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Comment by nusl | Hacker News Reader

Do you have an examples of good ones?

I’m currently using a Futro S720 at home. It’s probably much slower than the latest RasPis, but I only paid 20€ (I actually bought multiple and got one for less than 10€!) for it. A RasPi starts 65€, with accessories you’re probably looking at 90€ or so. The S720 is fine for my use case, but you can also look at the S920, which should have better performance and can still be bought below 25€. If you add the smallest reasonable SSD (128 GB probably), you’re still at only 40€ total.

All the prices are local to me of course, the availability might be different for you. Here’s a good page with info on many thin clients: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/

Dell, HP, Lenovo all make good x86 micro computers in the same form factor.

A lot of these are available refurbished from enterprise sources so almost always in good conditions

https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

I'm using a Lenovo ThinkCentre M715Q (Ryzen 5 PRO 3,2 GHz, SSD 256 GB, RAM 8 GB). Bought it "used" for 180 EUR last year, though it was in almost perfect condition.

Pretty happy with it so far. Runs a few cron jobs to generate some static sites, a local WordPress instance and pi-hole.

That's at least twice as expensive as a new Pi.

Not really, a Pi with 8GB RAM, case and Power Supply would be around $110 or so, right? With storage even more. And the mentioned PC is probably almost twice as fast as a Pi.

With the PSU and a micro SD its about 90 EUR from The Pi Hut. A case isn't necessary but can be got for a tenner.

Got a link? The starter set with 32GB SD card and 8GB RAM is £112… so you still have to get an SSD and SATA hat, or the hat this post is about. Then you’re at atleast £125, and your performance will be much lower than the mentioned PC.

    8gb pi 5 £76.80
    27W PSU £11.60
    case? - £9.60
    SATA hat - £29.00
    256GB SSD - £24 (reputable brand)

Total is £151,or roughly €181

Does it have noisy fans?

It does have fans that I only ever heard spin up during a reboot. I assume you would hear them if the machine is under continuous load, mine isn't). The small dimensions allow you to stow it away pretty easily.

> https://www.tomsguide.com/us/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-tiny,r...

> ($449 to start; $729 as tested)

So you bought it used for about one fourth the price. A pi 5 for one fourth its current price also sounds like a great value.

I don’t get this argument. If the goal is “buy the most power for a given budget”, how is “but you bought used!” a gotcha? As long as there are no used RasPis with better performance for the price, the used PC is still the better choice.

There are no "gotchas" and I am trying to have a discussion not an argument. The point is that for evaluating a product people have different goals and thus get different value propositions. In particular, I think a pi is a fine product if you value stuff being new and well supported (this also applies in the comparison with other, more powerful SBCs for the same price). If you don't, that is perfectly fine.

In the same vein, why do you prefer or not prefer your mini pc over some random, new n100 mini pc? I would argue that neither is strictly better and that reducing matters to "X is bad, period" is oversimplifying.

Sorry for that, you’re right. For some applications, the RasPi is a good choice. I was just trying to make the point that for private use where price is important and other factors are secondary, a refurbished thin client is probably better than a Pi.

And I prefer a refurbished thin client over a new n100 because for my application, the thin client I need is much cheaper than any n100 PC I could find.

Buy a Pi if you want a Pi. I was just answering a very simple question. Not arguing for either side.

The parent comment already mentioned the (to me) most important point:

> x86 means you can install whatever you want

I use a HP T640 currently as my main "home lab" server and I'm planning on relocating the old Dell/Wyse Zx0Q to my mums as a backup server.

I run about 20 different containers at the moment and run TVheadend bare metal with 3 DVB-T2 tuners.

Both machine used USB3 - Sata enclosures for extra storage. Work greats. The old Dell machine even did transcoding in JellyFin for 1080p content, which was not expected given how crap the cpu is in it. Everything ran fast and stable.

Check out Parky Towers for in-depth info on many different thin clients.

Lenovo make some pretty good small form factor x86 computers that can be picked up from ebay or similar for quite cheap. I forget exactly what model I got but I put ubuntu on it and it's been working fine for my applications (Home assistant, slowly migrating my website, might get another to use for NAS purposes)

The Lenovo m720q or the m920q. What makes them amazing despite their small form factor, is that they actually have a 8x PCIe slot you can use once you get a riser card for it. Either to add a GPU, Additional NIC or a HBA card to connect to a JBOD. I'm using a m720q as a OPNSense router and its been great.

Look on e.g. Amazon/eBay for refurbished/refreshed Lenvovos and such. The m900 is a good choice.

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