Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
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Nah no way does the average ewaste tier laptop use less power than a raspberry pi for any given task. The power consumption floor for a laptop may be lower than the rpi ceiling but that's not a fair comparison
Benchmark it and tell me. The truth is that most RPis are made using older process nodes to reduce costs. Laptops are often made using the best avaliable process node and core design. A modern raspberry pi 5 uses a 16nm processor with Cortex-A76 design from 2018. A laptop in 2015 would be using 14nm Broadwell processors from Intel. This was a time when 15W U series processors were gaining popularity, so sustained load power consumption is quite low. A 2015 laptop is 10 years old, and wouldn't run Windows 11, so will be ewaste this year. Same with a lot of 8 year old machines actually.
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Yeah, but this is about self hosting and it's costs, so the comparison is relevant.
Yes it's relevant. I have been one of the people making it. However they didn't specificy what they were actually comparing in their first comment. So it ends up they are saying something false. Your average laptop could easily beat a raspberry pi in performance per watt.
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I would assume that landfill laptop manufacturers are trying to minimize costs even harder on the charger.
but what timeframe do you mean with "anymore"? laptops made in this decade, or the last 10 years, or something else? there's plenty of old laptops that fitinto OPs category.
Probably for as long as raspberry pis have been around. There have been plenty of scares with phone chargers exploding, and that's what a raspberry pi is powered from. Laptop chargers haven't had many issues in the past decade or so.
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
wrote last edited by [email protected]A RPi is going to be smaller, quieter, and 10x more energy efficient though...
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
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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.
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.
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Are any of them actually that good in efficiency though? Like a Pi 5 is probably the best in performance per watt, but it also has the highest power consumption. Realistically you wouldn't self host on anything older than a Pi 4 anyway.
I can self host what I want on a pi zero. But, I do have some 30 years of experience so can probably do things some won't understand / bother with.
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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.
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.
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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.
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I can self host what I want on a pi zero. But, I do have some 30 years of experience so can probably do things some won't understand / bother with.
Bro please. I understand you can host very small stuff on less powerful Pis. I used to host some stuff on a Raspberry Pi model b myself. Stop tooting your own horn. You couldn't however host all the stuff I use or even most home labbers use on a Pi zero with modern software. I doubt it could run Jellyfin, an *arr stack, ollama, nextcloud, etc all at the same time. Probably you would also have to drop using containers which would be less secure and easy to deploy.
What's the performance per watt of a Pi Zero anyway? I am sure it's low power draw but I doubt it's actually efficient.
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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.
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If you have the lid closed, you're looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.
Maybe a little more under high load, but those are going to be intermittent and not constant.
I'm just saying it's not that much more electricity usage, and the recycling more than offsets the CO2.
Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it's unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I've never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it's being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.
With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that's mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
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.
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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.
My WiFi routers have historically struggled a bit, I've got a decent one now, but even it is slow to manage the DHCP lists for fixed assignments by MAC address.
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Should see an old 6th gen i5 mini PC on a power monitor. It's basically nothing!
Yeah, they've reversed that trend for sure.
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Your energy is clearly a lot cheaper than mine then.
Well, the idea scales, if your energy is 0.33 Euro per kWh take the watts x 3 and that's your annual running cost.
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I used to think so too, but my pi-hole just died the other week after four years of uptime. Couldn't work it out, finally pulled the SD card out to reinstall the OS and found my laptop wouldn't recognise it.
Made me glad I don't run my mailserver on a Pi anymore!
I join you, I used to change SD card and USB disk every 1-2 year. I bought a nas 3 year ago didn't need to change disk yet.
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Probably for as long as raspberry pis have been around. There have been plenty of scares with phone chargers exploding, and that's what a raspberry pi is powered from. Laptop chargers haven't had many issues in the past decade or so.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I have heard less about phone chargers failing catastrophically. They also handle much less power (except the fancy ones), and I haven't seen a hot phone charger adapter yet, but plenty laptop chargers of which some were just very warm, and some so hot just on its outsides that it was uncomfortable to hold it in hand.
this is why I'm more worried about laptop chargers
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Bro please. I understand you can host very small stuff on less powerful Pis. I used to host some stuff on a Raspberry Pi model b myself. Stop tooting your own horn. You couldn't however host all the stuff I use or even most home labbers use on a Pi zero with modern software. I doubt it could run Jellyfin, an *arr stack, ollama, nextcloud, etc all at the same time. Probably you would also have to drop using containers which would be less secure and easy to deploy.
What's the performance per watt of a Pi Zero anyway? I am sure it's low power draw but I doubt it's actually efficient.
See here's the thing. Why would anyone want to host ALL the stuff on one pi? That is not what they were designed for. Ollama on a pi? Are you out of your mind? I'd run the biggest model I can on a modern gpu not some crappy old computer or pi....Right tool, right job. And why is dropping containers "less secure"? Do you mean "less cool"? Less easy to deploy? But you're not deploying it, you're installing it. You sound like a complete newb which is fine, but just take a step back from things and get some more experience. A pi is a tool for a purpose, not the end all. Using an old laptop is not going to save the world and arguing that it's just better than a pi (or similar alternative) is just dumb. Use a laptop for all I care, I'm not the boss of you.
As for an arr stack, I'm really disappointed with the software and don't use it and those who do have way too much time to set it up, and then make use of it!
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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.
