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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

The CPU is now (IMHO) the major sticking point for many of my own use cases. It would also be nice to have an easier / less cumbersome way to connect higher speed storage. (The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying.)

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At that point you probably want a NUC style computer like the Lenovo M75q. Up to 4 core 8 thread, 32GB+ RAM (two slots), AMD graphics and an M.2 slot.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...

Also noteworthy is the upcoming ASUS PN 50 with the new Ryzen Renoir CPUs with up to 8 cores and 64GB RAM.

When this will be available in Europe I’ll get that to replace my MacBook for a developer machine.

https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-u...

x64 doesnt excite me as much as Arm does at the moment, for power draw.

The 8 core 16 thread version looks very promising. Wonder what the prices will be?

The DeskMini series has two M.2 slots AND two 2.5” slots in a tiny enclosure. Here’s mine:

Noctua NH-L9A-AM4, 37mm Premium Low-profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM4 (Brown) £36.17 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profi...

ASRock USB 2.0 Header to 2 x USB 2.0 Cable for DeskMini Series Chassis £10.93 Incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chas...

AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor (4C/8T, 6MB cache, 4.2GHz Max Boost) with Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics £139.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21

Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) £109.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1

ASRock DeskMini A300 Mini PC Barebone for Socket AM4 £146.94 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21

ASRock Wi-Fi Kit for DeskMini Series Chassis, includes 2 x Antennas £29.42 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Anten...

2 x ADATA AD4S2666316G19-S 16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory Module - Memory Modules (16GB, 1x 16GB, DDR4, 2666MHz, 260-pin SO-DIMM) 2 x £73.12 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-...

Price a few months ago - £619.68

Note that you don’t need the noctua fan but the provided fan that comes with the case is a bit whiny.

Ooh, that does sound good.

DeskMini A300's dimensions: 155 x 155 x 80 mm

From the specs: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20A300%20Series/i...

It's also possible to fit the fan included with the 3400G into the deskmini with slight modification (removing the plastic shroud from the top, it's just clipped on).

For a better fit I also had to cut off two plastic fingers that were left after taking the shroud off. Does not affect the functionality in any way and works well to this day.

I find the NUC's way overpriced unless you really need a high end CPU. I love my H2s[0]- good mix of cpu, RAM, storage (m2 + sata), and low power usage. Plus, they run standard x86_64 Linux/windows. Tricked out with 16G RAM, and a couple of cheap SSDs mine came in at $250.

[0]https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/

How fast does that setup run in practice? I have an odroid hc2 (which is a wholy different chipset than the h2plus, I know), and that's about as pokey as my pi4.

I haven't benchmarked them - the h2plus is celeron quad core at 2.3Ghz, with on-board Intel graphics.

I find them fine for light interactive use, and running network services for the home network. Also gradually moving my lab machines over to them.

None of this is particularly CPU intensive, but does benefit from being x86 compatible. Also having M2 NVME + 2xSata on-board is nice :-)

That's a sick machine, to bad it's not running Intel Nics otherwise I'd consider it for firewall/NAT-uses.

I really like them - here are some photos of putting it all together: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23744973

Used SFF PC (like Haswell i5) is cheap, powerful for this context, and also nice for power consumption.

being 3-4× the size, weight, price and power consumption, it really doesn't compare. I'm sure pi4 SATA/NVMe enclosures/hats exist

> The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying

I’m surprised there’s no Raspberry Pi case with a slot for a 2.5” drive and integrated USB 3.0 SATA controller.

I've just bought a Pi4, 7" touchscreen and a case that takes the lot. I have converted the thing to boot and run off a USB3 stick and it runs rather faster than off the SD card. I'm not too bothered about trying to turn it into a NUC.

Nowadays I see a Pi as a kiosk style machine with extras. It is what it is. It is a fantastic jack of all trades. You get loads of GPIO of all sorts, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, USB2 and 3, a quad core CPU and 2-8GB RAM. Two HDMI ports and a GPU. It's too much for jobs that you would deploy an ESP8266 or ESP32 and it's not enough for a full on desktop replacement.

I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination.

I have a C-64 under the telly in the sitting room (it has a QSII joystick and a USB interface). I have a ZX81 with 3" of rather stiff Blutac holding the 16Kb RAM expansion steady and a keyboard on a ribbon. Sometimes I go back to school and type in definitions for 8x8 blocks and make them run around the screen. I do not own a Sinclair C5, that would be silly.

Mess of cabling: lol!

It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB.

Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics.

In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.

My desktop with KDE Plasma 5 consumes somewhere in the ballpark of 500 MB RAM initially on startup.

RAM consumption by Konsole, tmux, and Neovim (30+ loaded buffers) combined is negligible to say the least.

RAM consumption by my browser with 10+ windows and 100+ tabs loaded easily exceeds 4+ GB even when exclusively visiting supposedly "lightweight" text based sites (ie documentation).

Going beyond RAM, playing a video on YouTube occupies a small but noticeable fraction of total CPU time. A single script heavy ad laden site sometimes manages to occupy a problematically large fraction of all available cores. Depending on the site, Dark Reader might slow this all to a crawl for 10+ seconds as the bloated page gradually loads (I'm looking at you, Amazon).

The problem isn't modern desktop environments.

A file server is a pretty basic task, and zfs is a pretty good choice of fs for a file server, and zfs wants all the ram you can scrape up.

But still there may not be many such examples so your point is still valid.

I use a 3b+ for a 3d printer and that means, octoprint, klipper, octolapse, live streaming from a webcam while printing, a web server and web ui with various plugins, a slicer (I don't slice on the pi, but it's there and I could) and for all that the 3b+ is hardly scratched while running full out. It's a 4g model that is always using only couple hundred meg if you don't count disk cache. This is exactly consistent with your supposition.

    I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage 
    on one of these things. If your use case needs 
    greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or
    I simply lack imagination.

Generally yeah. One possible (slightly contrived) exception that comes to mind could be using it as "dumb" volatile storage like Redis/memcached/etc.

I say "dumb" because if you are leaning into any of Redis' more advanced stuff (sorted sets, pub/sub, whatever else they've thrown in lately) I suspect CPU would tend to become a bottleneck rather quickly once you've got > 8GB of data.

there are, can even make your own. One quick example https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-In...

There are a few, and they're not too bad, but it's still something that would be neatly solved with an option of a PCIe slot or even onboard eMMC like on the compute module (assuming the eMMC or built-in NVMe was much faster than the one on CM3+ and below).

NVME hanging off the USB bus would be nicer and more compact.

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