Of course if you're powering this off solar in some remote location then we're into the niches where an RPi 5 might make sense, but otherwise it's just down to

Of course if you're powering this off solar in some remote location then we're into the niches where an RPi 5 might make sense, but otherwise it's just down to electricity cost. How that works out in practice depends on workload though, while the N100 consumes more at idle, it can also finish workloads much faster so can potentially spend more time at idle. While the RPi 5 idles at around 4W (including a NVMe) and the N100 at around 15W, the RPi 5 uses 12W at full tilt[1], ie close to N100 idle power draw. Alternatively the N100 with 32GB of RAM can replace two or more RPi 5's in terms of performance, so in that regard might even come out ahead. [1]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21#issuecomment-2579400396 https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21#issueco...