I bought a few used NUCs for $150 each, they're amazing home servers. Much, much faster, more capable, more flexible than a Pi, at only twice the price.
Pi's were never a good for compute-intensive tasks; running a DNS resolver (PiHole), print-server, or uploading backups to the cloud is the sort of thing it excels at. The Pi Zero W costs $15 and idles at less than 1 Watt; it's the always-on-appliance that turns on my GPU-workstation or NUC for the heavier stuff.
What do you use them for? I'm one of those that have Raspberry Pi 5 mostly just for Home Assistant. It's clearly overpowered for that use case, but I wanted the NVMe support. I'm not convinced by these articles -- used x86 box that maybe achieves almost the same low power draw still doesn't have any actual upsides if you don't realistically need that computing power.
I have one where I deployed K9s so I can learn Kubernetes better, and one where I have deployed Harbormaster (http://harbormaster.readthedocs.io/).
The Harbormaster one has a bunch of stuff (Zigbee2MQTT, my smart home stuff, my apps, etc. I have a Pi 4 that has Octoprint, services on the NUC load instantly whereas Octoprint feels a bit sluggish.
The NUC is an x86 (well, amd64) box, with a 10W power draw, which is great. I don't think a desktop PC will do less than 100W...
I use the mini-pc for running security NVR, git servers, self hosted NextCloud, local hosted LLM models, and backup servers.
After my branded security camera NVR died for the N times and the company went out of business, I got fed up and decided to run my own NVR. I got a powered switch to provide power and network connection to all the cameras via POE. Connected a mini-pc to the switch and ran Blue Iris on it to stream from all the cameras. Attached an external harddisk enclosure to use some old harddisks for storage. This ensures every piece of the system can be replaced and upgraded separately.
I have a home server that stores and processes all my photos, using PhotoPrism. Things like face recognition does require a bit of a compute. A NUC is perfect for this use case.
I've got one that does PhotoPrism + other media (sabnzbd, gerbera, flexget) as a general "media storage" box, one that just runs a Minecraft server, and one that's "everything else" (currently Home Assistant, Grafana, Prometheus, my webcam bird detection stuff, NATS, etc.)
Originally started with HA on a Pi 4 but it wasn't really up to it.
Just as a quick update after trying out: seems like a very nice local photo album service. The initial scan will take a long while, but looks like Pi5 is quite enough to handle the service after that completes. I will need a larger SSD for my Pi if I intend to keep all my photos in this, though.
I bought a 8TB SATA SSD for this. Currently it's already 15% full. The nice thing about my NUC is that it has Thunderbolt builtin so I can buy Thunderbolt drive bays.
So you're saying that the Pi is a proverbial Toyota Hilux and people are buying it to highway commute to work and back instead of using it for what it was meant for, and then saying it compares poorly to sedan? Yea, no shit.
If you're not using the GPIO or any of the ribbon cable peripherals there are much better options out there. But a Pi will be able to do things those machines never will.
I think they are comparing a $700 micro PC to an $80 Raspberry pi, but pretending they are in the same price range since the micro PC is available cheap in the refurb market.
You don’t need to pay that much. For example, Minisforum is selling a barebones MS-01 for $399 new. This isn’t quite apples to apples — the Raspberry Pi includes RAM (but not much), whereas the MS-01 includes a case, a cooling system, a power supply, and an RTC battery. (And the MS-01 uses a non-janky 19V supply, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 wants a weird not-to-spec not-quite-sure-what-they-were-thinking 5V USB supply by default.)
For the price, you get massively more CPU power, 3x the number of easily connectable NVMe devices, at higher bandwidth each, 22x (!) the network bandwidth, and the ability to connect a real multi-lane PCIe card of your choice.
I still find it sad that NVMe is an afterthought in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. SD is convenient, but it’s also slooooow, and it holds back a lot of raspberry pi use cases. The new-to-RPi5 official NVMe support still seems really awkward in the way it interferes with the overall thermal performance and the way it interferes with the IO header if you use the official board.
You don’t need to pay that much. For example, Minisforum is selling a barebones MS-01 for $399 new
That doesn't really change my point that they are comparing the Pi to a PC that costs 4 - 8 times more (and in a much larger formfactor), so it's not surprising that it's faster.
Personally, I'm a fan of the odroid H+ series - full x86 SOC with dual nics, and some on-board gpu stuff for $125. I have 3 of the old H2 series and I love them.
Not only are they very different in price, the micro PC is 10x the size. Size doesn't matter for all uses, but there are going to be things where a Pi will fit but these micro PCs won't.
I got one recently that was £159 (1.4x the 8GB Pi 5 starter kit) for a 16GB i3-8109U (with 500GB SSD) and is just about 3x the volume of the Argon Neo 5 case for the Pi 5 (113 x 127 x 43mm vs 94 x 70 x 30mm).
Doesn't change the "[places] where a Pi will fit but these micro PCs won't" assertion but the pricing and sizing are not as egregious as you're suggesting.
You can pick up something like an HP elitedesk g2 with 8th gen intel cpu for $100-120 on secondary markets. Most of them ship with at least 8gb ram and also a 500gb m.2 drive. A 8th gen cpu will be many many times more powerful than even the rpi 5. In addition to having quicksync for hardware media transcoding. Something the Pi still cannot do via hardware. Not to mention, its x86 - so lot more support over the ARM7
Of course, if you size and the ability to interface with other hardware via GPIO is the primary use - then yeah a SBC like a Rpi would be the better option. But for a small home server, one is better off just buying a mini-PC.
Now the 4020 isn't certainly a monster, but I can assure you it's way more performant than a RPi. Also, bear in mind that, as is the case with many Chinese products, those mini PCs are produced in huge quantities and sold under at least a dozen different ever changing "brands". Don't let the name "Wo-We" make you think this is something deemed to disappear in a few months; the name could certainly be thrown away but the product will most certainly reincarnate under another "brand".
OK I understand the RPi must have very good press, but nitpicking every part of a message just to find something to attack isn't constructive. Linux preinstalled means that Linux works out of the box, that is, you don't even have to search around for Linux compatibility with any of the peripherals inside that mini PC. Of course I would never ever trust anything preinstalled, neither Linux nor Windows, just as I got rid of stock Android on my recently bought Pixel 7 in favor of GrapheneOS like 2 hours after unboxing it. I only meant about compatibility, certainly I wasn't suggesting that anyone runs unknown software from China.
You misunderstood. My comment had nothing to do with the meat of your post. I was only referring to Linux being preinstalled on Chinese hardware as being downright dangerous.
I got the $700 figuring by looking up the list price of one of the mini PC's mentioned in the article, which use an Intel i5-6500 or AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200GE CPU (which each have 4 cores @ 3.6Ghz), I think if they'd compared against a 2 core 2.8Ghz Celeron, it would have been more evenly matched. The Raspberry Pi 5 beats the 4020 in both single and multi-core performance in this benchmark:
Don't let the name "Wo-We" make you think this is something deemed to disappear in a few months; the name could certainly be thrown away but the product will most certainly reincarnate under another "brand".
Does that matter? If it dies in 2 months and I can't find the manufacturer because it's operating under a different name now, is that any different than if the manufacturer folded completely?
I'm not sure whether to assume you either are clueless or whether to assume you're actively working to try to sabotage perception.
No one's gonna recommend an ancient middling mini-PC that costs vastly more than a modern current mini-PC.
Either go on the secondary market & get this old PC for under $100. Or go get some modern Ryzen mini-PC for $500. Or a decent n100 for somewhere in between, especially if you insist on new for some reason.
The manufacturer is the same, what dies is the brand name; the very same product is just being packaged in a box with another name. I mean, you shouldn't place too much importance in the name, just look at the real iron inside the box.
We, as westerners, are used to give a lot of importance to brand names, possibly because it comes from the old times when brand names identified products with the families that created them; that is completely different from how it works in far east today.
The reason I give importance to the brand name is because if the company has been around for a decade (or many decades), it's likely to still be around in a year or two to give me support when the product fails.
If the company resurrects itself every 6 months under a different name, then there's effectively no warranty on the product and there's no reason to think that it's built to be long lasting, since even bad reviews won't show up under the new brand name.
For $150 you can get a new mini pc with a low power intel cpu (e.g. N100) and 8GB of Ram. It comes with an SSD, a power supply and (gasp) a case. Add those to a raspberry pi and the price is not much different.
I have been looking at a N100, are they good in general as a Pi alternative. I am mostly looking at running K8s and running apps and running things like Pihole
I recently got a mini PC with an N100, 16GB ram, 512 GB SSD for €150, and am using it to run several docker compose projects. Basic home lab apps, such as nginx, home assistant, adguard home, vaultwarden (bitwarden), and actual and the CPU is at 4% and RAM is at 22%. I don't know how intensive K8s is, but I'm very happy with my setup and am surprised it's not breaking a sweat running all these things.
They're all over Aliexpress (prices before VAT, annoyingly) and often posted to hotukdeals when there's a sale. The Ryzen based miniPCs are also pretty good. Here's an example.
