I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’m curious, what’s an example of a mini x86 machine comparable to a raspberry pi? I just did research and ended up buying a RPI 5. I may have not known what to look for, but what I found in the x86 space was $200+ and seemed pretty underwhelming compared to a $80 SBC on arm.

    • FailBait@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      In 2022, when Pi4s were going for $150-200, I managed to get a 7th gen NUC for about $150. I was looking to start Home Assistant, so both were viable options, but even the Pi5’s coming close to $100 retail, spending 50% more gets you a lot more performance for a 7th gen intel i5/i7 mobile chip, 16gb of RAM and a 256GB NVME.

    • constantokra@lemmy.oneEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      You’d be looking at used mini PCs. I’ve heard really good things about lenovo. It’s not necessarily exactly comparable in price, but the reason people are souring on arm SBCs, and especially PiS, is that it’s only a little more for a more powerful lenovo, and there are never any supply issues.

    • Grippler@feddit.dkEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I bought an old Intel NUC with a 2.x GHz i3, 8gb ram and 120gb nvme used for $65, upgraded it to 16gb of ram and 1tb nvme for another $50. I run everyting from that in either VMs or LXCs (HA, jellyfin, NAS, CCTV, pihole) and it draws about 10W