Homebrew pi400 (2025 Update)

Well in my case when I need performance it's about watching hi res videos, playing the occasional video game, running a 3D slicer and editing videos.

And sadly running a windows VM.

I accept that, but sadly I couldn't justify replacing a desktop that does extremely well

I'd install linux anyway

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OoI - are they both pretty much silent?

My PC is.

It probably has a fan, but I seldom hear it

Intel® Core™ i5-6600T CPU @ 2.70GHz × 4

I'd say it idles at 5-10W mostly similar to a pi 5.

The trouble is that Intel has got its MIPs per watt up nearly as high as a Pi. And does more MIPS.

Intel has nothing with equivalent performance within a factor of 3 - and that's just the CPU, it's about 5x when you consider the whole system.

---druck

Good question.

Different refurbished PCs will have different cooling solutions (and different needs for cooling). Some may use passive cooling, others may have a fan. Fans tend to be noisier in older machines, so a refurbished machine is unlikely to be as quiet as a new one.

My main PC has a sizeable aftermarket metal cooler with a fan that seldom turns on, but is (barely) audible when it does.

My Pi 5 is in an Argon Neo 5 NVMe case, which does have a fan but also makes use of the metal case as a cooler. I've never noticed the fan making a sound.

I believe the Pi 500+ is fanless (I haven't taken mine apart, yet).

I had a Pi 4 in the standard pink/white Raspberry Pi case with a fan shim. After a year or so it started to hum noticeably so I removed the fan shim and put on a small metal heatsink. It runs a little warmer now, but not dangerously so.

The online teardowns say this is true.

-- When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat

Still, the newer ARM-based machine would consume less electricity, and take up less space, than the older x86-based one.

Orange Pi5 and Mac M1... are much better. Orange Pi5 runs at 2 watts and is faster than rPi5.

I would buy a second hand Mac M1 if I thought I could get Linux to run well on it.

Amazon are currently selling this:

KASEPE Mini PC 8GB DDR5 256GB M.2 SSD, Mini PC Alder Lake-Ν95 (up to 3.4GHz) Win 11 Pro 4 Cores 4 Threads, Micro PC Support 4K Triple Displays, Mini Desktop PC-WiFi 6 Bluetooth 4.2 for £84.00

I bought one of these last year for an application where I could also have chosen a Pi5. In the end the Intel version of the software that I needed to run was more mature than the ARM version. Otherwise there was very little to choose in my case. I have also used some very nice Bosgame N100 machines which have multiple 2.5Gbit/s ethernet ports. These machines use notebook-style centrifugal fans which are very quiet. One thing that did take a little sorting out was that the BIOS thinks they are notebook PCs with a lid switch but the hardware doesn't have such a switch. This makes them shut down after a while when a graphical interface is active. This is annoying when they are being remotely operated in another country. However, it only needs a 1-line change in a configuration file to fix this.

For many purposes the Pi5 is an excellent choice - just not everything.

John

Is that this one

(Verily, it is said, “the large print giveth, and the fine print taketh away”.)

I think the Raspberry Pi range can compare for value for money against anything in the x86 camp. That’s why Intel’s attempts to compete, like with Atom and NUC, were failures.

What kind of GPIO does it have?

It says, "Operating system DOS", in spite of the headline.

I wonder what you actually get!

Like the price though. What's the catch?

Well, no Windows license, obviously. :-)

-jw-

Yes. I have one of those.

Most computers are idle for a lot of the time, so falling back to a lower clock speed when it is not busy does save power.

I think there is an issue at the core of all this as to whether, given similar fabrication densities, a CISC computer is inherently more power hungry than a RISC one.

I suspect that in the end they come out the same: the major power consumption is FET state transitions per second, and if CISC has more FETs, but they aren't being used all the time, I see no inherent reason why more power should be drawn: At a given point the RISC that is executing the same number of transitions per second because it is executing 'real' code rather than microcode, ends up as essentially the same thing.

You do actually get Windows 11. You can also zero the SSD and install a clean copy of Windows 11 direct from Microsoft and it finds the necessary licence in the BIOS. However, I mostly run debian or Mint on these boxes. The cheapest ones like the one I mentioned have their RAM soldered in place so it can't be upgraded. Also, they sometimes come with M.2 SATA memory modules rather than NVMe. The slightly more expensive ones such as some from Bosgane that have 2.5Gbit/s ethernet come with upgradeable RAM and NVMe SSD memory. These machines claim a maximum of 16Gbyte RAM, but I have installed 32Gbyte without any problems. John

Yes, it is. That’s why you see x86 at an inherent disadvantage in low- power situations. That’s in the real world, not based on theoretical considerations.

But those extra transistors are being used a lot of the time. Intel has previously talked about some kind of “RISC-like core”, so extra transistors are needed to translate from the programmer-visible CISC instruction set into these “core” instructions. And they are needed all the time, as new instructions come in.

Except your cheap Celerons are not capable of the higher speed.

You can check this easily enough, by looking in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/.

Here you are: john@Unifi-T9Pro:/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0$ cat cpuinfo_max_freq 3400000

john@Unifi-T9Pro:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 190 model name : Intel(R) N95 ...

So what does that tell you?

John