Hacker News Reader

Comment by agloeregrets | Hacker News Reader

> There are plenty of low performance PC compatibles from Beelink and similar places that cost less delivered tomorrow than a Pi delivered tomorrow AND have higher performance specs than a legacy Pi.

This. I replaced my Homebridge/PiHole RasPi 4B 4GB with a J4125 Acer Desktop system at a cost of $88, all in with all accessories needed from ebay. It has 4GB of upgradable ram, a reasonable SSD, 1G ethernet, and a bonus Sata port for a NAS. It even included a power supply! Pihole's web UI is shockingly faster for me too.

Edit: Link to system, price went up a little, still better than a Pi. https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=i...

View on HN

Sure, better than a Pi, but better then the rockchip rk3588 system?

From a quick look it looks like the MiniPC has half the cores, half the max ram, half the shipped ram, much less I/O performance (SATA @ 400MB/sec vs NVME at 3GB/sec), much less network (1 x GigE vs 2 x 2.5Gbe), much older/slower USB (2.0 vs 3.1), hugely larger (looks like 20x the volume), and likely has a fan.

So sure the MiniPC is a good for for some uses where power, noise, and size don't matter. But if you want a router, firewall, server, or desktop you might well be much happier with an 8GB ($140 with nice passively cooled metal case) or 16GB rk3588.

On performance it's hard to say, if you want to compare performance post any open source benchmark you want. Although I don't have the 3GB/sec NVME JeffG benchmarked in the original post, but anything opensource that exercises the CPU/ram should work. I do have a kill-a-watt around if there's interest in perf/watt.

For running DHCP, router, dns-masq, firewall, and the mentioned PiHole seems like a much better fit for a Rk3588 @ a few watts and 10 or so cubic inches than a used system @ 600 inch^3. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Rk3588 faster than a celeron J4125.

"better" is in the eye of the beholder. You can get very near equivalents to the rk3588 on the x86 side. N5105/N6005 are a pretty good match for CPU benchmarks and better GPU, better I/O (more PCIe), SO-DIMM slots, better software support. All for a similar costs. I got a Intel NUC Essential N5105 for $160 6 months ago (SSD/RAM were separate).

The RK3588 is a 4 big core 4 little core design, so throwing out 8 cores as a point of difference is kind of misleading. Yes, there are 4 extra small cores in there.

If you just want a small cheap system, used ebay systems are pretty hard to beat. J4125 class CPUs are an excellent choice. At this point "faster" is less important than "works" I think. And the RK3588 isn't even touching the price you can get a used J4125/J4105 for. $55 https://www.ebay.com/itm/115671002802

Claiming a J4125 is "big" and "noisy" is similarly misleading. J4125 is a 10W TDP. RK3588 is a 12W TDP. You can passively cool either. N5105 and N6005 are similar power profiles. My J4105 idles at 3-5W, runs proxmox with my firewall and a bunch of VMs for databases and servers. 32GB RAM.

I couldn't find a Rock5 with case and power supply for anywhere near $150, and not even a bare board with 8GB for that. Let alone your claimed $140 for the full package.

Then there's architecture... A lot of packages you can find off the shelf for x86 just aren't built for arm. It bites you in the random places and burns time. Lots of time. I've burned far too much time trying to make ARM servers work.

One of the $99 PCs on this thread was 600 cubic inches, the NanoPi R6S is around 10 cubic inches.

Here's the link for the $119/$139 deal:

https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

The ship today price from amazon was $180.

I was curious about system power (not just TDP), so I hooked up a kill-a-watt, at idle, ubuntu 22.04, normal stuff running (like sshd) and so far it's taken 7 hours to accumulate 0.01 kwh, sadly not very accurate yet, so I'll leave it go till at least 0.02 kwh, looks like an average idle around 1 watt.

I've been pondering some easy benchmarks from the command line, so far I've come up with:

1) openssl speed -bytes 16384 sha256 sha512 aes-256-cbc rsa2048

2) 7z b # benchmark mode for 7zip

3) wget https://github.com/jtsiomb/c-ray/releases/download/v2.0/c-ra...; tar xvf c-ray-2.0.tar.gz; cd c-ray-2.0; make; time ./c-ray-fast ./sphfract.scn -s 3840x2160 -r 4 -o output.pnm -p

4) any similar ideas that are easy, reports a useful number (or a few) in 5 minutes or less?

I'll run similar later on the rk3588, once I get a better idea of the idle watts.

To give some idea my Rk3588 idles somewhere 1.75 to 2.2 watt range, ran it for 17 hours mostly idle except for some apt upgrade/installs on a kill-a-watt to accumulate 0.03 kwh.

Using geekbench 5 your J4105 gets 396 single-core and 1294 multi-core. The rk3588 gets 684 single-core and 2680 multi-core. So rk3588 is 1.7x the single core performance and 2.0x the multi-core performance at around half the power (2w vs 4w).

I've not found make problems with ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Large source code compiles like building rust/go just work, and so far I've found all the ubuntu packages I expected. Sure I'm sure there's some codes that don't like AArch64, but the situation does seem to be improving.

In my personal case, I need to be able to run couchdb. No arm arch package out of the box that I've been able to find. Last time I tried it on arm I gave up after several hours of chasing dependencies while trying to compile from source. Waste of time... Just works on x86. 2 minutes, done. Then I found proxmox, building portalable containers and VMs, and I'm just that much deeper in x86 land. Arm cloud support, while improving, is no where near x86 availability.

Benchmarks are fine and good, but immaterial. I don't really care about 50% more or less speed. It's a server. If I do my job right +/- a few 10s of ms for response time is immaterial. The speed delta between the EMMC and SATA M.2 may well make up for raw processor speed in my use cases which tend to use the I/O.

Your particular board is very niche. I mean, yeah, you have nice ethernet. But that's it. I need my M.2 slots. I need more ram. I could get an x86 board with everything for more $$$, nvme, 2.5-10GBE. It's a compromise.

The J4105 is like 1/3rd the price of the rk3588/rk3588s.

I could go on. To each his own. I'm glad you like your board :) Enjoy it.

What's the power usage difference compared to a pi? Considering this is something running 24/7?

If you get an atom line CPU a smaller I/O suite. Say a dell 3040 or 5070 and your at 4W idle - similar to the Rock5 (and cheaper if you're buying used on ebay). When you get to the full fledged core lines you're looking at 8-10W as a baseline. My Pi4, when I was running one, was 2-4 Watt @ idle.

If you really want to deep dive on this topic see parky towers https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

I don't have it on a kill-a-watt even though I should. As the person below you said, it's like 1.5 to 2x power consumption vs a pi4 at idle (Under 10w), but that is still comically small amounts, about the same as a Google Nest Hub.

Many of these mini PCs use 6-10W at idle, compared to 2-4W for a Pi, or 3-4W for the Rock 5 mentioned in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com