[HN Gopher] Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspb...
___________________________________________________________________
Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?
Author : transpute
Score : 242 points
Date : 2025-07-04 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| voxadam wrote:
| Unless you need the features on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO connector or
| _very_ low power consumption a mini PC is a much better bet for
| general compute.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| As the article shows, even power consumption can be debatable.
| If you're looking to get a certain amount of work done, the
| Intel mini PC can do it faster expending less power thanks to
| the smaller transistor size it uses. Maybe there are scenarios
| where continuous idle power is more important and the RPi still
| wins (there's no idle power graph in the article) but even if
| you're power-constrained, the Pi isn't the best choice anymore.
|
| The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still
| opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home
| server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly
| watching up to ARM.
| ekianjo wrote:
| it was over as soon as the Pi went out of stock and unit
| price skyrocketed since 2020.
| whazor wrote:
| Note that the Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 can do less than
| 2W< idle, which is competitive with the RPI5. The next
| generation H4 is even more efficient.
| baq wrote:
| rpi 5 is _not_ a low power device, or at least not noticeably
| lower power than atom systems.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think I mostly agree. To me, the Pi Zero is the real product
| these days. The regular Pi models are too expensive and more
| powerful than they need to be. The Zero is more in line with
| the original concept in my opinion.
| close04 wrote:
| > But newsflash: used is different than new.
|
| I'd put it differently, "you can't have used without the new".
| They might not be all that different in practice but you can't
| have everyone buying used. For every used unit sold, someone had
| to buy it new first.
|
| I agree with the rest. Having a bunch of RPi up to RPi4 in the
| house, I'm having a harder time finding its proper niche. I don't
| need the GPIO or the relatively small footprint in general, and
| from power and performance perspective it doesn't have an edge
| anymore. RPis stopped excelling at many things they used to, as
| the price to fix some of the bigger downsides. It just doesn't
| strike the best compromise for most of my uses (same from what my
| RPi-fan friends tell me).
|
| But despite reviews like this everyone should make their own
| assessment. There's no one size fits all. I run a RPi because I
| could power via PoE. Another one because there was no room for
| anything larger.
| willglynn wrote:
| I've had great results with N100 mini PCs including Power over
| Ethernet. Here's an N100, PoE, 2.5GBASE-T, case, 8 GB RAM, 128
| GB SSD for $129 refurbished:
|
| https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-...
|
| I have zero applications where a Pi5 makes more sense than
| either a mini PC or a large microcontroller.
| irusensei wrote:
| The s100 is not very stable on PoE+.
| close04 wrote:
| Great suggestion, I'll keep an eye on this. Not sure if this
| is 802.3af, or 802.3at, or even 802.3bt. I wouldn't want to
| upgrade the switch for this alone.
|
| The S100 product page gives me this brilliant description :).
|
| > The processor Intel N100 is the perfect home for the
| architects of Gracemont and the perfect combination of
| processes and processes, 7 d'Intel, 4 cores and 4 threads,
| maximum RPM at 3,4 GHz, 24EU and graphite centroids and TDP.
| seulement 6 W. La consommation and production of chaleur It's
| the perfect place to be. It's a great deal, it's a process,
| it's N5105, it's N100, it's a sign, it's augmentation, it's
| maximum CPU, it's 500 MHz, it's L3 cache, it's 2 MB.
| happymellon wrote:
| I ended up moving my Home Assistant to a used Surface tablet.
| Not really any difference in price to a Pi once you counted all
| the case, etc. yet it also had a built in screen to make it
| easier for the family to troubleshoot.
|
| There are a few form factors that end up making more sense than
| a pi with a little thought.
| analog31 wrote:
| I think the appeal of the RPi has to do with the amount of online
| tutorials that beginners can understand, and the experience of
| assembling something from pieces.
| unsigner wrote:
| I agree with the experience of assembling something from pieces
| is valuable.
|
| But if you don't want that, there's no need for "online
| tutorials for beginners" and that shouldn't be counted as an
| additional appeal. It's just Windows.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Also, rasbian is super solid to those tutorials I have found -
| they don't seem to pull repositories every version so you can
| still install things easily.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| There are even more tutorial for mini-pc since they are using a
| x64 architecture.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Not for a lot of use cases, like how to get 4G/5G cellular
| connectivity, how to monitor something using an embedded/tiny
| camera and a small machine learning model, or how to build a
| little HMI device using a 4" touchscreen...
|
| For basic homelab use cases, almost any computer is fine, but
| for IoT-style stuff especially, a Pi-focused will have a lot
| more hits, and the tutorials won't apply to any of the mini
| PCs.
| kccqzy wrote:
| At least half of the "how to do X on a raspberry pi" beginner
| tutorials don't actually use any RPi specific features like
| GPIO and apply equally well to Linux desktops.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| The problem with a lot of pi stuff is that a lot of it is just
| so out of date, especially as the community just didn't fully
| transition to the RPI5
|
| So for running things on an N100 it works in the same way as
| any other PC
| bogwog wrote:
| > the experience of assembling something from pieces.
|
| What pieces? RPis are single board computers, no assembly
| required.
|
| If Intel NUCs were sold without a case/shell, they'd probably
| be able to appeal more to the same hobby market RPi dominates
| (although the RPi does still look more aesthetically pleasing)
| Havoc wrote:
| Yes. You can stick 32gb memory in a N100 and don't need an
| adapter to get away from the god awful SD cards...
|
| Can still make sense for the tinkering ecosystem and
| compatibility for niche uses cases, but overall the value just
| isn't there and hasn't been since gen4
| g-mork wrote:
| what is this, memory for ants? you can fit a 48 GB stick in
| there. insane premium, but who doesn't want their pocket
| mainframe to be as packed out as possible
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah heard 48gb works, but also heard of people having
| stability issues above 16gb.
|
| I personally had 32gb work out but all seems pretty hit &
| miss
| hn_throw2025 wrote:
| I got away from the SD cards some time ago... Just about the
| only source of unreliability I have experienced on the Pi
| platform.
|
| You can boot from a USB attached SSD or HDD.
| Havoc wrote:
| >only source of unreliability I have experienced
|
| Consider yourself lucky then.
|
| Tried that then discovered there is a Pi/UASP incompatibility
| with the USB adapter I bought. So need to disable that
| murdering what little speed the USB contraption had.
|
| And then the power supply isn't sufficient anymore so buy a
| different one. Only to discover it was actually the cable not
| the supply. Then you start to investigate SSD power draw
| realize wait how does that even work USB can't provide that
| much. Only to learn that USB attached SSDs run in low power
| mode. Not that it matters cause it's USB throughput
| constrained anyway and adapters don't use x4 lanes on the
| nvme.
|
| I do have multiple rasps set up like that, but I consider it
| mistakes learned the hard way rather than a desirable setup.
| hn_throw2025 wrote:
| Hmm. I currently have a HDD and SSD attached to the USB
| ports of a Raspberry Pi 4B. I leave in on 24/7 as a media
| streamer and a PiHole.
|
| It does however have an Argon One PSU which is capable of
| supplying 3.5A.
|
| I learned early on to not skimp on the PSU, and have mostly
| used official Raspberry Pi PSUs in order to avoid brownout
| unreliability.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah they definitely have their uses. I've got a cluster
| of SBCs which is fun (mix of rasp4 & 32gb orange pis),
| but in hindsight I kinda wish I had spent the cash on one
| powerful device instead.
| nottorp wrote:
| > DDR5 SO-DIMMs are not compatible with DDR4 SO-DIMM slots--just
| something I learned on this project... I knew full-size DIMMs
| were incompatible due to the extra on-stick ECC circuit on DDR5
| RAM, I just didn't know the same applied to SO-DIMMs. Obvious in
| hindsight, but something to keep in mind.
|
| Umm... what?
| Retr0id wrote:
| Which part is unclear?
| wtallis wrote:
| The on-die ECC used by DDR5 (and pretty much all other recent
| DRAM) actually doesn't have many compatibility implications,
| precisely because it's done entirely on-die unlike
| traditional ECC memory modules that include an extra one or
| two chips to enable end to end ECC managed by the CPU's
| memory controller.
|
| The more significant incompatibilities between DDR4 and DDR5
| are in the power delivery (DDR5 has voltage regulators on the
| module rather than on the motherboard) and rearranging of the
| address bus and command encoding.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Oh, right, yeah I see the meta-confusion. They are
| incompatible for a bunch of reasons, of which ECC is not
| particularly relevant.
| scrlk wrote:
| The incompatibility between DDR4 and DDR5 DIMMS is also
| enforced by a physically different notch and slot. It's
| always been this way.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Sure, but it's only obvious once you know that. Given that
| the N100 itself supports both DDR4 and DDR5, I think the
| confusion is entirely understandable.
| nottorp wrote:
| DDR 4 and 5 are incompatible just because of the ecc?
|
| You could desolder the ecc chip off a ddr 5 stick and then
| just plug it into a ddr 4 slot?
| numpad0 wrote:
| The reason why the author thought these might be
| interchangeable in the first place?
| hollerith wrote:
| I found that perfectly clear and unambiguous...
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| Yes. You can get dirt cheap mini-pcs / NUC like devices on ebay
| for next to nothing and they aren't too crazy on the power front.
|
| The biggest problem for the Raspberry PI platform if you are
| using it as a home server or like a lite desktop is the lack of
| proper storage.
|
| However I do like the pi for things where you set them up and
| forget about it. I run a pi-hole on an old Pi 2. However that
| could be run as a docker container on a small home server / NAS.
| subscribed wrote:
| You cannot just compare raspberry pi specifically with all the
| slew of the random no name / ephemeral mini-pc builds, they're
| not the same.
|
| I was trying to find something deemed reliable for myself (I
| need two: one to replace kodi, one as the home storage) and I
| just don't know. Some have good prices and terrifyingly bad
| reviews, some look decent but in-depth reviews show significant
| design shortcomings (eg very bad air circulation inside, 2.5G
| ports but one chip for this and dosk, for example.
| kccqzy wrote:
| If you want a name brand mini PC, I'll note that System76
| also sells one under the name of Meerkat. And traditionally
| Intel sells them itself but these days the official successor
| is ASUS.
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| You can compare them because they overlap in use cases
| especially as lite-desktop/emulation/media/home-server.
|
| The PC ecosystem is more open so of course you are going to
| find lots of no name brands on amazon/ebay/ali-express or
| wherever you are looking. These N100/N150 piece of kit have
| 1000s of reviews on youtube. There are a few brands that seem
| dominate and seem to be reasonably well built.
|
| A lot of the mini-pcs / nuc you find on ebay are
| Dell/Lenovo/HP decommissioned stuff that you can put 16/32gb
| of ram in and a proper NVME. To do something similar with a
| PI you need to buy a PI5 and some additional hardware, it
| about two/three times more expensive. Yes they do consume
| more power but typically it isn't crazy.
|
| The ARM ecosystem isn't just RPi either. There are other
| manufacturers offering small credit sized arms boards but
| their drivers/software/firmware isn't nearly as good as the
| RPi.
| import wrote:
| You can get beelink or minisforum. I have both and they're
| rock solid.
| LikeBeans wrote:
| I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the
| requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for
| example. It works great. Low power and just that one task.
| Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I
| use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN
| into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in
| terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and
| throughput.
| voxadam wrote:
| > However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I
| want the throughput especially when I VPN into it.
|
| Plus, neither pfSense nor OPNsense run on Arm or _any_ non-x86
| system.
| giantg2 wrote:
| You can't run a DNS server on the same mini PC? Seems like that
| would be ideal.
|
| I run PiHole on a Pi Zero, which isn't really comparable to any
| mini PC in cost or performance. It uses such little resources
| that I'm surprised that most new routers don't offer the DNS
| filtering features out of the box these days.
| p_ing wrote:
| Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially
| supported OSes - https://docs.pi-
| hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of
| FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole.
|
| I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number
| of available DNS server options built into the distribution.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, thats why I asked about a DNS server running on there
| and not just a PiHole. Is there any reason to perfer PiHole
| over the Opnsense options?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Pi-hole is a little easier for someone who's not into
| networking to deploy. I would give a beginner Pi-hole
| much sooner than I would introduce them to OPNsense. (I
| run both, OPNsense for my studio network, and Pi-hole +
| Asuswrt-merlin for my homelab)
| dizhn wrote:
| I installed pihole once. Not a fan. Since then I've been
| using Adguard Home. It's a single go binary so it would
| work fine on pfsense/opnsense either directly or in a
| jail.
| transpute wrote:
| Some industrial Atom N150 boards include GPIO, SATA, M.2,
| discrete TPM and TXT/DRTM-capable BIOS for Windows IoT and future
| Linux, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/.
|
| There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS
| updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-
| software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom
| N150 devices.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I'm kind of curious as to why Gflops is the chosen basis for
| asserting performance superiority? Most user workloads exercise
| integer and I/O performance much more heavily. Linpack HPL
| evaluates CPU (not GPU) floating point performance IIRC so it's
| not a representative workload.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I typically run a suite of workloads (see https://sbc-
| reviews.jeffgeerling.com), but I like HPL as it's been a
| consistent relative performance metric for decades, especially
| for efficiency utilizing all available memory.
|
| There's always danger to focusing on one metric or benchmark
| too much, but I also enjoy comparing each system or cluster I
| build to the historic 'top500' list, to see what decade we're
| in for small clusters of mini computers.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| > I have a video that goes through everything in this post,
| embedded below:
|
| > If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue:
|
| More sites like this, please
| Gracana wrote:
| I recently noticed that Skatterbencher does this, with articles
| for each video. It's a fantastic format, especially in cases
| where the content is something you might want to refer to later
| without having to rewatch the whole thing.
| pbronez wrote:
| This is probably something AI can help with. Given a
| published video, write a blog post version. With some work
| you can probably get a first draft with solid links and
| appropriate tone, reducing the effort down to an hour per
| post or better.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I also like "tl;dr:" at the beginning. Straight to the point.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The thing is, the site earns me maybe $100-200 in Amazon
| Affiliates referral links per month (which is nothing to sneeze
| at... but that's not moving the needle on a mortgage payment).
|
| I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog
| posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_
| making a video, or is my transcript edited for
| blog/readership).
|
| My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being
| able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own
| note search engine), but I get why many people who make video
| (which _can_ earn an income) don 't spend the extra time and
| write up decent blog posts as well.
|
| (But I prefer reading much more than video content).
| Neywiny wrote:
| I appreciate the nm discussion. So often people bash larger
| process nodes but the wider gates are often/always better at
| static power consumption, and mature lithographies mean more
| research into optimization. It's not just smaller = better. My
| understanding is that smaller nodes reduce dynamic power due to
| lower gate capacitance (because the fet is just smaller), but
| there's a lot to the story, like architecture as mentioned.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Are the two boards even in the same category or class?
|
| I use RPi for little hobby projects
|
| - RPi Pico for being the payload that flies around the world in a
| PicoBalloon
|
| - Decoding NOAA weather imagery and storing it in my Google Drive
|
| - Full time AIS message decoder and tracker
|
| - Full time ADS-B and MLAT receiver
|
| - Runs my RetroPie setup
|
| - Runs my OctoPrint setup
|
| I wouldn't replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer
| dvdkon wrote:
| Except for the Pico (which is very different from the full
| RPi), you could do all that with a mini-PC.
|
| There are certainly usecases, especially using the RPi's low-
| level IO, where that's not possible, but as you yourself have
| shown, people do often get into situations where they are
| competitors.
| geon wrote:
| The more standardized hardware if the rpi tends to make a lot
| of stuff much easier.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I just can't see putting the NUC in my attic for example with
| my ADSB receiver
| transpute wrote:
| Intel N150 + GPIO in credit card size form factor,
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/06/24/aaeon-up-twl-and-up-...
| LtWorf wrote:
| Is linux support as good?
| transpute wrote:
| Is Linux support for Intel N150 (x86) as good as Linux
| support for RPi (Arm SoC N of M)?
|
| Generalist x86 is usually better supported than specialist
| Arm, but newer drivers (e.g. NICs) may take time to mature.
| LtWorf wrote:
| There's more to the CPU on a SoC.
| Daviey wrote:
| > I wouldn't replace much of that with an Intel NUC style
| computer
|
| Can you explain why?
| dgacmu wrote:
| I'm not the GP, but for my ads-b decoder, it runs on a Pi
| Zero 2W, which at the time cost under $15 and draws very
| little power. It's convenient having the computer right next
| to the antenna to avoid thinking about cables. Runs for a
| couple days on 100Wh of backup battery.
|
| (I personally find a ton of value out of the Pico and the
| zero, and less out of the main main, higher powered raspberry
| Pi line)
| ChrisRR wrote:
| > I wouldn't replace much of that with an Intel NUC style
| computer
|
| Why is that? Because you think the N100 isn't capable enough or
| for some other reason? Because N100 definitely can outperform a
| raspberry pi
|
| But a pi pico is definitely a totally different thing. I don't
| think anyone here is talking about replacing a microcontroller
| with a PC
| firesteelrain wrote:
| For the weather imagery one or any ham radio, it has to live
| outside which RPi is more suited such as RPi 3B
| AutoAPI wrote:
| I just purchased a Beelink Mini S13 with 16GB ram and 1TB drive
| on Amazon for ~$200 to use as a Docker host on my local network
| and have been very happy with it so far.
|
| I immediately wiped it and installed Ubuntu Server. I chose
| Coolify to manage Docker and local domains, and that took a bit
| of work to get going, but now I can spin up local services and
| containers on local domains and play with random stuff
| giantg2 wrote:
| Very similar here. I got a beelink a few years about with lower
| specs than yours and has worked great as a ZoneMinder host
| after a wiping windows and installing Linux.
| glimshe wrote:
| It's a no brainer IMHO. I stopped using my Pis after the N100s
| appeared on the market and have been advocating them since then.
|
| I like the idea of using ARM, but the value and convenience
| simply isn't there. The Pi remains great for certain embedded
| applications, though.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Did you not use any of the pi's IO?
| LtWorf wrote:
| I think most people here just do software... which defeats
| the point of using a rpi.
| glimshe wrote:
| I do not. I just needed a small computer for miscellaneous
| jobs, such as file serving and emulation. I think this is the
| case with most people who buy one.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not
| the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c
| because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5
| and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based
| computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of
| course).
|
| But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade
| HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and
| between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of
| the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.
|
| Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120EUR with
| 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less
| than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C
| 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda
| 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as
| risky as my N100.
|
| At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in
| power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility
| to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect
| up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my
| needs.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| >N100 based computer draw 9W at idle
|
| That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is
| idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more
| efficient.
| wltr wrote:
| How would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion
| that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Buy a kill-a-watt wall wart.
| blipvert wrote:
| At Walmart.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| I use an electrical outlet meter. It's roughly EUR10, the
| only annoying thing is everything rebooting each time I
| want to move it.
| genewitch wrote:
| i wonder if there's a market for pre-made cables with a
| "loop" in the hot wire, for using clamp ammeters, or a
| cable where in addition to the choke ferrule, there's
| another "ferrule" - current transformer - on the hot wire
| with "test points", where those test points are to a
| transformer winding around the hot wire. That way you
| could just put those cables on things you want to know
| the power consumption of, rather than having to move a
| kill-a-watt or whatever.
|
| I could make either, but they wouldn't be "certified", as
| i'd be either replacing plugs or cutting into the wire
| itself to add a pigtail.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Matthias Wandel measures power that way:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P47pjVyPP3w
| bialpio wrote:
| You may be looking for "AC line splitter".
|
| One example: https://www.harborfreight.com/15-amp-
| professional-ac-line-sp...
|
| Edit: s/splicer/splitter, damn autocorrect.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Yup. They even typically come with separate 1x and 10x
| loops.
|
| They're a common pack-in item with low- and high-end
| clamp meters.
| dgacmu wrote:
| The easy path, as someone suggested, is a kill-a-watt that
| you just plug it into.
|
| The less intrusive path for some definition of less
| intrusive is a clamp ammeter if you can expose one of the
| AC wires (you have to clamp around an individual wire, not
| both hot and neutral). But then you don't need to unplug
| the system to measure it.
|
| The third overkill option is to have it plugged into a
| full-time power monitoring and control device, such as a
| zigbee home automation plug switch. ;)
| mkesper wrote:
| This can actually be life threatening if done without
| proper tools and working fast fuses. So just use a kill-
| a-watt or any other such tool for safety! NB they're
| maybe not 100% exact but good enough to give an estimate.
| bityard wrote:
| A clamp meter does not expose you to any live uninsulated
| wires unless you are doing it very wrong.
|
| (Although they also tend to be not very accurate for low
| current measurements. So this isn't a use case I would
| recommend them for.)
| scottbez1 wrote:
| Clamp meters are completely safe. The only risk is if you
| DIY your power cable so you can clamp one lead, but
| that's not necessary if you just buy an AC line splitter
| plug. And those often come with the hot looped around so
| you can get a 10x reading for better fidelity at lower
| current draw.
|
| But these days I just skip the clamp meter and throw Ikea
| Inspelning zigbee plugs anywhere I want power
| measurement.
| chaoskitty wrote:
| Doing anything can be life threatening. We don't need to
| assume that people who decide to do a thing are the same
| as you.
| jkortufor wrote:
| There are $10 Chinese kill-a-watts with color display,
| and live Bluetooth data recording.
|
| It's fun stating a CPU intensive job and watch the graph
| spike.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Do you have any names or links? I tried a Temu version a
| while back and even getting it connected to wifi was
| hopeless.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I have a regular i5-6500 in an HP 800 G2 SFF. It has 32 GB
| RAM (2x8+16), two Samsung 840 SSDs and a 4-port i350
| network card. It Linux as a KVM host with OpnSense and Home
| Assistant on top.
|
| According to some watt-meter I got off Amazon it idles at
| 14W with the 4 interfaces UP but next to no traffic. I
| consider it idling when the CPU usage as reported by the
| host is under 5%.
|
| Now the watt-meter isn't some top-of-the-line exotic model,
| just a random Chinese thingy, but it seems to measure close
| enough to what I expect some other devices to pull.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I can vouch for the power draw in this type of system. I
| have a Dell OptiPlex 7070 with i5-9500, 32GB and running
| Proxmox with a Windows VM and a couple smaller instances.
| I measure 8w idle from my Kill-a-Watt on the system. I
| was really surprised at how low it is.
| znpy wrote:
| > How would you guys properly measure that?
|
| I'm using smart plugs that have an open source firmware
| called tasmota. I can scrape the values using prometheus
| and can build dashboards with historical data.
| transpute wrote:
| USB-c cables with live PD power display can be chained with
| PD-to-barrel converters for fixed voltage.
| evil-olive wrote:
| the author has a previous blog post about his monitoring
| setup:
|
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/how-i-monitor-and-
| con...
|
| I can recommend those Third Reality outlets as well, I have
| about a dozen now and they Just Work with my Zigbee dongle
| (Sonoff ZBDongle-P) and zigbee2mqtt / Home Assistant setup.
| I use Home Assistant's Prometheus integration to get the
| data into VictoriaMetrics, which lets me build Grafana
| dashboards showing the usage of each plug over time.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I may misremeber the exact number, but it was high enough
| compared to a RPI
| Semaphor wrote:
| That sounds wrong, efficient intel chips should be very
| comparable to pi's. Measurements for the futro s740 (j4105
| CPU) were [0] around 2-4 W idle when properly configured
|
| [0]: https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_c
| onsump...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| how did you get a 6500T to idle so low? Is that CPU power or
| total system power? I have a T part from the next generation,
| I don't remember the exact model. It's low but it isn't that
| low.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The processors themselves all seem to be pretty efficient
| at idle (there's apparently no real reason to get a T
| processor. It just caps performance). It mostly depends on
| everything else. The only place I know of to get this kind
| of info is this thread[0] where people have been building
| this spreadsheet[1]. Some threads on servethehome.com also
| report when some pcie cards have broken power management
| which can destroy idle efficiency.
|
| [0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-
| sparsamste...
|
| [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6
| Hf18L...
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Total system power (as in, drawn from the outlet)
|
| I didn't do any significant customizations, it runs Alpine
| Linux. Here is my powertop output:
| Summary: 139.6 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0
| VFS ops/sec and 0.9% CPU use Usage
| Events/s Category Description
| 100.0% Device Audio codec
| hwC0D0: Realtek 480.6 us/s 38.3
| Timer tick_nohz_handler 469.0 us/s
| 24.6 Timer hrtimer_wakeup
| 330.0 us/s 23.2 Process [PID 2121]
| [irq/132-iwlwifi] 281.2 us/s 10.1
| Process [PID 3278] containerd --config
| /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml
| 28.9 us/s 9.5 kWork
| toggle_allocation_gate 52.4 us/s 7.5
| Timer inactive_task_timer 279.3
| us/s 4.6 Process [PID 3279] containerd
| --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml
| 363.9 us/s 4.5 Process [PID 3306]
| containerd --config
| /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml
|
| The system as a whole spends around 95-97% of time in pc8
| state.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Depends on what you have active on he board, especially
| storage that isn't pushed to an idle state for some reason.
| mmgutz wrote:
| Can confirm 8-9w idle for my N100 homelab server having 1
| NVMe SSD, 1 SATA SSD, 16GB RAM.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| 9W at idle for the N100 is similar to what I get with my N100
| based PC. Although under windows it's often sitting at
| 10-12W.
|
| I also see lower power consumption with an 8th Gen intel Core
| system.
|
| The small cores that the N100 use are _size_ efficient, but
| not necessarily _power_ efficient. The N100 chip is just not
| that efficient power-consumption wise.
| fswd wrote:
| I am reading this right now on my N100 desktop and it's 7W
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| From what I've read, some N100 systems don't support the same
| c-states as other systems and don't idle as low.
| p_ing wrote:
| If you want something less "risky", ASRock Industrial has mini
| PCs which are great. I have an AliExpress N150, fully passive
| which worked just fine but then I saw the shiny of the Arrow
| Lake-H platform. Ended up getting a NUC BOX-225H for Opnsense.
| Way overkill, it's great!
|
| https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/industrial-computer-system
|
| The Arrow Lake-H platform can have up to 28 PCIe lanes where as
| the N150 gets 9. Something to think about if you want dual NIC
| + plenty of NVMe drives.
| enronmusk wrote:
| That's $550 on amazon/newegg. It's not in the same price
| range at all.
| p_ing wrote:
| Oh, my bad, I don't recall mentioning price in my post.
| Rather I mentioned a system that has the PCIe lanes to
| accomidate 2.5G NICs + 4 NVMe drives without compromises.
| akho wrote:
| For the price, you can get four N150, with 36 lanes. It's
| a pointless comparison.
| wokkel wrote:
| Use an odroid h4: 2x2.5gbe and a 4*1 m.2 bifurcation card
| to get 4 nvme drives there. Performance is limited due to
| ethernet anyway.
| znpy wrote:
| Weird number. I have one of those enterprise mini pc (think
| EliteDesk pro mini) with an i9 (8c/16t), 64gb ram and 1 nvme
| disk and it idles at ~2W.
|
| The measurement was done via a smart plug running tasmota (and
| the tasmota exporter) so I'd say it's pretty realistic.
|
| I also have an HP MicroServer Gen8 with a 20W Xeon cpu (https:/
| /www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/53401/i...) and
| four disks... It also idles at ~21W (again, as reported from
| tasmota-based smart plugs).
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I may misremember the number indeed, but it was definitively
| not 2W
| fnord77 wrote:
| for US viewers, there's an N150 16Gb/512 that goes on sale on
| amazon for $130 every few weeks
| nacnud wrote:
| Fan noise might be another consideration, given that some
| projects have to share a home with a family. Anyone know whether
| the N150 makes much noise?
| taneliv wrote:
| N150 by itself doesn't generate any noise, but the cooling fans
| probably will. There are some fanless N150 solutions that are
| perhaps of interest? Though they are likely at a higher price
| point. I'm too lazy to copy and paste a link here, but search
| for "fanless N150" for some references.
| degrees57 wrote:
| My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan,
| and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an
| excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can
| tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The N150 is only really useful with active cooling or a chunk
| of metal bolted to it, and most manufacturers will pick the
| cheapest possible fan, so yes, there will be some noise.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| My steam deck has superceded my rpi for this kind of stuff.
| Probably not as power efficient but I live in the South and use
| A/C and hot water so I feel like those are far bigger spends of
| electricity
| user_7832 wrote:
| Slightly tangential, does anyone know of a decent n100/150 board
| that's not super expensive, has enough pcie for at least 2 ssds,
| and is available ideally in India or the EU?
|
| The vast majority of mini PC's with these processors don't have
| pcie. The lattepanda mu is the closest product I've found so far.
|
| All I want to do is run a server with 2 disks, but it seems
| weirdly tough. (Ideally a small physical footprint server but I
| can compromise on that a bit.)
| p_ing wrote:
| N150 only supports 9 PCIe lanes.
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If you search n100 nas board you should find some interesting
| stuff. Boards with 6 sata already crammed in. Potentially more
| if you use an m2 to sata adapter.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I used RPi's for years for little stuff like DNS and file sharing
| and when I b it the bullet and got a surplus DELL SFF office PC
| things just started working a little bit better.
|
| yeah, docker images and the like are supposed to be platform
| intependent, but there's 'supposed to' and 'is'
|
| Running Ubuntu (and later Proxmox) on it just worked a tad bit
| better. I was into it for about $160 (purchased from Microcenter)
| varispeed wrote:
| I got RPi 5. Wanted to create a little server for my files,
| source code repository etc. I bought it with NVMe hat. Gone
| through 3 1TB drives that supposed to be compatible with it.
| Unfortunately none of it was stable. File system would have weird
| errors, but on top of that networking would go out after few
| hours or days and RPi would need a hard reboot.
|
| I just threw the RPi into the drawer and bought N100. Installed
| WSL on Windows 11 and everything just works. It's been up for
| almost a year now, not a single reboot or network problem.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how
| much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that
| is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that
| doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.
|
| Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a
| Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two
| SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure
| how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot
| previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and
| in price for a similar Pi setup.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when
| you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under
| 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have
| many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for
| a long time now. First they went through some weird feature
| creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then
| inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to
| make bank with something that has immeasurable value for
| letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the
| line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like
| building something again for the first time in years. It's not
| as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-
| line raspberry model for under 30 bucks._
|
| You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at
| PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used
| market.
|
| That's why most people who bough those RPis had them
| collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs
| with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.
|
| At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled
| microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi
| was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller".
|
| You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be
| done on an ESP32.
| comboy wrote:
| There was maybe a short period of time when RPi offered a
| decent compute for money if ever. But all of that time it's
| about the ecosystem and simply being the most popular platform.
| Any hardware library, you take it and you know somebody tested
| it on this exact hardware with the same operating system. When
| doing hardware stuff it can be really painful to debug. You
| don't want to also be wondering if maybe some pin is handled
| differently on your box than RPi etc.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yeah; honestly if you're going to integrate I2C/UART/SPI,
| cellular, serial bus stuff, PoE, or anything like that into a
| project, the Pi (4/5) makes that simple, and almost always
| painless.
|
| Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice,
| when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use
| cases.
|
| The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random
| spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in
| that common homelab use case.
|
| I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for
| $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than
| microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
| edoceo wrote:
| Ethernet w/POE
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| > I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port,
| for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than
| microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
|
| It's not a Raspberry Pi, but this Radxa board is more
| powerful than a Pi Zero 2 and has the form factor you're
| looking for. Price isn't that bad either (around $25 for
| the cheapest model).
|
| https://radxa.com/products/zeros/zero3e/
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I found that the mini PCs with the N100 are much more
| convenient because I don't have to deal with custom OS or
| packages. I'm not a developer, and wanted the easiest method to
| get a Linux server running. After struggling with the
| limitations of the custom builds required for an SBC, I found
| it so refreshing to be able to install the general Linux
| distros available for the x86/x64 platforms.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is a very underrated feature of x86/64 platforms. All
| these ARM boards sound (and can be) so fun, but the level of
| polish leaves much to be desired when you're tired of
| tinkering and want the project to be done.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Agreed. I spent years begging Linux to boot on Banana Pi's
| and their cousins.
| harshitaneja wrote:
| RPi is a good option if one has less RAM requirements
| especially if you take into account the quality of the drivers
| and software support in general.
|
| RPi can be a compelling option if you need lower power draw. It
| does take some effort to squeeze out power efficiency but if
| the requirement can't be handled by a microcontroller then it
| is the most convenient of-the-shelf option.
|
| For everything, RPi isn't a very compelling option. Even for
| GPIO, during RPi shortage I started experimenting with just
| using STM32 dev boards connected via USB to a NUC or an old PC
| and it worked well. But I just prefer to use ESP8266 or ESP32
| for those tasks most of the time. Bandwidth and latency of USB
| communication/wifi to the main device has been low enough for
| it not to be a concern for me and I recon outside of very
| specific robotics cases it won't be for most.
|
| CSI port is quite nice though and not many great alternatives.
| tw04 wrote:
| Depending on what you're doing, even for gpio. Just use a USB
| gpio board.
|
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
| chasd00 wrote:
| man, i couldn't hit the upvote button hard enough. That is a
| very cool breakout, thank you for the link. I'm already
| thinkking about that breakout connected to the 16 channel PWM
| breakout I already have. Now i can play around with servos,
| and many other things, right from my laptop with all my usual
| build tools instead of having to power up my pi zero and
| connect over ssh first. I love Adafruit, they do so many cool
| things.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| If you can do without SPI there's also
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/4471 You can also just get
| the chip (MCP2221A) in a DIP package and just pluck it in a
| breadboard. All you need is two bypass caps and two pullup
| resistors if you need I2C.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| it's the raspberry that becomes bad in value. I feel like their
| price has never recovered since the hardware shortage during
| covid.
| jon_adler wrote:
| It is also possible to get the best of both worlds. The ODYSSEY
| features both a Celeron J4125 and RP2040 co-processor. I have
| an older model and find this combination very handy. I run
| Proxmox on it and it works very well.
|
| https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-v2-p-5531.ht...
| wingworks wrote:
| I got an old Mac mini 2014 like 5 years ago, 2nd hand,
| installed Debian on it, and after the first few days smoothing
| out bugs, it's worked rock solid since. On 24/7. Never heard
| the fan ever spin up either. Not sure if that's just broken in
| Debian or the fan just doesn't speed up unless really hot. But
| either way, seems to not effected it thus far.
|
| I mostly went this route vs Pi because I didn't want the pain
| of working with ARM. x86 "just works" with 99% of things. Where
| are a lot of cases with ARM you end up compiling code just to
| do what you're after. Anything off the popular apps.
|
| Things are better now, but still a risk.
| astrostl wrote:
| I got so dang sick of SD and enclosure fan failures on rPis.
| Adore my $159-in-2024 Beelink S12 (N100/16GB/512GB).
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Agreed. Especially for a home media server, an underrated
| element not mentioned in the article is that something like the
| N150 is going to have intel quicksync for hardware transcoding,
| and the pi is going to be stuck with software implementations
| if it needs to transcode something which is going to make a big
| difference in streaming media performance.
| dingi wrote:
| This is not even a question if you don't need GPIO. N100/N150
| brings so much value for money in almost any metric compared to
| RPi.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I'd been a staunch supporter of RPi nodes for homelab work for a
| decade (and don't get me wrong, I still love 'em), but the
| various N100 miniPCs have been a pleasant little game changer.
| Got two for $130 each fully loaded (N00/16GB RAM/512GB SSD),
| slapped a 1TB SATA 2.5" SSD inside, threw Proxmox on them and
| voila, I have a highly efficient homelab that hosts my Plex
| server.
|
| That said, there's three reasons I got them versus a RPi5:
|
| * Built-in RTC with battery (no more post-power outage downtime)
|
| * iGPU with video acceleration (for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding)
|
| * PRICE (seriously, a comparably outfitted RPi5 would be twice
| the price of these things!)
|
| Intel has a little sleeper hit here, if they can get out of their
| own way on pricing and marketing it. At sub-$150 versus a RPi5,
| it's a no-brainer if you don't need GPIO support.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Currently on holiday and browsing on a Chuwi MinibookX N150
| model. Comes with Windows 11, but I quickly set it up to dual-
| boot Ubuntu 25.04. There were a couple of tweaks needed to rotate
| the display properly (except for GRUB which doesn't seem
| possible) and get the orientation sensor to work, but otherwise
| I'm very impressed with it.
| enronmusk wrote:
| That appears to cost $352. Wouldn't it be much better to get a
| used ThinkPad for that amount of money? The ThinkPad would have
| better build quality and a more powerful processor.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| A ThinkPad is a different form factor. The MiniBookX is a
| 10.5inch lightweight (just under 1kg) machine with a 360
| degree hinge (not that I ever use it like that). I've got a
| recent ThinkPad (running Linux) provided by my work, but it's
| a bit chunkier and not so good for holidaying.
| enronmusk wrote:
| Makes sense, thanks for clarifying!
| o11c wrote:
| Hmm, given the performance-vs-efficiency tradeoff, I wonder what
| the efficiency of the NUC is if the Intel CPU is throttled to
| ~equivalent performance?
|
| `cpufreq-set` has been a lifesaver for me on hardware with poor
| fans, but it's also useful for benchmarking.
| tensility wrote:
| The thing is, I don't use a RPi for desktop-like experiences, so
| I don't want all of the accessories you've padded the price with
| just to have a cheap unix node somewhere that I need a small
| amount of compute or, especially, physical presence. For a
| desktop UI experience, I have and prefer much better machines to
| drive full desktop UIs than either a Pi or an N1x0. For that, I
| use one of my Macs.
|
| Of course, I already know we don't have similar needs or desires
| for a desktop experience, because I haven't found a good reason
| to run Windows for a couple of decades (since I'm not a PC gamer
| type and that seems to be the primary interesting reason left for
| running it), other than to occasionally boot up the newest
| version and try it out to see if I'm actually missing much.
|
| Also, for servers that get real load, I'd often rather run them
| from (unix-based) containers in the cloud anyway, if only for
| maintainability's sake. Heck, I already have NUCs depreciating
| out in storage that I don't bother to use because a RPi is
| usually a more solid and energy-efficient choice, unless I want a
| decent desktop experience or need a high-load server, for which
| purposes an N1x0 isn't usually the machine I want or need,
| either.
|
| Now, that said, if you do want a cheap minimal desktop experience
| machine and you don't mind or even want the Windows experience, I
| suppose a used N1x0 probably is a great choice.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| tensility wrote:
| Of course, something like the mini-NAS that Geerling describes
| in the following article IS a great fit for an N1x0 machine.
| These are really all just a spectrum of tools we have
| available, many of which are better fit than others for
| particular niches. A NAS seems like a perfect fit for N1x0. So,
| yeah, my initial response was dumb, but so is dismissing the
| RPi simply because you're trying to apply it to the wrong kinds
| of use cases.
|
| <https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-
| nvme...>
| steelbrain wrote:
| Unrelated to the contents of the article, but I really like how
| the layout of the blog's comments is very similar to that of HN.
| Functional. Minimalistic.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Heh, guess what site I took as inspiration for the layout?
|
| (And honestly, I can't imagine having a blog without comments
| -- probably the majority of my blog posts are made better by
| the discussion underneath.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Is the N150 really 0.59 W/flop less efficient than the BCM2712,
| does the N150 just allow you to reach a higher peak performance
| if you don't care about efficiency, or is the N150 truely already
| limited to its optimal perf/watt? We can't actually tell because
| the article only compared a 35.169 Gflops workload to a 62.067
| Gflops workload.
|
| I.e. how efficient the boxes running the same amount of work per
| second, not how efficient are the boxes when you max them out to
| different maxes. On the surface using Gflops/W feels like it
| should normalize that until you consider perf/Watt is almost
| never linear so you're left comparing apples to oranges in the
| chart.
| nullc wrote:
| Yeah, in particular, what happens when you install the same
| amount of ram in both and downclock the N150 to match the rpi
| performance?
|
| It's a bit of an odd comparison though because I don't think
| that rpi5 is particularly power efficient among small linux
| capable SBCs.
| jekwoooooe wrote:
| Raspberry pi is fairly overpriced and doesn't make sense unless
| you want to spend exactly 50$ for some reason
|
| If you need gpio, you can probably get away with an esp32
|
| If you want a server, n100 based computer will be better
| hollerith wrote:
| I am writing these words on an N100.
|
| I wanted a cheap PC small enough to store easily at my
| girlfriend's house without a fan, i.e., without the _noises_ that
| non-Apple non-Noctua fans tend to make as they get old.
|
| (I looked for a Core i3-N305 or an N200, but could not find
| either in a fanless mini PC.)
|
| Am very happy with my purchase.
| diggernet wrote:
| I've been thinking about replacing an RPi4 running Kodi, and
| N100/N150 seems with looking at. But one requirement is support
| for remote control support, including power on and off
| (preferably with discrete on/off commands). Anyone have
| suggestions?
| m101 wrote:
| Is the only reason not to use a firestick for kodi local file
| storage?
| diggernet wrote:
| That is one big reason, yes, but not the only one. I prefer
| hardware where I can install the OS I choose, and to avoid
| Amazon gadgets.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Not sure about power on/off--you'd have to hack together a
| solution for that separately, but I've had good luck with an IR
| dongle like the Flirc USB: https://flirc.tv/products/flirc-usb-
| receiver
| diggernet wrote:
| Yep, those are pretty nice. It's on/off that's really hard to
| find. Discrete on, specifically, since with Flirc you can
| handle off in software.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| How do I toggle a GPIO on the N100?
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Get an esp32 board for $3 and plug it in.
| lossolo wrote:
| I'm in the process of buying and evaluating mini-PCs to replace
| my Pi 4. Right now, I'm trying out the Minix Z100-0dB, which is a
| fanless N100 system. It's great--around 6W idle, with zero coil
| whine or any other noise.
|
| I also got a Geekom A5 with an AMD Ryzen 7430U, which is a 15W
| TDP CPU that's about 3x faster than the N100. It's crazy, because
| even though it has a fan, it idles at just 4W! (That's with an
| additional 2.5" SSD connected via SATA, plus the standard 2 x 8GB
| DDR4 and 512GB NVMe that came in the box.) I mean, it scores
| around 15,000 on CPU Benchmark, compared to the N100's 5,000. And
| the Pi is way below both of them.
| Venn1 wrote:
| Low cost x86_64 solutions beat the pants off ARM in the PPPITA
| (performance per pain in the arse) department. The Raspberry Pi
| software ecosystem advantage nopes the moment x86 shows up to the
| party. Granted, it does suck the fun out of spending a weekend
| trying to get an application to compile.
|
| Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything
| similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're
| looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if
| you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get
| something done.
| reactordev wrote:
| I'm going to argue there's no difference in "ecosystem" between
| arm and x86 anymore. It's as simple as compiling with a flag.
| Your frustrations are your own.
|
| I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you
| need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi ecosystem makes the device worthless as soon
| as you factor in commodity parts that have been marked up far
| beyond their generic counterparts. And then worst, all of the
| vendors selling generics targeting Raspberry Pi devices mark
| those up too, so it's wash. You're better off buying the
| official accessories because there's no benefit to buying the
| generics to save money.
|
| After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access
| to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a
| better value.
|
| So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore
| unless you factor in this specific requirement.
| reactordev wrote:
| I love my Beelink mini PCs but there's a use case for going
| raspberry pi and that's power draw. Way easier to build a
| system that's solar or battery powered.
| blarg1 wrote:
| Currently with the latest pi os version, moonlight
| streaming's video hardware support doesn't work.
|
| While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can
| compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package
| version has been broken for 2+ months now.
|
| If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like
| this.
| reactordev wrote:
| Stale packages are a distro problem, not a platform one.
| You said so yourself, you can compile it and it works. Your
| problem isn't with ARM. Arch on arm works fine.
| wingworks wrote:
| While not ARMs fault, the pain is still very real for the
| end user. Compiling once is maybe ok, if you get lucky.
| But more often than not you end up needing to compile
| several things, and then again every time there is an
| update you want. Trying to automatic that is also a pain.
|
| It's just so much extra work, that I'd rather spend
| working on my project, and not compiling.
|
| I love that we in Linux world have compiling as an option
| for most apps, but there is a time and place for it.
| reactordev wrote:
| Build chain problem, not an ARM one. That said, this is
| THE WORST problem. Having to recompile all dependencies
| to a platform target just so your own Makefile will
| build.
|
| I feel like distros have an obligation to cross compile
| all packages for x86 and arm in their own build chains.
| That's ultimately where this problem lies. You can't _apt
| install_ the dependencies you need to _make install_ your
| thing.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Actually, hardware video handling and not having to faff
| about with weird bootloaders have been the main reasons I
| have preferred mini-PCs
| wpm wrote:
| That's great if I have source code.
|
| I don't always. I find plenty of Linux stuff that was never
| compiled for ARM (printer drivers tend to be awful for this).
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'm not understanding this. so https://www.amazon.com/s?k=n150
| versus https://www.amazon.com/s?k=raspberry+pi+5 ... what's the
| claim here?
|
| Is it that the pi is slow?
|
| I'm not trying to disagree, I just don't see the savings
| everyone in this thread is claiming.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| > Is it that the pi is slow?
|
| Yes, its slow and its ARM-based. So if you want things to
| just work (tm), N100 is a much, much better choice. You don't
| have to fiddle around with the configs to reduce writes to
| the SD card, figure out how to fix issues with ARM ecosystem,
| yadda yadda yadda.
|
| It also limits what you want to do. For example, it is simply
| not powerful enough to run a smooth personal computer (video
| watching + light browsing).
| MaiSck wrote:
| And you can run Windows! Sometimes that's needed.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| You can run ARM Win 11 on the RPi 5, even in VMs. But that
| doesn't seem terribly practical, the little N100 I have running
| Home Assistant cost less than $90... I will stick with the Zero
| 2 W for anything in the sweet spot of "needs an OS but isn't
| doing too much, and uses GPIO" and x86_64 for anything bigger.
| rcarmo wrote:
| If you want to call "running" it doing it without complete
| networking and graphics support...
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I actually unsubscribed from Jeff's channel after he published
| that video. Anyone claiming the lack of a used RPi market means
| we have to ignore the used market for everything else is just an
| idiot. I'm going to compare the two no matter how much it bothers
| the fanboys.
| chaoskitty wrote:
| Anyone who claims that pointing out the difference between new
| and used is the same as telling you to ignore the used market
| is just an idiot.
| jacknews wrote:
| "When did raspberry pis get so expensive?" from one of his
| videos.
|
| I'm guessing around the time they were bought/went public and
| became for-profit.
| rcarmo wrote:
| As someone who has been avaluating ARM boards for years, the
| answer is hell yes.
|
| The only chipset/reference design combo that comes close is the
| RK3588 (not close to the N100, just much closer to it than even
| the Pi 5), from CPU features to PCI lanes.
| knowitnone wrote:
| One has exposed GPIOs for devs to play with. If you just want a
| basic computer, N100s are great.
| johnklos wrote:
| Reddit is filled with posts where people try to make their values
| in to everyone else's.
|
| Want an Arm SBC? Get an N100 instead! Want a Ryzen to transcode
| video? Get an N100 instead! Want a NAS? Get an N100 instead!
|
| I get it, N100 people - you get a shiny new toy, and you want to
| hype it up as the Next Best Thing that's a great choice for
| everyone. The problem is that it's not the best choice for
| everyone, and it's getting old hearing about it.
|
| Here are some reasons the N100 isn't best:
|
| SBCs are smaller and almost always take less power.
|
| Intel QuickSync isn't the same quality as software based
| transcoding, and not everyone wants to compromise on quality.
|
| Like Jeff points out, N100 systems cost more, and the added
| performance over a Pi of some sort isn't always needed (although
| it's funny that the same people who point out the higher
| performance of N100 over a Raspberry Pi will at the same time
| dismiss a low power Ryzen :P).
|
| They cost more.
|
| N100 systems don't have enough PCIe lanes to replace certain I/O
| heavy uses.
|
| Some people don't like the x86 ecosystem. N100 fans try to tell
| everyone that there's more software because it's x86, but that's
| a _negative_ thing for some of us who prefer to install from
| source.
|
| Intel gatekeeps products by removing features when there's no
| reason to do so. Even my 2014 AMD Athlon 5350 systems, which are
| very decently performing low power systems and which I'm still
| using as routers / firewalls / servers in many places, have ECC
| support in the CPU. (I wonder how the N100 would compare with a
| 2014 Athlon 5350, but that's a question for another time.)
|
| The primary reason for me is a little different: Intel makes
| shitty decisions. All of the CPU vulnerabilities found that I
| know of have affected Intel CPUs more than AMD or Arm CPUs. Why?
| I think it's because Intel tries so hard to chase performance and
| marketing points that they prioritize this over security and
| reliability.
|
| I bought an eight core Bulldozer in 2012 for compiling because I
| preferred eight integer cores over four cores plus hyperthreading
| in a Core i7-2600. Benchmarks then showed the Intel beat out AMD
| in many benchmarks then. However, more than a decade later, with
| toolchain improvements and with performance impacts of Spectre
| and Meltdown, my Bulldozer now beats an Intel i7-2600 at many
| modern benchmarks.
|
| But it's not just security - Intel's 13th and 14 generation
| degradation debacle again shows that Intel is more concerned with
| marketing and benchmarks than having good, reliable products.
| That their CPUs can take hundreds of watts to compete with Ryzen
| illustrates this well. Would this be an issue with N100? Probably
| not, but I don't want any CPUs from a company that will
| compromise their products for profit and marketing purposes.
|
| They tried to do AVX-512 and made a huge mess of which products
| have it - again, Intel were more concerned with benchmark
| results. After all, Intel's not going to release benchmark
| figures that show the effects of dropping the whole CPU's clock
| while running AVX-512. They tried to play us.
|
| The bottom line is that I don't trust Intel, which is why I'll
| never get an N100, and all of these other reasons are why I'd
| never recommend them.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Your post has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you do not
| make a single point against the N100. You just whatabout other
| Intel products that you hate...
| johnklos wrote:
| I can only surmise that you're a troll. What I wrote has
| plenty about the N100. Why not refute any of the number of
| things I brought up?
| otterley wrote:
| > Intel QuickSync isn't the same quality as software based
| transcoding, and not everyone wants to compromise on quality.
|
| Perhaps not, but when you want to do realtime transcoding so
| you can view a video on the device of your choice without pre-
| transcoding, there's really no price/performance comparison.
| johnklos wrote:
| > there's really no price/performance comparison
|
| Huh?
|
| A Ryzen can easily do real time transcoding. So why can't we
| do a price/performance comparison? A low end Ryzen that can
| easily do 4K 60 fps transcoding in real time costs $300 (with
| 24 gigs of DDR5 and 500 gig NVMe) and offers many times the
| overall performance of an N100 / N150 / N200. One can go even
| cheaper on a Ryzen, but that's just an example from Amazon.
|
| Would some people pay twice as much for a computer many times
| faster, with more memory and more storage, and that can do
| software transcoding in real time? Sure.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Word of warning on those GMKtec PCs. They put all their drivers
| on a Google Drive account that they don't pay for, and there are
| no known mirrors of some of the drivers. So when you suddenly
| need to do a reinstall one day, remember that their GDrive will
| be over-quota for a month and you'll be SOL for a few weeks
| unless you can match the drivers to the ones from the OEMs.
| transpute wrote:
| Could a cumulative set of drivers be mirrored to a Github repo
| or archive.org?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| This is the most wtf thing I have read on Hacker News in a day
| or so. Thanks, I was considering them as an N100 alternative to
| my Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe I'll search a little more...
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Copy it directly to your own Google Drive, then download it
| from there, and it will use your quota instead of theirs.
| dizhn wrote:
| Windows drivers?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Is there a reason these mini PCs still have all USB-A ports? That
| strikes me as a bizarre choice.
| octo888 wrote:
| How many USB-C keyboard/mice do people have?
| 654wak654 wrote:
| Probably for easy mouse & keyboard support? Also, mini PCs are
| usually used in offices a lot and I bet most places that buy
| these things still have lots of USB-A storage devices as well.
| Zren wrote:
| Also, probably the price of the connector. USB A is also a
| simple standard and no one will expect to treat it as a display
| out.
| roscas wrote:
| While looking at the site I noticed
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own...
| Youtube is amazing! It hosts billions of videos to all kind of
| bad content, but still make true content creators feel it's long
| arm of their laws! It is just pathetic. Just like other anti-
| social networks like Fakebook and Twitter.
| tills13 wrote:
| I built myself a 1U server using off-the-shelf parts I had lying
| around to run my Proxmox instance. I wanted to expand my cluster
| & also give myself a dedicated node for Plex (so that it could
| have direct access to the CPU w/ QuickSync) so bought myself a
| Beelink with an N100. The little Beelink sips power and has never
| once stuttered while streaming Plex. Going forward, I plan on
| replacing my 1U server with a cluster of Beelinks.
| etempleton wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi has moved too far upmarket to the point where
| something like the N100/150 is a better value for cheap compute.
| Raspberry Pi should perhaps focus on becoming increasingly
| affordable versus increasingly capable. Perhaps that also leads
| to a dead-end.
| dottjt wrote:
| How are these things for emulation?
| anon-3988 wrote:
| I have an RPI5, its in a weird zone of not cheap enough for
| embedded and not powerful enough as a NAS. I should have gone
| with N100 instead.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Semi related, what's the best source for a consumer to buy mini-
| itx boards with the processor on?
|
| I want to get a board (ideally with two gigabit Ethernet) and BYO
| ram, SSD and enclosure.
| tonymet wrote:
| my ryzen7 Beelink has been the best PC I've owned. Great
| performance, excellent reliability (only 1 BSOD in 2 years),
| great utility.
|
| I ended up consolidating 3-4 Raspis onto a single HyperV server
| and alpine / debian VMs.
|
| Pi zero 2 is the last compelling raspberry pi . Great for running
| cpu-bound servers like DNS, static web, network monitoring.
|
| Pi-5 performance, especially with IO, is not worthwhile.
| worik wrote:
| I do not understand
|
| I cannot get one of these x86 computers for twice the price of a
| fully pimped RPi5
|
| Even second hand they are usually twice the price
|
| $/mips may be a different story, but RPi5 has way more than I
| need, so I care about capital cost in total
|
| Is there some class of computer I am ignoring? This just seems so
| wrong
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