Wifi.

This is definitely a machine I'd suggest as ARM SBC competitor, but I'm not sure that the price is representative of mini x86 systems (when I was looking for one, a few years ago, it was the cheapest by a significant amount).

He probably got something like a MeLE Quieter3 on sale or used. They're usually closer to $300 with specs like that.

It is a Beelink model from Amazon a couple of weeks ago.

Presumably this one, is a good deal. https://www.amazon.com/Processor-Beelink-Computer-Support-Di...

Yup! Currently $190 with the coupon.

Amazon seems to have multiple listing for Beelink PCs with the exact same specifications, but different price points.

Now $219 with coupon.

Interesting, I still see $249 with click the box for $60 off.

It's $249 with Prime, I see now.

Search the CPU name on AliExpress.

I'd love to know where you got that PC for that price.

I just spent 20 minutes doing some searches in all the usual suspects (Amazon, eBay, AliXpress, and some online stores I can usually get good prices from) and the cheapest I found for the configuration you specified was around $400..

Mostly it seems to be the RAM that boosts the cost. For 8GB I can get it down to $260, but I've seen nothing even close to $180.

Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread it's a Beelink from Amazon. Around ~$237 is still the cheapest I can find..

Still a good price.

The prices went up recently, but another similar one is the Morefine M8S (on aliexpress). N5105, 16G ram, 512GB SSD, 3x HDMI, 3x USB 3.0, 2x gigabit ethernet, Wi-Fi6, BT5.2, USB-C charging, ~$253.

What's the use-case for this PC by the way?

I'm in the market for a cheap PC/Laptop for my kids (minecraft, zoom, MS teams, chrome, and Roblox)

N5105 Jasper Lake systems do this pretty well. Has a good iGPU, particularly for a low end budget intel chip. Efficient. Has Quick Sync for video.

The laptops use the N6000 chip, N5105 is for the small desktop lines. There is also a more expensive N6005 for desktop.

N6000 is more aggressive in power savings. So higher single thread, lower multi. It also has more silicon dedicated to the GPU, which is about a 25% boost (30 execution units vs 24).

The biggest practical difference I've seen is that 95% of the laptops have fixed memory that tops out at 8GB. HP has one that accepts an SO-DIMM. If this is a reasonable level for the minecraft they do then you should be fine. I know with my kid's systems I had to go up to 12GB because of the mods they like.

r/buildapcsales on Reddit is pretty good for catching these sorts of deals. You'd want to filter by the prebuilt, HTPC or Barebones tags.

Apply the coupon and it's 190: https://www.amazon.com/Processor-Beelink-Computer-Support-Di...

It shows as $279 for me with a $60 coupon.. Just being pedantic though, that's still a great price.

$190 with $60 coupon for me + tax

Prime members get an additional 11% off, which probably explains the difference

Yep, tried for months to find a Pi4 to replace an old Pi2 for home experimentation. I've only tried a few things needing the GPIO pins, mostly it's just an always-on computer I can proxy through and self host on. But the Pi2 was getting into swap all the time and needed an upgrade.

Found a Thinkcentre M600 on ShopGoodwill for $40 with an SSD. Added $10 of RAM and it's honestly a better fit for what I do with it. Crazy slow for a windows desktop but perfectly snappy running debian.

For someone just looking for an inexpensive PC, and with the way availability and markup are right now, the Pi just doesn't make sense. Used / cheap SFFs are a good way to go.

> Thinkcentre M600 on ShopGoodwill for $40

These are, indeed, RPi killers if you don't mind the power consumption and the lack of built-in GPIO.

I have a cluster of HP thin clients running... clustery things.

GPIO pins.

If you want to connect a "regular PC" to the real world, you can get a USB DAQ but even the cheapo LabJack, NI or MCC models are at least a hundred bucks.

The LattePanda 3 Delta [1] has a Celeron N5105 and RasPi levels of GPIO pins.

  1: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2594.html

But it's $200 more...(but it's also in stock).

The GPIO on the PI is compromised for any hard realtime usage by the fact its running linux (ignoring what can be done with a lot of extra work with a RT kernel and pinning cores).

For non realtime use, the $10 USB->GPIO ones work fine on any computer with USB.

In fact many of them are just ESP's, and work even better than the pi for hard real-time because you write custom bitbanging ardunio code and send the results/control signal over the USB. They become custom peripherals with a /dev/ttyUSB endpoint.

On my pi zero w, for realtime needs like pwm I use a dedicated controller and access it over the i2c bus. It works just fine.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/815

I got my pi zero w a lonnng time ago when you could actually find them.

A little microcontroller with USB support (I like the Raspberry Pi Pico) can help with your GPIO woes.

I bet it is a bit more hassle than RPi.

Sure, in many cases. Depending on the situation, though, it may be no more hassle than any other USB GPIO device, so it's a decent enough cheap solution if you can't or don't want to use a Pi or a similar SBC.

with circuit python (basically Micropython) from adafruit you can open a screen session to the USB port and get a REPL interface. I wonder if you could set something up to script input and output from REPL (i'm not a python expert). If you could then you'd have a little pipe to the micro-controller where you could enter python and have it execute and return a value. From there you have all the GPIO and other features available on the microcontroller available to you on your computer.

I have one of adadruit's RP2040 boards and use the REPL a lot to talk to other things connected to the i2c bus. For example, controlling servos from a servo board, or getting orientation data from an IMU. Basically, i treat the circuit python REPL like a command line

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4884

The Odroid H3 / H3+ is a x86 SBC that has a 24-pin GPIO header and is only moderately more expensive.

The Pi4 should cost $30. The entire point is it is cheap. But now with product scalpers jacking up prices, its just an bad purchase.

> What is the point for a consumer to use a Raspberry PI 4 today?

does one stop being a consumer once the GPIO is touched?

Intel boards with a unified GPIO are pricey industrial units, and I don't consider pinning out a serial port or parallel port to be a very clean solution; and I consider an attached sister-board Arduino to be even less tidy.

Having a desktop with that type of IO is just handy for the things that I do as hobbies, just as my multimedia Intel-based laptop is handy for when I want to consume media.

the unit price is ridiculous for RPis right now though, i'll certainly agree to that.

I used it because I already had one.

What brand is your system from? Or isn't it pre-assembled? The price of $180 sounds perfect for an increase in performance and still low power requirements.

That's a good reason, it's always great when you can repurpose hardware.

It is a Beelink model from Amazon a couple of weeks ago. It came pre-assembled with Windows 11 pre-installed. I wiped it and installed Proxmox.

I just saw their website. Definitely an option for when my RPi lets me down, or - more likely - when I need to do heavier stuff. But these Beelink things come with fans... how's the noise?

It's essentially silent, I've only ever heard the fan when I'm within a foot of the unit. I pulled the unit apart and the fan looked pretty standard.

There are also models on Amazon that use the N5105 that are passively cooled. I havn't used one, so I'm not sure if there is any throttling going on with those models.

Good to know, thanks!

Pi 400 is about $70, or with power supply and mouse and a few other goodies it is $100. It is essentially a 4gb pi 4 built into a keyboard. The power supply is a basic 15 watt usb-c cube, so you probably have one around already. 400's are fairly easy to buy, unlike 4's. It would be nice if they made an 8gb one. I wonder if DIY upgrade is possible.

good to know! I'll probably be buying a bunch and tearing then apart to use since the pi 4 is so hard to find.

The 400 motherboard is laptop like/long and narrow vs. the credit-card style Pi4.

Yes. I’d considered tearing a 400 apart because I didn’t need the keyboard at all, but I don’t know what else I’d put it in to save much space.

Thanks for the heads up. It still has the gpio pins and USB and wifi, I'll just need to find a (bigger) box that fits it. Chips out of a washing machine scenario here

1) The pi 400 is not exactly abundant and it won't be easy to buy large quantities. When I said they were easy to get, I meant you could e.g. put yourself on adafruit's waiting list and get a notification fairly quickly that allows you to snag a unit, or maybe 2 units, but either way it is a low limit. Even if you are obnoxious and go buy up all you can find night and day, it still won't be a lot on the scale of things.

2) the packaging with the keyboard actually is fairly compact. I'm going to use mine like I would normally used a boxed 4b (i.e. as sort of a home server tucked out of sight) but am not going to try taking the board out of the case. It looks like a small keyboard in a normal keyboard enclosure and doesn't take that much space. It isn't really that visible that there is a computer inside.

I used a RPi in the past as main desktop, why i went for this:

- Its not a Intel platform (trust issues due to IME)

- Power consumption low enough for running 24/7

- Noise - its quiet enough so it does not disturb me while sleeping

- No support for weird power management, machines going dark for no discernible reason has always been bugging me

What i really disliked was the instability of SD cards, and the media playback was mediocre back then due to a lack of HW accelerators.

  Its not a Intel platform (trust issues due to IME)

See, this is what I don't understand, the pi's GPU is running a huge pile of closed source proprietary code as well, and at a first approximation has full system visibility too (ignoring it apparently has a bug limiting its actual view of all system ram on the higher capacity models). It could in theory be injecting/monitoring the nic as well. AKA, its just as privileged as the ME.

So why do you "trust" it more than the intel? If anything the intel probably has 100x as many security researchers analyzing it.

Also RE power, the pi idle power tends to be quite poor. Mine idles at ~4W, which is worse than a number of low end intel machines I have, so for something that might sit idle for >12H a day, it might be less efficient than recent intel machines.

> It could in theory be injecting/monitoring the nic as well.

Intel is known to do this shit, Broadcom isn't, yet.

I'd always prefer a blob on the boot partition over an EEPROM that i can't access without disassembly.

When the machine owner asks for it, has there been a case where its been caught sending packets otherwise?

I mean its a "feature" being sold, if you get a vpro/amt machine it still needs to be turned on (the couple I have, have bios options for enabling/disabling the management features).

There was no proof of the whole NSA Prism thing either, but we still "knew" it would be there and acted as if it was there. Until Snowden leaked the stuff and we learned its name.

I'm not going to wait until the next Snowden uncovers whatever the IME is for.

>ignoring it apparently has a bug limiting its actual view of all system ram on the higher capacity models

AFAIK that SoC had big and little DMA engines. The little engines can't reach the upper half of memory but the bigger ones can, which means you can just use the big DMA engines to muck with any RAM you yourself can't directly see. It's annoying for practical purposes but it doesn't have any security value.

> Its not a Intel platform (trust issues due to IME)

You're right to be paranoid. If only people fully grasped what the IME actually was.

> I do think the PI is great from the hobbyist and industrial perspective, but to just use it as an inexpensive PC seems like a waste.

Given the current availability and prices, yes. Mind you, they started much, much cheaper.

RiscOS... at least this is the reason why i use an PI instead of a normal PC

You don't need to buy a case.

Also, the plan was $100 for the pi4+keyboard+everything combo before all this (lets just call it the 2020 era) happened. But $100 is still a much better deal than $180.

For something you use as a main computer, it's hard to see how the time lost on something 3X slower can ever justify the ~$100 saved. At least for anyone who spends a decent amount of time on a computer and is in the developed world with a job.

Productivity doesn't scale with speed, or else everyone would be using Threadrippers. OP might be perfectly fine with a pi.

There is a floor where browsing the web is _painful_, and the pi is definitely in that category on any site that isn't hackernews levels of javascript. I challenge you to give amazon or ebay a try on it, or just spend a bit of time on youtube. Things you take for granted, like being able to run videos full screen won't happen on the pi if your monitor is HD or better.

Yeah, this is basically what I mean. Personally, I think the performance of SBC boards with Celeron N5105 is my baseline for "acceptable" performance for a desktop. Anything slower I will deliberately avoid due to the jank and inconvenience factor.

The first machine I browsed the web on was running at a wopping 40MHz. We have a bloat problem not a spec problem even on cheap machines.

Now get off my lawn you kids.

We have an absolutely terrible bloat problem on the web. Unfortunately, using a slow PC on our end won't solve it. If we could force web devs to work on raspberry pis or old atom netbooks, the world would be a better place.

That's what I did, basically. I forced myself to work on low end machines because there might be a chance my website system also runs in a browser on a low end machine. My website with this blogpost is holding up perfectly fine by the way, even with all HN visitors, peaking at almost 2 visits each second for some hours. Also credits to my webhost!

It is funny to think of the hoops I jumped through to get things working nicely on an old Atom processor. My Makefiles were so good, everything was tracked compilation only happened when necessary...

it will throttle under load if you don't buy a case

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/best-way-keep-your-co...

This was exactly my case. I spent around that price point, before 'the 2020 era'. The RPi4 definitely needs cooling. Luckily for me the passive cooling case/ribs works, so I don't need fans.

Not if its 1/4th the machine.

These jasper lake/etc machines are usually between $100 and $200 new and are a much better deal than an 8G rpi, even at MSRP for a laundry list of reasons starting with they are much more capable machines.

Look for chuwi herobox, beelink, etc

The pi's were priced right when they were $35, because adding storage, case, RTC hat, powersupply, etc would double or triple the machine build cost but still land <$100 when the floor on cheap PC's (usually Via) were in the $300 range. But driving the price up for just a tiny amount of ram...?

These days you can buy new windows tablets for $200 (from big companies like HP for example), and these low end NUC style boxes frequently for less than $100. Sure the perf isn't great, but even the worst are equal or better than the very aged A72, low clocked designs lacking even crypto acceleration you find in the rpi4.

Never mind if your actually trying to just save money, midrange refurb and used machines from a couple years back will give you perf within a few percent of the current hardware in the same price range, and its going to be far more capable.

(I just stumbled on a very capable i5 based HP slim fanless desktop, refurb for $109 on amazon while checking the prices of that chuwi. There are a bunch of these "laptop in a slim desktop" case systems frequently for very reasonable prices.)

Tangential, but I learned the other day that if you have access to a 3D printer, there are a lot of free designs for RPi cases on the STL-sharing sites.

Some of them add extra value by doubling as other desktop furniture (phone stands, pen holders, etc.).

The pi 400 was £80 (unit only) recently

Does it run on low voltage dc?

Yes, it runs on 12VDC.

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