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Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

A good take away about modern SBC landscape for hobbyists: you can get much better specced "mini" x86 PC at the cost of slightly more power consumption, but with benefits of much better OS and hardware compatibility at a similar price as an ARM SBC at this point.

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Now, like January 2023 numbers, you can get a brand new mini micro PC from a no-name brand with twice the memory and a large SATA drive and vastly faster CPU and probably a pirated win10 or win11 installation for 10% to 20% lower price than a ARM SBC supplied without storage, and usually the slightly higher electrical power is more like double.

Although, if you have twice the ram and a huge SATA and huge amount more CPU power, that just means it spends a higher percentage of time in sleep mode, so its probably about same total energy consumption, just higher peak power consumption.

Its worth pointing out that prices have gone up somewhat but "generally" "away from overinflated areas" you pay a bit more than a buck for a watt-year of wall outlet power, so trying to spend an extra $50 upfront to go ARM and save four watts will take a VERY long time to pay off, perhaps infinity depending on inflation and interest rates, if you're plugged into a wall; battery applications have stranger financials of course.

> Now, like January 2023 numbers, you can get a brand new mini micro PC from a no-name brand with twice the memory and a large SATA drive and vastly faster CPU and probably a pirated win10 or win11 installation for 10% to 20% lower price than a ARM SBC supplied without storage, and usually the slightly higher electrical power is more like double.

Mind sharing how I can find one of these?

NUCs and the like are about twice the cost of Beelink and the like.

You can search on Amazon and pay about 10% to 25% premium to the dropshipper or get a general gist of the market and then order off the website (where it'll cost like 20% less but then you have to pay for shipping, no such thing as a free lunch). Sometimes old models will be cleared off cheaper on Amazon, you really need multiple tabs open while you're shopping. Usually you get a windows 10 pro or win11 installation of questionable genealogy installed on a fraction of a TB SATA for the price.

Its hard to keep track of who's drop shipping from the factory for you on Amazon vs who's just entering orders for you on AliExpress vs who's selling natively from stock (like traditional retail). Unlike the ARM SBC marketplace they actually have stuff in stock for sale when they advertise a MSRP, I haven't run into any issues like that.

I'm pretty happy with the ultra low end of the Beelink products. Their numerous competitors are likely pretty similar.

NUCs and the like are more expensive than buying ARM SBC boards, but they are probably more reliable. Probably. Of course for twice the price you could buy 10% or 20% more devices for a project.

I set up, well, am currently setting up, a medium sized Rancher and Elasticsearch cluster for reasons that are hard to explain, so I needed an odd number around half a dozen. So far, so good.

Ah ok, I thought you were talking about mini PCs in the same form factor as RPis (very small, credit-card sized). Yeah I have a great no-name mini PC as my primary desktop. But it's still 4x bigger than a RPi I think.

Not the PP, but here is one I recently bought: https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-n40-mini-pc

Very true, though without the GPIO, so depending on your project(s) you may need to hang an Arduino etc. off of it also. I would also love to see some really cheap and really small x86 machines, like the equivalent of an RPi Zero W, say $20, and small...

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

"you can get much better specced "mini" x86 PC at the cost of slightly more power consumption" ... if you buy used, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

Generally even the mini PCs are much larger than the rk3588.

I think the used mini pc market is still better than the used arm sbc market right now

Dunno, I got a complete working rk3588 with 8GB ram for $139 in a nicely machined metal fanless case, that just needs a modest usb-c power supply. I could have gotten it caseless for $20 less.

So it's silent, reasonably fast, and enough ram to run everything Iv'e tried. Software compatibility has been good, my first choice of OS worked (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS), compiling rust and go "just worked", and it's a decent little server.

So generally smaller, quieter, more efficient, and lower power than whatever plastic encased random mini PC. I think I'd have a problem getting something nicer and cheaper in a PC, even used.

I've bought recently a Minisforum N40 (Celeron N4020 CPU), and man, it's much faster than the Pi. Installing Manjaro Linux was a breeze, all peripheral supported out of the box. I bought used on ebay, but new is priced like €150, which competes directly with the Raspberry Pi 4, and this one comes with 64GB eMMC and 4GB RAM. No exposed GPIOs though, so it won't be the ideal choice for hardware hacking, but for media boxes or tiny desktops it beats the Pi hands down.

That does look reasonable. Seems like a lower spec though, 1/2 the ram, fairly slow CPU, single ethernet (instead of two 2.5G ethernets ports). I do like usb-c for a power supply over whatever custom wall wart+barrel connector.

I'm curious about the Celeron N4020 vs rk3588. Keep in mind that the rk3588 vs Pi4 isn't really in the same class. In a compile based benchmark my rk3588 was 7 times as fast as the Pi4. JeffG's geekbench multi placed it 3+ times faster than the Pi4. On the same compile benchmark the rk3588 was about half as fast as my quad core xeon system from 2015, not bad for a few watts.

Do you have a transcoding benchmark you prefer to compare? Or something else media related? Or storage? JeffG managed 3GB/sec which is pretty respectable for a small/cheap widget.

New x86 Mini PCs on aliexpress start at $5 more than the MSRP of a top spec Pi 4 MSRP, and they come with a case and a power supply.

I'm not arguing for the Pi4, I'm arguing for the rk3588. On aliexpress it's $119 with 8GB ram, and $139 with a nice CNC machined metal fanless case.

I've seen decent x86's, but matching the spec (case, 8GB ram, 2x2.5G, usb-c power supply, fanless, etc) leads to some pretty old x86's and higher prices. Not to mention that I'm far from convinced that chips like the celeron N4020 are an upgrade, even ignoring power efficiency.

I agree it's not a fair comparison. However, that doesn't preclude it from being a better choice. The used SBC market seems to be extremely small compared to other used markets, and with less of a markdown. It's hard to even find new SBCs in some cases, especially not marked up.

Fair.

Keep in mind that the rk3588 is MUCH more available than the Pi4. The day I looked I found them at 3 stores, but decided to use Amazon with quick shipping instead of the cheaper aliexpress with 2-4 week delay. Keep in mind the rk3588 is smaller and lower power than most (all?) mini PCs. It's takes up less space than my phone on my desk and is about twice as thick. The passive heat sink/case is cool to the touch under normal use, and only gets noticeably warm if I'm running something intensive, like a make -j 12 on a large build.

I've heard Raspbian and OpenWRT have newer kernels working, unsure if all the required bits are upstreamed though. Progress is being made though, and people have newer kernels working.

They seem like a great little board. Maybe I'll come across a project that will require one in the future. For now, they're a bit pricey for me.

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