Alternative. Cheap android box and coreelec.
You can have them for about 20 bucks. Have minimal power consumption. And small power factor. They also have ARM architecture.
They are good for low power applications.
Its all fun and games until the power bill arrives. Performance per watt is important, please look at that first. Don’t be me.
You’ll have no end of problems and won’t know whether it’s a hardware or software problem.
Damn straight. Another reason not to buy a pi.
Yeah… no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
my 20 year old pc runs at ~5°C above room temp under load
So do Raspberry Pi?
That just means they become 100% efficient in winter!
It’s a good idea until you consider the fact that a Raspberry Pi will be astronomically more power efficient.
If you think in flops per watt, maybe a little bit, but not a lot. Do you have one or two good procs for almost free, or half a dozen new sbcs at $100 each? Takes a while to save back that amount in power.
My question is usually not how many flops, but how quickly and reliably those watts can give me just a few flops on demand.
Look for refurbished elitedesk g5, it runs debian magnificantly! I splurged a bit on the memory and ssd and have a quite nice desktop (developer).
this is the way
Only if you’re running it at full load all the time and comparing that to a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount of work. Also, only if you live in a cold climate and the heat generated is not a concern and power is supplied by a renewable source so power isn’t a concern.
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
A RPi is going to be smaller, quieter, and 10x more energy efficient though…
There are probably a dozen things you can do to save energy on orders of magnitude higher than using a pi.
Like: using the pi to manage your HVAC more efficiently.
Why use a pi instead of a microcontroller?
At the HVAC control level it would be a Pico - for the development / maintenance time efficiency: I know how the tools work, I know the community support is there, the hardware is easy to find and available relatively reliably, although ESPHome on the ESP micro-controllers is pretty good too.
Then do them. It’s still not going to decrease the energy use of your server.
I’m sure silicon valley are stepping on each other, vying to get their hands on these super cheap laptops for their 24/7 AI training.
No Silicon Valley are the ones throwing these things away because it costs them too much money to deal with old unreliable PCs.
Damn, I should have ended the post with /s for people like you.
They aren’t very useful for much besides hobby projects. Modern hardware is more energy efficient and will be cheaper in the long run compared to anything that would be considered e-waste. The only advantage an old laptop has is the initial cost, so it makes sense for a small home server.
Also, Raspberry Pi first got popular because of the size and cost. Now it’s popular because it’s popular. Not hating on them, I think they’re cool, but they’re not cheap any more. Especially with the scalping.
Getting x86_64 based systems is going to mean much less headache. Unless you truly truly need the size I wouldn’t consider getting a Pi or other SBC. Just go to literally any used marketplace (Facebook, Craigslist, etc) and get anything.
Pi is popular with me because it’s time efficient. Meaning: when I am trying to get it to do something, it takes less of my time to make the thing actually happen on Pi hardware as compared with most of the other small / embedded alternatives. Notable recent exception: ESPHome on ESP32 hardware, but even there the more limited variation of Raspberry hardware makes it similar to those fruity phones, MP3 players and computers - since there are a limited number of variations, you can usually find information specific to EXACTLY your setup, instead of having to infer from something almost the same, but figure out little wrinkles here and there due to differences between what you are working with and what you are reading about on the internet.
but they’re not cheap any more
People say this, but they really are still cheap.
The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched for £22 in 2012. The entry level Raspberry Pi 5 is £46, but adjusted for inflation that’s only £32 in 2012 money. So only £10 more expensive in real terms.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is only £14.40, which is only £10 in 2012 money. Compare this to the original Raspberry Pi Model A, which launched for £16.
People look at the headline cost of the high end RPi 5s (£115 for the 16GB model, £76 for the 8GB), but fail to recognise that there was nothing comparable to these in the Raspberry Pi lineup before, and these are not the only models in the Raspberry Pi lineup now.
There was the supply shortage price spike, they really were stupid expensive then if you supported the hoarder/scalpers.
Since that has cleared… most of the Pi price increases (in inflation adjusted dollars) can be attributed to improved features like more RAM, or people acknowledging that having a good dedicated $20 power supply is preferable to dealing with the flakiness of that old phone charger you found under the bed.
Inflation adjustment doesn’t really tell the whole story though, it’s not like salaries have gone up by the same amount. Regardless, I don’t like dealing with the Zero unless I specifically need something that tiny. It’s just too annoying. Don’t get me wrong! They’re cool! I’m just saying unless I really need a Pi Zero I wouldn’t wanna work with one. I’d rather work with x86_64 than Arm. Like even just getting Java working was really tricky on Zero. Much like a microcontroller has limitations for what you can run on them but they have other benefits, Zeros aren’t really general purpose.
So yeah, dirt cheap used laptop for general purpose server beats out dirt cheap Pi in my book.
10£ more, or 50% more expensive?
Don’t like the expensive version? Get a Zero 2 W which outspecs the original by a wide margin.
That’s only true for the high-end Pi 5. Lower-powered models like the zero 2 are still cheap, and they’re a lot easier to find than a few years ago.
Which part? Because the “it’s not x86” is even more annoying to deal with on Pi Zero lol.
Yeah… I’m not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
But… that’s so uncool…
I should have rebuilt an old coffee maker in to a Pi Hole instead. I’m such a rube.
I agree that the Zero is up to the task, but I prefer a wired connection for my home DNS/DHCP server and if I understand correctly the Pi5 has better wired ethernet than its predecessors… Yeah, utilization is laughable, but there’s something to be said for reduced lag time too:
Hostname: pihole CPU: 0.2% on 4 cores running 318 processes (0.3% used by FTL) RAM: 25.9% of 2.0 GB is used (7.4% used by FTL) Swap: 35.9% of 512.0 MB is used Kernel: Linux pihole 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 Uptime: a month (running since Sunday, May 18th 2025, 17:54:59I have never felt the need to have a wired connection for my DNS/DHCP, since such a trivial amount of data exchanges hands. The quality of the wired connection if it had one would similarly have negligible impact, surely.
For me it’s not about the bandwidth, it’s about the lag and reliability. I have had strong WiFi connections flake out a lot more than wired connections.
Also, I just prefer to not have 100+ WiFi devices kicking around my network when more than half of them could be wired, or on another protocol like Zigbee.
I guess I am pretty far from saturating my WiFi in any way, the removal of cables with little to no impact on connectivity was far more of a priority for me. I have never noticed a WiFi related outage or performance loss.
No reason why a laptop wouldn’t work though.
I mean, a lot of things would work, I could power it all with potato batteries if I had enough. The Pi Zero 2 W only cost ~£15 anyway.
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…
You are probably right for something like a Pihole, which can easily run on a RPi 3 as well (I think I’m running it on a 3… maybe even a 2.) My fear is something like Jellyfin (which it is not suited for anyway, I know), combined with the fact that my stack of Pis is in my meter cabinet, so a fairly confined space with very little air movement, also passive. Running Jellyfin without transcoding has my Pi 5 running at just under 50 °C.
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…
I have one of those 8.1 laptops - I LITERALLY fished it out of a dumpster.
