I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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I still like vms on digital ocean. I guess I'm a seething soydev.
This struggle usually takes place over a weekend.
This guy selfhosts
Or you learn proxmox and running everything as a VM
i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300
Reduces electric waste
A lot of older equipment actually wastes more electricity.
But it will cut down on electronic waste.
Not necessarily.
A i5-6500 has a TDP of 65W while a i5-13600K has a TDP of 150W.
If you get something modern that has the performance of a i5-6500 it will be a little bit more efficient. The key is that more performance uses more power.
13600K
If you buy a high watt CPU, that's on you. Ryzen 7 also came out in 2022 and had many 65 watt cpus that could outperform an i5-6500.
not necessarily
a lot of
Yes, but also no. Older hardware is less power efficient, which is a cost in its own right, but also decreases backup runtime during power failure, and generates more noise and heat. It also lacks modern accelerated computing, like ai cores or hardware video encoders or decoders, if you are running those appd. Not to mention lack of nvme support, or a good NIC.
For me a good compromise is to recycle hardware upgrades every 4-5 years. A 19 year old computer? I would not bother.
I have a Lenovo M710q with a i3 7100T that uses 3W at idle. I'm not mining bitcoin, server is idle 23h a day if not more.
Bro, I am just hosting a WordPress backup, an RSS reader, and a few Python scripts
Yeah what Iβve always done is use the previous gaming/workstation PC as a server.
I just finished moving my basic stuff over to newer old hardware thatβs only 6-7 years old, to have lots of room to grow and add to it. Itβs a 9700k (8c/8t) with 32GB of ram and even a GTX 1080 for the occasional video transcode. Itβs obviously overkill right now, but I plan to make it last a very long time.
Think centre tiny here
Low consumption, two ddr4 slots, one 2.5" slot and one nvme slot! Lots of outside slots.
Costed less used than a new pi too. They have gotten too expensive IMO.
lenovo thinkcentre m910q supremacy
Yesss I have a m910q as my main with (IIRC) a 6500T 4 cores.
And a m710 with the CD contraption for backup (the CD is just for fun, the PC is the backup) :-p
Pi has gotten crazy expensive.
Same mentality but HP Elitedesk Minis
Just add dell micro to the list and you have what I run - 9 tiny/mini/micro PCs run everything here. Though I may move a few things to a VPS soon.
Edit:
- (4) Dell Micros
- (3) Lenovo Tinys
- (2) HP Minis
How would you class them, if you think you could/would/should? I'm so impressed with the thinkcentre tiny I wonder if it can get better at all.
Mostly equitable.
Ive had a slightly higher failure rate with the Dells, but the sample size is too small to be relevant.
The Lenovos more often than others ive found outfitted with a dGPU which comes in handy in some scenarios, but I think that comes down more on which enterprises more often purchase Lenovos and want the dGPU, and that its just what ive come across in the used/decommissioned territory.
Short answer - they are basically all the same.
ServeTheHome has a series "tiny mini micro" for exactly this reason.
I bought a decade old Z840 and it's great for VMs, Plex, Arr stack, and a few other services but it is so overkill with 2 GPUs. I think what I should've done was buy a couple of used desktops or laptops to expand the my homelab as I needed.
I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don't care that it's just for wife's home-made dog collars webshop.
This is the way
You can do it on a handful of Raspberry Pis rather than one, then.
Imagine, if you will, a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis!
A man of culture, I see!
I don't get this; a Pi isn't even in the same conversation as an old rackmount server you can get for free. You couldn't stuff half the compute, ram and storage into a Pi or a dozen Pis for 10X the cost of grabbing something off eBay for a hundred bucks.
That's if the Rpi Foundation is deigning to let us peasants even buy them these days.
I have an old rackmount server I got for free. Dual Xeon X5650s, 192GB of RAM, four 8TB HDDs, and a pair of 250GB SSDs. I can only use it in the basement because itβs too loud to run anywhere else, but even then, itβs currently off because it trips its circuit breaker under heavy load.
A power strip full of Pis in a k3s cluster doesnβt do that. I used a 2GB model 4 for the control plane and 3Bs as the workers.
The problem is that server will probably use more electricity, it'll be clunky to store, and it's going to be loud as fuck.
A mini PC is a good middle ground. Mostly for the video transcode and machine learning power.
Yeah, a mini PC... or if you already have one, why not 5 mini PCs?
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Wait, you can host a website on a raspberry pi !? But is it really cheaper than shared hosting, for instance? And even then, quality-wise, it cannot be that good, can it?
Same as a 4x CPU with 8GB ram VPS.
Unless bandwidth is a limiting factor.
But the quality of a website is about code. Not about hardware
You see, bits sent from an x86 have 10% more antioxidants....
My understanding is raspberrypi.com is hosted on raspberry pis. It's a Linux computer; it can do anything a Linux computer can do.
You can definitely run a low traffic website with a Pi. You can run Minecraft Servers and such on Pis. Especially on Pi4s.
Raspberry Pis are way overhyped and overpriced.
Also this is totally wrong. Once you start it just keeps growing unless there is some other factor.
Switched from a raspberry pi 3 to a second hand x86 thin client (lenovo thinkcentre m920q) because raspberry pi 4 were not available at the time. Made me learn proxmox and a bunch of other cool stuff my raspi couldn't handle.
I'm rooting for ARM / RISC-V to become more popular in desktop computing / servers though.
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