I've been loving the recent attention to mini PCs here. I've had hobby projects put off for a while as I tried to find the best R-Pi clone, only to buy one and struggle just to get it to boot. Then I pick up a used mini PC on ebay for like $42 shipped, power cord and everything and even a 500gb SSD. Now I have a server running at home and am actually working on projects again, oddly for probably less than what a Pi clone costs after you buy enough accessories to use it.
difference might be that a Raspberry Pi consumes < 10W.
An old PC draws easily 5-10 times more energy.
Depending on your location, the yearly cost of running a Pi is around ~10$. The big machine then 50-100$.
So energy wise, a small power efficient machine might be more expensive but the running cost could be lower.
Here's examples of idle power consumption of second hand mini-pc's i've tested, running Ubuntu, measured from the wall:
Dell Wyse 5070 with Pentium Silver J5005 ~ 5W
Fujitsu Futro S940 with J5005 as well ~ 7W
Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro with i5-10500t ~ 12W with two SSD's
In comparison, my Ryzen 7 server build consumes about 22W idle (before I added GPU), has 4x SSD and 4x RAM sticks. I like raspberry pi, but for most purposes an used mini-pc is a better choice.
Talking about building a server with a Zero 2 W is a bit of a stretch. I have some running as airplay and Spotify connect clients + some environmental sensors but much more would be pushing it...
No where in the thread was the "building a server" use case defined - the subject was always-on costs. That said, an RPi Zero works perfectly fine as a pihole (DHCP + DNS server), WireGuard node, a git mirror (running Forgejo), and many more use cases that are not CPU-bound.
Obviously, Raspberry Pis, SFF boxes, workstations and rack mounted servers all occupy different niches (with some overlap). Anyone confidently stating that one could fully replace anther with no context of the workloads is wrong.
The OP of the comment you answered was pretty much talking about how he uses his mini PC as a server and doing projects on it... and ofc a zero can do everything but at what speed? IOPS is disturbingly slow. I like the Zero for what it is but it's just not a good server fit.
I mean, I do projects on mine too. Without OP describing what the projects are; you're assuming they are CPU-bound.
Speaking of my projects - the RPi is perfectly capable of working as a web crawler (at a page rate that may surprise you) as well as a media download client & transcoder (again, simultaneously transcoding a number of streams that may surprise you).
Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.
The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.
So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.
It's fine that it's enough for you and I applaud you. I was also not only talking about CPU but also IOPs some of us have more demand on what we call a server. I don't understand how you can be so defensive about a piece of hardware it's actually rather concerning and my zero w 2 does have problems with FullHD streams with high bitrates. It doesn't even have the io bandwidth to push more than one stream.
Add an SD card to that cost as well as an ethernet adapter, maybe wifi too? I'm not trying to bash on the Pi as option in all cases, just trying to note that in some cases, particularly hosting local services, it's likely not the simplest choice. Uses where I can see needing a Pi over a miniPC? Maybe 4k video playback, I'm not sure how well these x86 systems from 2011 can do that while some Pi's IIRC have onboard hardware for h265 decoding.
The RPi zero 2 is nowhere near powerful enough to be used for multiple purposes as any of the above machines.
It could probably run a single-task relatively well, like PiHole or something, but otherwise it's in a completely different performance category. Like an order of magnitude.
So 6W idle for J5005 would put it on the same level of efficiency.
You're right, the RPi zero 2's CPU is slower - but that doesn't matter for non-interactive tasks. I don't care that my cloud backup export cron job runs 5 minutes (or hours) longer on the Pi than on a Nuc; I only care it happens daily. For the CPU-/GPU-heavy workloads, the RPi Zero W is works as an orchestrator for the > 10W computer: powering it on and off as needed.
As others have said, this needs to be qualified. My HP Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF qualifies as "old" I think, yet it draws 14-15W at idle, measured at the outlet.
It has an i5-6500, 32 GB RAM, 2 SATA SSDs and a 4-port i350 NIC (all ports up). Idle means OpnSense and HomeAssistant running inside KVM on top of whatever kernel version was current in Arch at the time, but with no traffic.
Does the raspberry pi draw 1-3W only? It should be noted that old pcs like these can be had extremely cheap, so the difference in price should take this into account. Moreover, if you need extensions of any kind (NICs, drives), getting them running at all on a PI is somewhat more involved than on a standard PC.
> Gen 8 delivers the idle power much more honestly
What do you mean by this?
> In either case, USFF is an order of magnitude less energy than desktop so it's still a win most of the time.
Doesn't it depend on the actual CPU used? I have an HP Elitedesk Mini (which is basically a small laptop without a screen — the equivalent of the ThinkCentres mentioned in this thread) and the CPU is an i5-8500 IIRC. I don't think this particular configuration would draw much less power than a "regular" desktop / SFF, aside maybe from the RAM (it uses SO-DIMM). I've never bothered to measure its idle power draw, and don't have any comparable "full desktop" to compare.
I don't know if HP or Lenovo have models with laptop-class CPUs in this form factor, but I image that would be an actual improvement on the power draw. I did see however Chinese brands on Amazon sell models with those kinds of CPUs.
Typo in my first sentence about the Gen 8. it should be "Gen 8 cpu's in a USFF appear to deliver lower idle power usage and lower high end power usage than Gen 6/7."
You're correct that some of these machines have desktop CPUs, what I discovered was they also have different classes of desktop CPUs.
The m920q/m920s appear to have differnet power usages an possibly different cpus, or at least they're configured different.
Additionally, if you look up the Gen 6/7/8 power usage for the cpu itself, you can see the idle and total is different as well.
The trick is Lenovo is far from the best priced USFF in this category for the same thing.
When I bought Lenovo, I wanted to try out Proxmox, had no interest in fighting with installation or drivers, an just picked something that had flawless installation... that has since improved with other manufacturers.
The tool from OP here is really cool - I'd probably add some from the spreadsheet I had built out but I haven't had to buy many more of these once I figured it out. Load them up with ram, a few ssds, a UPS and they're pretty solid.
It's a fair point but as others have noted, these mini PCs can be very power efficient. I still need to hook up a meter to mine to see what the wattage is but I'm sure it's far below a typical desktop PC.
Agreed. Related, disappointingly, the new pi5s don’t have much in the way of running in a lower power state. I gather it’s mainly the cpu, but my new pi5 runs hot doing a whole lot of nothing. Cooling solution is pretty much required. I am very content with perf, but it actually brings too much juice to the table for the tiny apps im running. Sure, another soc would be a better fit power wise, but the ecosystem keeps me locked in!
You might consider a pi 5. I'm using it after I installed the NVMe top mount hat. (Where I loaded Raspberry OS.) It really speeds everything up!
BTW, I'm using a M.2 2280 drive, even though the hat is designed for shorter drives. (I just tied mine down.) I installed it over the CPU fan and it works great.
I have a little Intel i5 behind me all year long, and I don't notice any effect on the temperature of this (small) room. 12 watts is not a lot of heat to be dumping.
This is really small fry compared to other HVAC efficiency concerns, and definitely not an issue outside of summertime temps in most locales.
My Threadripper on the other hand - I had to move that into the crawlspace as it was: a) loud as hell, and b) basically a space heater that also does useful compute. 160w idle, ~280w full tilt - that thing is very noticable.
I've switched to a minipc as my main computer. I'll never go back. Went from a 16 core monster to whatever 4 cores this thing has and it's just as nice.
Not who you are replying to, but likely: 1) heat 2) fan noise 3) power consumption.
I recently (8 months ago) replaced my 10 year-old laptop. The only reason I retired it was because the display was starting to go.
So I bought a second-hand workstation-class laptop with 6 beefy CPU cores and kinda wish I hadn't. Overall I want to like it but the battery life is abysmal, it makes a lot of heat even when fairly idle, and is a bit heavy due to the large heatsink inside. (And that's without a dedicated GPU.)
If I had to do it over again, I would trade it for one with a weaker but more power-efficient CPU.
