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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

I was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.

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The raspberry pis have been bad value for money for at least 4 or 5 years now unless you're really sensitive to the power draw. Once you add in a case and fan (required if you don't want it to overheat and screw the SD card), the charger, SD card it generally comes in at roughly the same price as more capable intel 1L PC like the Lenovo M920Q (though of course, they aren't new)

Yeah power consumption (and performance per watt) is the main reason I keep buying Raspberry Pi, I haven't find anything similar on that regard, specially for pi zeros

It's also very hard to encounter x86 machines that can be powered from PoE.

True for base PoE (802.3af, 15.4W), but if you have PoE+ or greater (802.3at, 30W and up) you can start to power more common PCs - I’m running a couple repurposed Chromeboxes from PoE++ adapters.

I'm on mobile so can't easily pull up an example part number, but digital signage controllers can often be PoE powered. They're insanely overpriced new from the actual suppliers, but for hobby projects they can normally be sourced relatively easily on ebay. The trick is that many of the ebay sellers don't bother listing the specs, so you need to first search digital sign cintroller/computer on ebay then look up the spec sheet from the model number.

Another annoyance is that you need to buy a hat for PoE, it seems like an oversight

I really like the ecosystem around them. All of the nice compact hats, the software, the 3D print files. Very googleable which also means easy to get help from an LLM.

I thought x64 was better for perf per watt just because perf is so much better

Unless you specifically need a pi (unlikely) then they really are awful value now. Hard to really go out of the way to support them now they've stuck two fingers up at the solo/indie/educational community and gone all enterprise.

Second hand mini pc's are a good option. Half the price of a pi 5 + sd + power and you often get them with 16gb ram, a decent ssd, etc.

If you need GPIO then many of the rockchip boards are still fairly affordable and easily had.

The Pi isn't great value, but honestly, I'm finding it hard to find a better trade-off between price, performance and software support right now than the compute modules for embedded projects where you can afford to spin a custom PCB. Especially for low-ish volume or prototype stuff.

I also love the compute modules for their size. Stick one on a nano base board and they’re half the size of a Pi 5. TBH the standard Pis are a bit frustrating with all of the IO. I do not believe the average purchaser is using one as a PC replacement and wants 4 USB ports and 2 HDMI ports. I’ve never seen one in use like that. They are mostly servers or driving a single display without any user input.

100% with you on the IO. I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi.

You know what I do want though? An actual damn HDMI port! HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. But micro HDMI? The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. There have been plenty of times where I've reached for a Pi 3b instead of a 4 or 5 just because I didn't have a micro HDMI cable.

I do not understand what has gone through their head. How could anyone look at the use case for a Raspberry Pi and decide that two micro HDMI ports is a better choice than one HDMI port? I don't understand it. Like you, my experience with the Pi is that they mostly just sit there, headless, so the only reason I need display output is that it's useful during setup (because they don't have a proper serial console port).

I can't set up a Pi 4 or 5 without going hunting for that micro HDMI cable I bought specifically for that purpose and never use for anything else. I can set up a Pi 3b anywhere, at any time.

The micro hdmi thing (which I too loath) is for digital signage and industrial machinery - we (home users) aren't the audience and haven't been for a long time.

Being able to run two sides of an advertising board, or two control panel screens on a big hunk of metal doing fabrication things in a factory was more important to Raspberry Pi as a business apparently.

Why he heck they didn't just go with 1x normal hdmi and 1x usb-c +DP for the Pi 5 is a mystery, perhaps the SOC doesn't support it or something.

Don't forget the case and fan. I think the RPi 3 was the last one you could comfortably run without a fan and not worry about it frying the SD card

Completely depends on what you're doing. If you're doing a lot of sustained compute, or doing graphics, then yeah you're gonna want some cooling. But it's a useful little machine for all kinds of tasks which don't cause sustained high power consumption.

Two fried on me. One was just running a printserver without a case. It was in summer so ambient temperature was around 32C but still, you telling me you use rpi 5 without even a cooling case?

I've had an rPi4 running a copy of a forum and server (for reference) in one of the fancy aluminum cases which passively cools for a couple of years now, no issues.

The big chunky aluminum ones do seem pretty good on the pi 4. I had one in the flirc case for a long time and it never seemed to have issues. Obviously adds to the cost though. Also not sure if the Pi 5 works as well in them given its higher thermals, and the Pi 4 didn't exactly run cool so imagine the 5 might throttle occasionally without active cooling.

Yeah I should have been more specific, a fan isn't the only option but you need either a fan or a cooling case. Running them naked is too risky now

I have been using a Pi 4 as a desktop computer for a few years (didn't have anything else) with an microSD card and without any fan, heatsink or case. Haven't had anything problems. Obviously, this depends on your environment, but it worked fine for me.

Raspberry Pi hasn't been a cheap SBC for a long time. It's now in the same market segment as a NUC, but without the case and with worse price to performance.

Unfortunely there are no ARM NUCs with a good distribution support, and that is still a strong value for getting a Raspberry Pi.

Geez you just agro the x86 guys.

Have fun reading 40 answers about how discarded Lenovos from 2017 are cheaper and stay idle at 5W. It springs to 3x the power usage of a pi if they do anything with it but who cares about performance per Watt?

There were a couple alternatives for a few years. Wonder if they are a better value for money now. Beaglebone Black, Orange Pi, Jetson Orin Nano, etc.

What will you do? eBay?

Maybe if I can find an unused one, still not sure tbh... Or I might go for an alternative SBC from AliExpress and compromise on CPU

Old Android phones might also be an option, depending on the use case.

I cant personally comment on them since I havent grabbed them yet but these are two Pi clones I was considering:

Radxa Rock 5C and Orange Pi 5

I would do research on them because they are a similar form factor and usually cheaper for more memory… the software will be different.

i'm running qwen3.5:0.8b on my orangepi zero 2w, low token/s but it still runs. I think i paid around £14 for it over a year ago but now the same board is double price. I wouldn't buy a computer right now of any kind. It's a bubble.

Interesting, I have a few Pis laying around, I know they'd be low token use, but debated putting some models on them, whats your setup look like if you don't mind me asking? Is there a specific image or package you're using?

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