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Comment by failbuffer | Hacker News Reader

RPi has an ecosystem and great documentation. People use it for projects because every tutorial and YouTube video out there shows you how to get the job done with an RPi. There's a jillion expansion boards (HATs), hundreds of 3D prints, many ready to run OS images (selectable from an easy to use flashing tool), and even a first party camera module. The 40 pin GPIO header has stuck around unchanged thru all but the earliest hardware generations. Does the N100 offer that?

There are more performant and efficient alternatives, but for many hobbyists, prototypers, startups, and students (or rather, their teachers) it's not worth the extra time/headaches/hassle to start adapting an rpi solution to non-rpi hardware.

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You completely missed my point. We already had the RPi4, and it was sold for $35 for the 2GB model. It was perfect at that. I had enough grunt, and 2GB was enough for a lot of use-cases. I still use mine for a lot of various tasks. One is my GPS-driven NTP server for example. Don't need lots of RAM for that, but do need the GPIOs.

What I said was, I don't get the RPi5 value proposition. It's fairly expensive so not just something you throw at simple tasks like an NTP server without consideration.

If you need grunt and RAM, well, why not just pay a bit more and get tons more of that? You get more PCIe, you get way more RAM, CPU and GPU, in a form factor that's not that much larger. And it's x86 so you're not facing the kernel support issues like OrangePi and friends.

In my experience, there's very little overlap between "need hardware GPIO pins" and "need 8+GB of RAM and/or lots of compute".

There's also the point that Pi5 actually took a step back from a Pi4 in some specific applications; It doesn't have the hardware video encoders the Pi4 had so for things like 3D printers (I use a Pi4 in my Voron) where you want the CPU concentrating on printing while the hardware encoders take off the load for video streaming from a camera, the Pi4 is the end of the line.

Totally in agreement with you though, even as a huge fan of Raspberry Pi, the Pi 5s are overkill for the tasks they're capable of, and overpriced and underperforming in the tasks a mini-PC can do for 2-4x the price (maybe less once you factor in a PSU, case, storage etc).

> It doesn't have the hardware video encoders the Pi4 had

Yea I included that under GPU, but spelling it out is a good point. A major step back. I use some of my Pi4s with a camera module for other uses, and rely on hardware encoding. The N100 can encode 4+ 1080p streams in hardware without breaking a sweat.

> maybe less once you factor in a PSU, case, storage etc

Most certainly. For a mini-pc application you'll need special USB power supplies, since the Pi5 doesn't fully support USB-PD (it won't accept >5V), so the USB-PD supplies you got for your phone, laptop etc probably won't cut it. And to use M.2 storage you need a separate HAT. And you want a case for it, and some cooling. Between those three, price for a 8GB RPi5 comes very close to a N100 box.

> And to use M.2 storage you need a separate HAT. And you want a case for it, and some cooling. Between those three, price for a 8GB RPi5 comes very close to a N100 box.

Now you mention it; I recently put together a Pi5 setup for low-power file-storage (portable), ~£80 for the Pi, ~£20 for the PSU, £5 for the cooler, £12 for a decent MicroSD, £16 for the NVMe HAT and £60 for an SSD, no case (total: £133), compared to the MinisForum Ryzen cube-PC I bought for a low-wattage server which cost ~£230, has 16 core Ryzen Laptop CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, PSU, nice case, etc; It's almost as portable, and orders of magnitude more powerful. Ok there's almost 100% price difference, but you get way, way, way more than 100% more of a computer for the price.

Am I missing something? ~£80 + ~£20 + £5 + £12 + £16 + £60 = £193. Doesn't look so bad now for the ~£230 cube.

Clearly I can't count today, but yes, looking at it now, it's a _much_ worse deal for the Pi in hindsight.

The cube PC has really nice build quality, 32GiB SKHynix RAM, an extra PCIe slot, space for an additional DATA 3x4K display outputs, 2.5Gb networking, plenty of USB-C ports (don't remember which speeds) and a few USB-A (3.x) ports, active cooling, and although an anti-feature for me, came with Windows 11 out of the box (I blew it away and installed Debian) on a 1TB Kioxia NVMe drive.

I use it as a headless server but it's a powerful enough system that I'd absolutely use it as a desktop replacement for day-to-day work (development).

s/DATA/SATA,/

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