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Gah - thanks for pointing this out! I made an error that I'm guessing a few others' did -- I compared the $35USD against the $59AUD price. This makes a little

by mdip 9y ago

Gah - thanks for pointing this out! I made an error that I'm guessing a few others' did -- I compared the $35USD against the $59AUD price. This makes a little more sense. There are a few things that offset this, though. The eBay OptiPlex ships without RAM. The author points out that this adds a minimal $20AUD, but that offsets the sticker price difference. In addition, if Hacker News is the target audience and you folks are anything like me, I have a medium sized box filled with USB cables and power adapters -- more than half of which meet the specs to power a Pi, not to mention about 4 high-end multi-port units, one of which sits where my servers are and has available ports. Plus, on my nightstand next to me are three 16GB MicroSD cards that I could re-purpose for a Pi, so those costs are very efficient for me -- I'd just end up actually using something that's laying around. Neither come with substantial storage, though. So you're going to be buying a drive to attach to either if you want to serve up video files or the likes. This puts them about even at sticker price, but you're not leaving them in the box. You have to consider total cost of ownership with a PC just like with a car. The author states that these are silent but it has an HDD fan and it's unclear if there are other fans in the device -- these will wear. And then there's the cost of electricity. I couldn't find any data on power consumption at load/idle but a look at the specs indicates that this ships with a (rather economical/small) 50W power supply (it's 87% efficient). 50W for a PC is quite good, but it's awful compared against a Pi. The Pi is 1.4W idle and 3.7W at load[0]. Granted, more would be required for any external disks being added, but going SSD would be low power as well. Assuming the device will be 'always on', the Dell PC will cost substantially more. [0] If this source is to be believed, anyway: https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption

mark-r 9y ago
50W would appear to be a maximum, the article shows a meter at 20W which is presumably total power from the wall socket. Once power consumption gets low enough it should cease to be a consideration. Everybody will have their own threshold for "low enough", but I personally wouldn't stay awake at night over 20W.
coredog64 9y ago
I keep having awful luck with USB power adapters and RPis, to the point that I buy a specific adapter to go with each Pi.
- mdip 9y ago
  It can be a little tricky, but if you know what the adapter is rated to handle it usually isn't too tough to find one that works. About 5 years ago I ordered some 4-port 2.1A Monoprice PoS adapters for a few bucks a piece. I routinely use these for my RPis, but with only one RPi plugged in (add any second device and the thing will start flaking).

by mdip 9y ago

mark-r 9y ago

50W would appear to be a maximum, the article shows a meter at 20W which is presumably total power from the wall socket. Once power consumption gets low enough it should cease to be a consideration. Everybody will have their own threshold for "low enough", but I personally wouldn't stay awake at night over 20W.

coredog64 9y ago

I keep having awful luck with USB power adapters and RPis, to the point that I buy a specific adapter to go with each Pi.

mdip 9y ago
It can be a little tricky, but if you know what the adapter is rated to handle it usually isn't too tough to find one that works. About 5 years ago I ordered some 4-port 2.1A Monoprice PoS adapters for a few bucks a piece. I routinely use these for my RPis, but with only one RPi plugged in (add any second device and the thing will start flaking).