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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
And they passively cool better that way much of the time too...
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damn you all, now I impulse bought an old thin client for 30EUR :-) but, fwiw: I mostly use RPi for my purposes, up to RPi4; RPi 5 I think missed the mark, with its active cooling requirement and power use. (and price...) the only use case where an i86 alternative is justified is my jellyfin setup (where realtime transcoding is needed).
As a Pi Hole, the Pi 5 doesn't require active cooling.
Now, I am running a separate Pi 5 with a HAILO 8 for Frigate monitoring of a bunch of video streams, and it does need a little air movement, so I built a box with a 200mm fan pulling through a filter and I just threw all my Pis in there along with the Frigate rig so they stay nice and cool... I'm thinking that I should probably switch Frigate over to a Pi 4 for the h.264 hardware decoder, but the 5 is working fine for my needs and endless tweaking gets boring...
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn't.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don't need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power? A whole 60 watts? Are you rationing AA batteries to run your household?
What is it with the bullshit fanciful rationalizations people come up with to consume consume consume?
Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power?
Some of us live off-grid and make every Watt-hour we consume. So it may be that one man's fanciful bullshit is another man's daily life. For context, this is my 2,461st day offgrid.
A whole 60 watts?
Over the last 30 days I've averaged 2.01kWh/day, or an average constant consumption of 84w. All in. And that's on the high end for folks in similar use cases. In this scenario adding in another 60w would be significant (ie, impossible for my rig during winter months).
As Sesame Street taught showed us it's a matter of perspective.
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And that's 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.
But I want to be cool and awesome! I want to constantly re-learn how to do basic things over and over because TECHNOLOGY!!!
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23718473&cid=65450499
And I think China is evil and dumb... but I click "add to cart" on aliexpress in my sleep!
But I am deeply worried about totally renewable energy consumption by buying an endless stream of disposable baubles!
(Read above in some kind of sarcastic tone)
60w is like £120 a year, these costs add up to the point that low spec servers pretty much always cost more in energy than hardware. Of course it also depends on where you live and your energy rates.
You could buy a 20 year old server that is going to use 800w, or you could buy a mini PC that is probably more powerful and uses like 10-20w.
Then again, I used to live somewhere that energy was included in the rent so short of starting a bitcoin farm usage wouldn't really get noticed too much. In that case it would make sense to just go cheap hardware.
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these shitty win8 laptops are surprisingly low power and efficient though.
Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time
Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can "race to sleep" more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable
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Aren't laptops typically very energy efficient? Low consumption converts to high battery life, which is a priority for laptop hardware.
Some of them consume less than 10W.
Yes actually still sounds good. Raspberry Pis actually have quite high power draw compared to the performance they give. Like sure the number might be smallish but the performance they give and functionality they have is awful compared to even a mini PC which use similar power. Mini PCs btw are actually one of the best options in performance per watt and can still be cheap, plus they have upgradable RAM and storage. A Mac mini is more expensive but will thrash everything else in efficiency and performance per watt, although non-upgradable. Even slightly older laptops will only draw tens of watts when fully charged, vs a desktop or proper server that could pull 100W even at idle in some cases. Older laptops tended to be more upgradable too.
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I had the accounting self hosted web app on it until I was too lazy for accounting and now I am in so called hot water and must make bunch of shit up using mathematical apparatus
But it worked really well for a year or so
I have one of those 8.1 laptops - I LITERALLY fished it out of a dumpster.
It's not just the size constraint. The power usage is significant...
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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