Well yeah of course you can. The pi 400 is even an official computer kit turning it into a homecomputer akin to a commdore 64/amiga 500/acorn/bbc micro etc.
That’s a poor analogy given that the Pi 5 & Pi 400 are incomparably more powerful than 1980s home computers, and I don’t think OP was asking if a Pi 5 can run WordPerfect or VisiCalc.
Did you really think they were comparing the pi’s capabilities with a commodore…? It was obvious that they were comparing the form factor.
Okay, I wanted to say that the computer would be integrated just like the computers I mentioned.
Forgive me but the Pi is an order Of magnitude better than the dinosaurs you mention.
NO WAY. Sorry I didn’t realise how a
64-Bit CPU with a clockspeed of 1.8 Gigahertz with RAM of up to 8 Gigabytes, USB connectivity, HDMI outs, Wifi and other shit
could EVER be superior to a (respective to an Amiga 500)
16-Bit computer with a speed of 7.16 MEGAhertz with 512 KILOBYTES of RAM
You REALLY opened my eyes.
(sorry for being overly sarcastic)
No need to apologize, these are some bonkers replies
Been able to use rPis as a desktop for a while now. The 2s and 3s weren’t particularly pleasant but it was doable. The Pi 4 8GB with an USB3 jump drive as root partition was a lot more pleasant, at least until you hit thermal throttle.
Right now though, there are more powerful options in the same price point, once you account for power, storage and optionally, a case. At least for desktop and home server use.
The Raspberry Pi’s just aren’t the go to hardware for the home lab anymore. Probably won’t be again unless the price comes back down on the Pi’s or the price on new and used amd64’s goes back up.
Could you share what you consider better options at the same price point?
Sure, but “better” is massively subjective. For me, when I set up a pi, I’m not usually making use of the GPIO or the camera inputs. I’m generally throwing together a headless server. To do that, in addition to the board itself, I need storage, power, heat sinks, an fan and usually some sort of case.
Using the prices at CanaKit as a rough guide, you can come up with this search on Ebay.
The first entry I saw drew my attention. It’s a 7th gen i5 with 16GB RAM and a 120 GB SSD. Not sure the 500 GB HDD would survive shipping, but it’s $100 shipped. Biggest concern is that the seller only has 65 sales. Possible scam?
On the higher end of that bracket there is this. 6th gen and only 8GB RAM, but the seller does have a history.
With the prices on the Pi5 your potentially getting into the price range where it might make sense to look at the Beelinks mini PCs, based around a 12th gen Intel.
Like I said, prices right now are at a spot where I can’t just say throw a Raspberry Pi at the problem. They are great boards but for someone self-hosting their own services they don’t necessarily always make sense anymore.
With the prices on the Pi5 your potentially getting into the price range where it might make sense to look at the Beelinks mini PCs, based around a 12th gen Intel.
Wow, wish I had known about that before. That looks amazing! I ordered one and will give it a shot. Do you happen to know of a community based around mini-pcs? If not Lemmy, forum, etc. I use places like Tomshardware but would love to see things like the Beelink when they pop up.
Not that I’m aware of.
The only time I heard anyone talking about it was on the podcast Self-Hosted . Supposedly it’s a NUC clone with performance similar to a then current (2023) mid range laptop and draws about the same amount of power. I think they said the N100 processor had Intel QuickSync for hardware transcoding.
I am sure you can, but you will likely get better performance from a mini PC for roughly the same price.
Yeah, an intel N95 puck will absolutely demolish any Pi. By the time you add a case, a drive, a stable power brick, enough memory, a cooler, you’re at the same price. With a PC, you’re getting an NVME drive (2 pcie3.0 lanes because Intel can’t let it eat the i3 market) @ 800MB/s. With a Pi, you are living off of a microSD card running at 50MB/s (and that craters with any writing or seeking).
you can get a mini PC for 87€ with BETTER performance than the Pi 5?
We are looking at:
2.4 GHz, 4GB of RAM, 4kp60 HECV de/enconding.
87€ does not include case, power supply, or microSD. Realistically close to 120€ to get a working system and for that kind of money yes you can get a newish Celeron powered PC with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD/NVME.
I am doing conversion from Canadian Dollar so my calculations and what is actually available in Europe might be off a bit. It is totally possible here though.
But the Pi 5 doesn’t play well with the regular smartphone power adapters. It’s a good thing that I got the official power adapter. You should get one, too.
You just need the right voltage
Edit: that’s just an ad for a raspberry pi cooler.
You can also use the official cooler for 6€ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/active-cooler/
Yes, you’re right about voltage and amp combined, but the problem is modern phones and their charges don’t generally want to be doing high amps at 5v, they increase their voltage to 9v, 15v or, 20v. Which like you would point out, is not the right voltage.
Personally I just feed 5v in via a ubec like this: https://core-electronics.com.au/ubec-dc-dc-step-down-buck-converter-5v-at-3a-output.html since I usually have some kind of 12v battery powered thing going on with mine and lots of 12v ac-dc adapters for bench testing and charging. Lots of ways to power them but it’s definitely not just ‘grab your usb-c charger and it’ll be right’ which can be frustrating for people since it’s almost all other usb-c things will ‘just work’.
I own two Raspberries 1, a Raspberry 4 8GB and a Raspberry 5 8GB. I wouldn’t recommend the 4 as a full-fledged desktop replacement, but the 5 has been very smooth so far.
I’m currently using the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite and installed KDE on top.
There’s even a MX release for Pi https://mxlinux.org/download-links/
they have come a long way since the old pi 2 that would max out it’s cpu just wiggling the mouse around on the desktop
