Yeah, honestly I have become pretty disillusioned with the entire ARM SBC market. For awhile they were super cheap and so it was easier to justify, but when th

Yeah, honestly I have become pretty disillusioned with the entire ARM SBC market. For awhile they were super cheap and so it was easier to justify, but when they’re getting into $200+, at some point I feel like you’re going to get a better deal with a mini x86_64 PC, with considerably better performance (if not per watt, at least total performance). I had some used thin clients with AMD CPUs a few years ago. They were $50 each, and only ate like 10W of power, even under load. No, there wasn’t GPIO built in, but even three years ago there was USB 3.0 and it blew the Raspberry Pi out of the water at the time. I was running a full rack mount server for a few years after that but since cheap mini gaming PCs have been coming out on Amazon semi recently, I bought one of those to save power usage, and I have extremely happy with them. They have a GPU where I have been able to VAAPI transcoding fully working and they have a considerably faster CPU, and since RPis have gotten so expensive with spiked demand, it wasn’t even that much more expensive for a home lab.