[agloeregrets]

> There are plenty of low performance PC compatibles from Beelink and similar places that cost less delivered tomorrow than a Pi delivered tomorrow AND have higher performance specs than a legacy Pi.

This. I replaced my Homebridge/PiHole RasPi 4B 4GB with a J4125 Acer Desktop system at a cost of $88, all in with all accessories needed from ebay. It has 4GB of upgradable ram, a reasonable SSD, 1G ethernet, and a bonus Sata port for a NAS. It even included a power supply! Pihole's web UI is shockingly faster for me too.

Edit: Link to system, price went up a little, still better than a Pi. https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=i...

[sliken]

Sure, better than a Pi, but better then the rockchip rk3588 system?

From a quick look it looks like the MiniPC has half the cores, half the max ram, half the shipped ram, much less I/O performance (SATA @ 400MB/sec vs NVME at 3GB/sec), much less network (1 x GigE vs 2 x 2.5Gbe), much older/slower USB (2.0 vs 3.1), hugely larger (looks like 20x the volume), and likely has a fan.

So sure the MiniPC is a good for for some uses where power, noise, and size don't matter. But if you want a router, firewall, server, or desktop you might well be much happier with an 8GB ($140 with nice passively cooled metal case) or 16GB rk3588.

On performance it's hard to say, if you want to compare performance post any open source benchmark you want. Although I don't have the 3GB/sec NVME JeffG benchmarked in the original post, but anything opensource that exercises the CPU/ram should work. I do have a kill-a-watt around if there's interest in perf/watt.

For running DHCP, router, dns-masq, firewall, and the mentioned PiHole seems like a much better fit for a Rk3588 @ a few watts and 10 or so cubic inches than a used system @ 600 inch^3. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Rk3588 faster than a celeron J4125.

[BackBlast]

"better" is in the eye of the beholder. You can get very near equivalents to the rk3588 on the x86 side. N5105/N6005 are a pretty good match for CPU benchmarks and better GPU, better I/O (more PCIe), SO-DIMM slots, better software support. All for a similar costs. I got a Intel NUC Essential N5105 for $160 6 months ago (SSD/RAM were separate).

The RK3588 is a 4 big core 4 little core design, so throwing out 8 cores as a point of difference is kind of misleading. Yes, there are 4 extra small cores in there.

If you just want a small cheap system, used ebay systems are pretty hard to beat. J4125 class CPUs are an excellent choice. At this point "faster" is less important than "works" I think. And the RK3588 isn't even touching the price you can get a used J4125/J4105 for. $55 https://www.ebay.com/itm/115671002802

Claiming a J4125 is "big" and "noisy" is similarly misleading. J4125 is a 10W TDP. RK3588 is a 12W TDP. You can passively cool either. N5105 and N6005 are similar power profiles. My J4105 idles at 3-5W, runs proxmox with my firewall and a bunch of VMs for databases and servers. 32GB RAM.

I couldn't find a Rock5 with case and power supply for anywhere near $150, and not even a bare board with 8GB for that. Let alone your claimed $140 for the full package.

Then there's architecture... A lot of packages you can find off the shelf for x86 just aren't built for arm. It bites you in the random places and burns time. Lots of time. I've burned far too much time trying to make ARM servers work.

[kyriakos]

What's the power usage difference compared to a pi? Considering this is something running 24/7?

[BackBlast]

If you get an atom line CPU a smaller I/O suite. Say a dell 3040 or 5070 and your at 4W idle - similar to the Rock5 (and cheaper if you're buying used on ebay). When you get to the full fledged core lines you're looking at 8-10W as a baseline. My Pi4, when I was running one, was 2-4 Watt @ idle.

If you really want to deep dive on this topic see parky towers https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

[agloeregrets]

I don't have it on a kill-a-watt even though I should. As the person below you said, it's like 1.5 to 2x power consumption vs a pi4 at idle (Under 10w), but that is still comically small amounts, about the same as a Google Nest Hub.

[geerlingguy]

Many of these mini PCs use 6-10W at idle, compared to 2-4W for a Pi, or 3-4W for the Rock 5 mentioned in the article.