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Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

303 points by transpute 1y ago

voxadam 1y ago
Unless you need the features on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO connector or very low power consumption a mini PC is a much better bet for general compute.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  As the article shows, even power consumption can be debatable. If you're looking to get a certain amount of work done, the Intel mini PC can do it faster expending less power thanks to the smaller transistor size it uses. Maybe there are scenarios where continuous idle power is more important and the RPi still wins (there's no idle power graph in the article) but even if you're power-constrained, the Pi isn't the best choice anymore. The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly watching up to ARM.
  - ekianjo 1y ago
    it was over as soon as the Pi went out of stock and unit price skyrocketed since 2020.
  - whazor 1y ago
    Note that the Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 can do less than 2W< idle, which is competitive with the RPI5. The next generation H4 is even more efficient.
- baq 1y ago
  rpi 5 is _not_ a low power device, or at least not noticeably lower power than atom systems.
  - deleted 1y ago
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- giantg2 1y ago
  I think I mostly agree. To me, the Pi Zero is the real product these days. The regular Pi models are too expensive and more powerful than they need to be. The Zero is more in line with the original concept in my opinion.
- deleted 1y ago
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- wpm 1y ago
  The Pi 5 isn’t very low power at full tilt, but it’s much slower than any of the x86 SBCs from the last few years. There are at least two SBCs that have N100s and an RP2350 or 2040 onboard that can do you gpio, and at least one that has native GPIO. I have a Radxa X4 and it runs Arch great (only downside is the crappy stock cooler, no cases, and the unfortunate Pi B form factor).
close04 1y ago
> But newsflash: used is different than new. I'd put it differently, "you can't have used without the new". They might not be all that different in practice but you can't have everyone buying used. For every used unit sold, someone had to buy it new first. I agree with the rest. Having a bunch of RPi up to RPi4 in the house, I'm having a harder time finding its proper niche. I don't need the GPIO or the relatively small footprint in general, and from power and performance perspective it doesn't have an edge anymore. RPis stopped excelling at many things they used to, as the price to fix some of the bigger downsides. It just doesn't strike the best compromise for most of my uses (same from what my RPi-fan friends tell me). But despite reviews like this everyone should make their own assessment. There's no one size fits all. I run a RPi because I could power via PoE. Another one because there was no room for anything larger.
- willglynn 1y ago
  I've had great results with N100 mini PCs including Power over Ethernet. Here's an N100, PoE, 2.5GBASE-T, case, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD for $129 refurbished: https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-refurbished https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-... I have zero applications where a Pi5 makes more sense than either a mini PC or a large microcontroller.
  - irusensei 1y ago
    The s100 is not very stable on PoE+.
  - close04 1y ago
    Great suggestion, I'll keep an eye on this. Not sure if this is 802.3af, or 802.3at, or even 802.3bt. I wouldn't want to upgrade the switch for this alone. The S100 product page gives me this brilliant description :). > The processor Intel N100 is the perfect home for the architects of Gracemont and the perfect combination of processes and processes, 7 d'Intel, 4 cores and 4 threads, maximum RPM at 3,4 GHz, 24EU and graphite centroids and TDP. seulement 6 W. La consommation and production of chaleur It’s the perfect place to be. It’s a great deal, it’s a process, it’s N5105, it’s N100, it’s a sign, it’s augmentation, it’s maximum CPU, it’s 500 MHz, it’s L3 cache, it’s 2 MB.
analog31 1y ago
I think the appeal of the RPi has to do with the amount of online tutorials that beginners can understand, and the experience of assembling something from pieces.
- unsigner 1y ago
  I agree with the experience of assembling something from pieces is valuable. But if you don't want that, there's no need for "online tutorials for beginners" and that shouldn't be counted as an additional appeal. It's just Windows.
- hypercube33 1y ago
  Also, rasbian is super solid to those tutorials I have found - they don't seem to pull repositories every version so you can still install things easily.
- poulpy123 1y ago
  There are even more tutorial for mini-pc since they are using a x64 architecture.
  - geerlingguy 1y ago
    Not for a lot of use cases, like how to get 4G/5G cellular connectivity, how to monitor something using an embedded/tiny camera and a small machine learning model, or how to build a little HMI device using a 4" touchscreen... For basic homelab use cases, almost any computer is fine, but for IoT-style stuff especially, a Pi-focused will have a lot more hits, and the tutorials won't apply to any of the mini PCs.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  At least half of the "how to do X on a raspberry pi" beginner tutorials don't actually use any RPi specific features like GPIO and apply equally well to Linux desktops.
- ChrisRR 1y ago
  The problem with a lot of pi stuff is that a lot of it is just so out of date, especially as the community just didn't fully transition to the RPI5 So for running things on an N100 it works in the same way as any other PC
Havoc 1y ago
Yes. You can stick 32gb memory in a N100 and don't need an adapter to get away from the god awful SD cards... Can still make sense for the tinkering ecosystem and compatibility for niche uses cases, but overall the value just isn't there and hasn't been since gen4
- g-mork 1y ago
  what is this, memory for ants? you can fit a 48 GB stick in there. insane premium, but who doesn't want their pocket mainframe to be as packed out as possible
  - Havoc 1y ago
    Yeah heard 48gb works, but also heard of people having stability issues above 16gb. I personally had 32gb work out but all seems pretty hit & miss
  - deleted 1y ago
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- hn_throw2025 1y ago
  I got away from the SD cards some time ago... Just about the only source of unreliability I have experienced on the Pi platform. You can boot from a USB attached SSD or HDD.
  - Havoc 1y ago
    >only source of unreliability I have experienced Consider yourself lucky then. Tried that then discovered there is a Pi/UASP incompatibility with the USB adapter I bought. So need to disable that murdering what little speed the USB contraption had. And then the power supply isn't sufficient anymore so buy a different one. Only to discover it was actually the cable not the supply. Then you start to investigate SSD power draw realize wait how does that even work USB can't provide that much. Only to learn that USB attached SSDs run in low power mode. Not that it matters cause it's USB throughput constrained anyway and adapters don't use x4 lanes on the nvme. I do have multiple rasps set up like that, but I consider it mistakes learned the hard way rather than a desirable setup.
nottorp 1y ago
> DDR5 SO-DIMMs are not compatible with DDR4 SO-DIMM slots—just something I learned on this project... I knew full-size DIMMs were incompatible due to the extra on-stick ECC circuit on DDR5 RAM, I just didn't know the same applied to SO-DIMMs. Obvious in hindsight, but something to keep in mind. Umm... what?
- Retr0id 1y ago
  Which part is unclear?
  - wtallis 1y ago
    The on-die ECC used by DDR5 (and pretty much all other recent DRAM) actually doesn't have many compatibility implications, precisely because it's done entirely on-die unlike traditional ECC memory modules that include an extra one or two chips to enable end to end ECC managed by the CPU's memory controller. The more significant incompatibilities between DDR4 and DDR5 are in the power delivery (DDR5 has voltage regulators on the module rather than on the motherboard) and rearranging of the address bus and command encoding.
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      Oh, right, yeah I see the meta-confusion. They are incompatible for a bunch of reasons, of which ECC is not particularly relevant.
  - scrlk 1y ago
    The incompatibility between DDR4 and DDR5 DIMMS is also enforced by a physically different notch and slot. It's always been this way.
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      Sure, but it's only obvious once you know that. Given that the N100 itself supports both DDR4 and DDR5, I think the confusion is entirely understandable.
PoshBreeze 1y ago
Yes. You can get dirt cheap mini-pcs / NUC like devices on ebay for next to nothing and they aren't too crazy on the power front. The biggest problem for the Raspberry PI platform if you are using it as a home server or like a lite desktop is the lack of proper storage. However I do like the pi for things where you set them up and forget about it. I run a pi-hole on an old Pi 2. However that could be run as a docker container on a small home server / NAS.
- subscribed 1y ago
  You cannot just compare raspberry pi specifically with all the slew of the random no name / ephemeral mini-pc builds, they're not the same. I was trying to find something deemed reliable for myself (I need two: one to replace kodi, one as the home storage) and I just don't know. Some have good prices and terrifyingly bad reviews, some look decent but in-depth reviews show significant design shortcomings (eg very bad air circulation inside, 2.5G ports but one chip for this and dosk, for example.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    If you want a name brand mini PC, I'll note that System76 also sells one under the name of Meerkat. And traditionally Intel sells them itself but these days the official successor is ASUS.
  - PoshBreeze 1y ago
    You can compare them because they overlap in use cases especially as lite-desktop/emulation/media/home-server. The PC ecosystem is more open so of course you are going to find lots of no name brands on amazon/ebay/ali-express or wherever you are looking. These N100/N150 piece of kit have 1000s of reviews on youtube. There are a few brands that seem dominate and seem to be reasonably well built. A lot of the mini-pcs / nuc you find on ebay are Dell/Lenovo/HP decommissioned stuff that you can put 16/32gb of ram in and a proper NVME. To do something similar with a PI you need to buy a PI5 and some additional hardware, it about two/three times more expensive. Yes they do consume more power but typically it isn't crazy. The ARM ecosystem isn't just RPi either. There are other manufacturers offering small credit sized arms boards but their drivers/software/firmware isn't nearly as good as the RPi.
LikeBeans 1y ago
I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.
- voxadam 1y ago
  > However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Plus, neither pfSense nor OPNsense run on Arm or any non-x86 system.
- giantg2 1y ago
  You can't run a DNS server on the same mini PC? Seems like that would be ideal. I run PiHole on a Pi Zero, which isn't really comparable to any mini PC in cost or performance. It uses such little resources that I'm surprised that most new routers don't offer the DNS filtering features out of the box these days.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially supported OSes - https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole. I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number of available DNS server options built into the distribution.
    - giantg2 1y ago
      Yeah, thats why I asked about a DNS server running on there and not just a PiHole. Is there any reason to perfer PiHole over the Opnsense options?
      - geerlingguy 1y ago
transpute 1y ago
Some industrial Atom N150 boards include GPIO, SATA, M.2, discrete TPM and TXT/DRTM-capable BIOS for Windows IoT and future Linux, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/ https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/. There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/ https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom N150 devices.
ThrowawayR2 1y ago
I'm kind of curious as to why Gflops is the chosen basis for asserting performance superiority? Most user workloads exercise integer and I/O performance much more heavily. Linpack HPL evaluates CPU (not GPU) floating point performance IIRC so it's not a representative workload.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  I typically run a suite of workloads (see https://sbc-reviews.jeffgeerling.com https://sbc-reviews.jeffgeerling.com), but I like HPL as it's been a consistent relative performance metric for decades, especially for efficiency utilizing all available memory. There's always danger to focusing on one metric or benchmark too much, but I also enjoy comparing each system or cluster I build to the historic 'top500' list, to see what decade we're in for small clusters of mini computers.
syntheticnature 1y ago
> I have a video that goes through everything in this post, embedded below: > If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue: More sites like this, please
- MrGilbert 1y ago
  I also like "tl;dr:" at the beginning. Straight to the point.
- Gracana 1y ago
  I recently noticed that Skatterbencher does this, with articles for each video. It’s a fantastic format, especially in cases where the content is something you might want to refer to later without having to rewatch the whole thing.
  - pbronez 1y ago
    This is probably something AI can help with. Given a published video, write a blog post version. With some work you can probably get a first draft with solid links and appropriate tone, reducing the effort down to an hour per post or better.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  The thing is, the site earns me maybe $100-200 in Amazon Affiliates referral links per month (which is nothing to sneeze at... but that's not moving the needle on a mortgage payment). I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_ making a video, or is my transcript edited for blog/readership). My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own note search engine), but I get why many people who make video (which can earn an income) don't spend the extra time and write up decent blog posts as well. (But I prefer reading much more than video content).
Neywiny 1y ago
I appreciate the nm discussion. So often people bash larger process nodes but the wider gates are often/always better at static power consumption, and mature lithographies mean more research into optimization. It's not just smaller = better. My understanding is that smaller nodes reduce dynamic power due to lower gate capacitance (because the fet is just smaller), but there's a lot to the story, like architecture as mentioned.
firesteelrain 1y ago
Are the two boards even in the same category or class? I use RPi for little hobby projects - RPi Pico for being the payload that flies around the world in a PicoBalloon - Decoding NOAA weather imagery and storing it in my Google Drive - Full time AIS message decoder and tracker - Full time ADS-B and MLAT receiver - Runs my RetroPie setup - Runs my OctoPrint setup I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer
- dvdkon 1y ago
  Except for the Pico (which is very different from the full RPi), you could do all that with a mini-PC. There are certainly usecases, especially using the RPi's low-level IO, where that's not possible, but as you yourself have shown, people do often get into situations where they are competitors.
  - geon 1y ago
    The more standardized hardware if the rpi tends to make a lot of stuff much easier.
    - wpm 1y ago
      A miniPC is just a PC though, with UEFI and ACPI, how are they not standard?
  - firesteelrain 1y ago
    I just can’t see putting the NUC in my attic for example with my ADSB receiver
    - dingaling 1y ago
      Probably shouldn't have your decoder in the attic anyway, as they aren't well suppressed in terms of EM interference which will seep into the antenna. Particularly a cheap AC-DC wall wart, they're basically broad-spectrum noise-jammers. I shunt the USB output of the SSR dongles onto Ethernet and pipe that to the PC downstairs.
AutoAPI 1y ago
I just purchased a Beelink Mini S13 with 16GB ram and 1TB drive on Amazon for ~$200 to use as a Docker host on my local network and have been very happy with it so far. I immediately wiped it and installed Ubuntu Server. I chose Coolify to manage Docker and local domains, and that took a bit of work to get going, but now I can spin up local services and containers on local domains and play with random stuff
- giantg2 1y ago
  Very similar here. I got a beelink a few years about with lower specs than yours and has worked great as a ZoneMinder host after a wiping windows and installing Linux.
glimshe 1y ago
It's a no brainer IMHO. I stopped using my Pis after the N100s appeared on the market and have been advocating them since then. I like the idea of using ARM, but the value and convenience simply isn't there. The Pi remains great for certain embedded applications, though.
- declan_roberts 1y ago
  Did you not use any of the pi's IO?
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    I think most people here just do software… which defeats the point of using a rpi.
  - glimshe 1y ago
    I do not. I just needed a small computer for miscellaneous jobs, such as file serving and emulation. I think this is the case with most people who buy one.
poulpy123 1y ago
This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course). But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking. Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100. At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.
- PhilipRoman 1y ago
  >N100 based computer draw 9W at idle That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more efficient.
  - wltr 1y ago
    How would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.
    - mjh2539 1y ago
      Buy a kill-a-watt wall wart.
      - blipvert 1y ago
        At Walmart.
    - 1y ago
nacnud 1y ago
Fan noise might be another consideration, given that some projects have to share a home with a family. Anyone know whether the N150 makes much noise?
- taneliv 1y ago
  N150 by itself doesn't generate any noise, but the cooling fans probably will. There are some fanless N150 solutions that are perhaps of interest? Though they are likely at a higher price point. I'm too lazy to copy and paste a link here, but search for "fanless N150" for some references.
  - degrees57 1y ago
    My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.
- rcarmo 1y ago
  The N150 is only really useful with active cooling or a chunk of metal bolted to it, and most manufacturers will pick the cheapest possible fan, so yes, there will be some noise.
fmbb 1y ago
[flagged]
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Betteridge's law doesn't really apply (i.e. it's closer to 50/50 than not) to things where having an answer in the title prevents the reader from wanting to read the article. Regardless if the answer is "yes" or "no" when the headline answers the question fewer people load the article and click the affiliate links.
ijustlovemath 1y ago
My steam deck has superceded my rpi for this kind of stuff. Probably not as power efficient but I live in the South and use A/C and hot water so I feel like those are far bigger spends of electricity
user_7832 1y ago
Slightly tangential, does anyone know of a decent n100/150 board that's not super expensive, has enough pcie for at least 2 ssds, and is available ideally in India or the EU? The vast majority of mini PC's with these processors don't have pcie. The lattepanda mu is the closest product I've found so far. All I want to do is run a server with 2 disks, but it seems weirdly tough. (Ideally a small physical footprint server but I can compromise on that a bit.)
- p_ing 1y ago
  N150 only supports 9 PCIe lanes. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/intel-processor-n150-6m-cache-up-to-3-60-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/...
  - user_7832 1y ago
    That's more than sufficient for me fortunately, I only need a few lanes of pcie. This isn't a plex server with 1gps transcode, it's probably closer to 50 or 100mbps as it'll only be documents and photos, not videos.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  If you search n100 nas board you should find some interesting stuff. Boards with 6 sata already crammed in. Potentially more if you use an m2 to sata adapter.
  - user_7832 1y ago
    Thanks, that's an interesting product I didn't know existed. Unfortunately it's a fair bit too big for my use case, but I'll keep it in mind for a home server build in the future.
Damogran6 1y ago
I used RPi's for years for little stuff like DNS and file sharing and when I b it the bullet and got a surplus DELL SFF office PC things just started working a little bit better. yeah, docker images and the like are supposed to be platform intependent, but there's 'supposed to' and 'is' Running Ubuntu (and later Proxmox) on it just worked a tad bit better. I was into it for about $160 (purchased from Microcenter)
varispeed 1y ago
I got RPi 5. Wanted to create a little server for my files, source code repository etc. I bought it with NVMe hat. Gone through 3 1TB drives that supposed to be compatible with it. Unfortunately none of it was stable. File system would have weird errors, but on top of that networking would go out after few hours or days and RPi would need a hard reboot. I just threw the RPi into the drawer and bought N100. Installed WSL on Windows 11 and everything just works. It's been up for almost a year now, not a single reboot or network problem.
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO. Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used market. That's why most people who bough those RPis had them collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.
    - Nextgrid 1y ago
      > tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too. At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller". You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be done on an ESP32.
dingi 1y ago
This is not even a question if you don't need GPIO. N100/N150 brings so much value for money in almost any metric compared to RPi.
stego-tech 1y ago
I’d been a staunch supporter of RPi nodes for homelab work for a decade (and don’t get me wrong, I still love ‘em), but the various N100 miniPCs have been a pleasant little game changer. Got two for $130 each fully loaded (N00/16GB RAM/512GB SSD), slapped a 1TB SATA 2.5” SSD inside, threw Proxmox on them and voila, I have a highly efficient homelab that hosts my Plex server. That said, there’s three reasons I got them versus a RPi5: * Built-in RTC with battery (no more post-power outage downtime) * iGPU with video acceleration (for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding) * PRICE (seriously, a comparably outfitted RPi5 would be twice the price of these things!) Intel has a little sleeper hit here, if they can get out of their own way on pricing and marketing it. At sub-$150 versus a RPi5, it’s a no-brainer if you don’t need GPIO support.
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
Currently on holiday and browsing on a Chuwi MinibookX N150 model. Comes with Windows 11, but I quickly set it up to dual-boot Ubuntu 25.04. There were a couple of tweaks needed to rotate the display properly (except for GRUB which doesn't seem possible) and get the orientation sensor to work, but otherwise I'm very impressed with it.
- enronmusk 1y ago
  That appears to cost $352. Wouldn't it be much better to get a used ThinkPad for that amount of money? The ThinkPad would have better build quality and a more powerful processor.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    A ThinkPad is a different form factor. The MiniBookX is a 10.5inch lightweight (just under 1kg) machine with a 360 degree hinge (not that I ever use it like that). I've got a recent ThinkPad (running Linux) provided by my work, but it's a bit chunkier and not so good for holidaying.
    - enronmusk 1y ago
      Makes sense, thanks for clarifying!
- leakycap 1y ago
  I've been searching for something like this to replace the lightweight convenience of my Asus c100p running debian. Thank you for commenting, I was thinking there was nothing this small and light anymore!
o11c 1y ago
Hmm, given the performance-vs-efficiency tradeoff, I wonder what the efficiency of the NUC is if the Intel CPU is throttled to ~equivalent performance? `cpufreq-set` has been a lifesaver for me on hardware with poor fans, but it's also useful for benchmarking.
tensility 1y ago
The thing is, I don't use a RPi for desktop-like experiences, so I don't want all of the accessories you've padded the price with just to have a cheap unix node somewhere that I need a small amount of compute or, especially, physical presence. For a desktop UI experience, I have and prefer much better machines to drive full desktop UIs than either a Pi or an N1x0. For that, I use one of my Macs. Of course, I already know we don't have similar needs or desires for a desktop experience, because I haven't found a good reason to run Windows for a couple of decades (since I'm not a PC gamer type and that seems to be the primary interesting reason left for running it), other than to occasionally boot up the newest version and try it out to see if I'm actually missing much. Also, for servers that get real load, I'd often rather run them from (unix-based) containers in the cloud anyway, if only for maintainability's sake. Heck, I already have NUCs depreciating out in storage that I don't bother to use because a RPi is usually a more solid and energy-efficient choice, unless I want a decent desktop experience or need a high-load server, for which purposes an N1x0 isn't usually the machine I want or need, either. Now, that said, if you do want a cheap minimal desktop experience machine and you don't mind or even want the Windows experience, I suppose a used N1x0 probably is a great choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
  - zokier 1y ago
    N100/N150 doesn't really have enough PCIe lanes to be considered good fit for a NAS.
- tensility 1y ago
  Of course, something like the mini-NAS that Geerling describes in the following article IS a great fit for an N1x0 machine. These are really all just a spectrum of tools we have available, many of which are better fit than others for particular niches. A NAS seems like a perfect fit for N1x0. So, yeah, my initial response was dumb, but so is dismissing the RPi simply because you're trying to apply it to the wrong kinds of use cases. <https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme-intels-efficient-chip https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...>
jekwoooooe 1y ago
Raspberry pi is fairly overpriced and doesn’t make sense unless you want to spend exactly 50$ for some reason If you need gpio, you can probably get away with an esp32 If you want a server, n100 based computer will be better
steelbrain 1y ago
Unrelated to the contents of the article, but I really like how the layout of the blog's comments is very similar to that of HN. Functional. Minimalistic.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Heh, guess what site I took as inspiration for the layout? (And honestly, I can't imagine having a blog without comments — probably the majority of my blog posts are made better by the discussion underneath.
zamadatix 1y ago
Is the N150 really 0.59 W/flop less efficient than the BCM2712, does the N150 just allow you to reach a higher peak performance if you don't care about efficiency, or is the N150 truely already limited to its optimal perf/watt? We can't actually tell because the article only compared a 35.169 Gflops workload to a 62.067 Gflops workload. I.e. how efficient the boxes running the same amount of work per second, not how efficient are the boxes when you max them out to different maxes. On the surface using Gflops/W feels like it should normalize that until you consider perf/Watt is almost never linear so you're left comparing apples to oranges in the chart.
- nullc 1y ago
  Yeah, in particular, what happens when you install the same amount of ram in both and downclock the N150 to match the rpi performance? It's a bit of an odd comparison though because I don't think that rpi5 is particularly power efficient among small linux capable SBCs.
hollerith 1y ago
I am writing these words on an N100. I wanted a cheap PC small enough to store easily at my girlfriend's house without a fan, i.e., without the noises that non-Apple non-Noctua fans tend to make as they get old. (I looked for a Core i3-N305 or an N200, but could not find either in a fanless mini PC.) Am very happy with my purchase.
diggernet 1y ago
I've been thinking about replacing an RPi4 running Kodi, and N100/N150 seems with looking at. But one requirement is support for remote control support, including power on and off (preferably with discrete on/off commands). Anyone have suggestions?
- m101 1y ago
  Is the only reason not to use a firestick for kodi local file storage?
  - diggernet 1y ago
    That is one big reason, yes, but not the only one. I prefer hardware where I can install the OS I choose, and to avoid Amazon gadgets.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Not sure about power on/off—you'd have to hack together a solution for that separately, but I've had good luck with an IR dongle like the Flirc USB: https://flirc.tv/products/flirc-usb-receiver https://flirc.tv/products/flirc-usb-receiver
  - diggernet 1y ago
    Yep, those are pretty nice. It's on/off that's really hard to find. Discrete on, specifically, since with Flirc you can handle off in software.
brcmthrowaway 1y ago
How do I toggle a GPIO on the N100?
- gmiller123456 1y ago
  Get an esp32 board for $3 and plug it in.
lossolo 1y ago
I'm in the process of buying and evaluating mini-PCs to replace my Pi 4. Right now, I'm trying out the Minix Z100-0dB, which is a fanless N100 system. It's great—around 6W idle, with zero coil whine or any other noise. I also got a Geekom A5 with an AMD Ryzen 7430U, which is a 15W TDP CPU that's about 3x faster than the N100. It's crazy, because even though it has a fan, it idles at just 4W! (That's with an additional 2.5" SSD connected via SATA, plus the standard 2 x 8GB DDR4 and 512GB NVMe that came in the box.) I mean, it scores around 15,000 on CPU Benchmark, compared to the N100's 5,000. And the Pi is way below both of them.
Venn1 1y ago
Low cost x86_64 solutions beat the pants off ARM in the PPPITA (performance per pain in the arse) department. The Raspberry Pi software ecosystem advantage nopes the moment x86 shows up to the party. Granted, it does suck the fun out of spending a weekend trying to get an application to compile. Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get something done.
- reactordev 1y ago
  I’m going to argue there’s no difference in “ecosystem” between arm and x86 anymore. It’s as simple as compiling with a flag. Your frustrations are your own. I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.
  - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    The Raspberry Pi ecosystem makes the device worthless as soon as you factor in commodity parts that have been marked up far beyond their generic counterparts. And then worst, all of the vendors selling generics targeting Raspberry Pi devices mark those up too, so it's wash. You're better off buying the official accessories because there's no benefit to buying the generics to save money. After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a better value. So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore unless you factor in this specific requirement.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      I love my Beelink mini PCs but there’s a use case for going raspberry pi and that’s power draw. Way easier to build a system that’s solar or battery powered.
  - blarg1 1y ago
    Currently with the latest pi os version, moonlight streaming's video hardware support doesn't work. While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package version has been broken for 2+ months now. If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like this.
MaiSck 1y ago
And you can run Windows! Sometimes that's needed.
- blacksmith_tb 1y ago
  You can run ARM Win 11 on the RPi 5, even in VMs. But that doesn't seem terribly practical, the little N100 I have running Home Assistant cost less than $90... I will stick with the Zero 2 W for anything in the sweet spot of "needs an OS but isn't doing too much, and uses GPIO" and x86_64 for anything bigger.
  - rcarmo 1y ago
    If you want to call “running” it doing it without complete networking and graphics support…
gmiller123456 1y ago
I actually unsubscribed from Jeff's channel after he published that video. Anyone claiming the lack of a used RPi market means we have to ignore the used market for everything else is just an idiot. I'm going to compare the two no matter how much it bothers the fanboys.
- chaoskitty 1y ago
  Anyone who claims that pointing out the difference between new and used is the same as telling you to ignore the used market is just an idiot.
  - gmiller123456 1y ago
    I guess I must be. Where did he "point out the difference between new and used"? All I see is "But newsflash: used is different than new", then the explicit declaration 'you can't say "Tiny PCs are cheaper than Raspberry Pis" based on used pricing versus new.'.
- stuckkeys 1y ago
  What is wrong with someone expressing their opinions? Nobody forcing you to watch or force shoveing the change down your throat lol. You can use any device you want. To each their own. But he does have a good point. You can get all in one n series under the price what you would pay for a rasp5.
jacknews 1y ago
"When did raspberry pis get so expensive?" from one of his videos. I'm guessing around the time they were bought/went public and became for-profit.
rcarmo 1y ago
As someone who has been avaluating ARM boards for years, the answer is hell yes. The only chipset/reference design combo that comes close is the RK3588 (not close to the N100, just much closer to it than even the Pi 5), from CPU features to PCI lanes.
knowitnone 1y ago
One has exposed GPIOs for devs to play with. If you just want a basic computer, N100s are great.
johnklos 1y ago
Reddit is filled with posts where people try to make their values in to everyone else's. Want an Arm SBC? Get an N100 instead! Want a Ryzen to transcode video? Get an N100 instead! Want a NAS? Get an N100 instead! I get it, N100 people - you get a shiny new toy, and you want to hype it up as the Next Best Thing that's a great choice for everyone. The problem is that it's not the best choice for everyone, and it's getting old hearing about it. Here are some reasons the N100 isn't best: SBCs are smaller and almost always take less power. Intel QuickSync isn't the same quality as software based transcoding, and not everyone wants to compromise on quality. Like Jeff points out, N100 systems cost more, and the added performance over a Pi of some sort isn't always needed (although it's funny that the same people who point out the higher performance of N100 over a Raspberry Pi will at the same time dismiss a low power Ryzen :P). They cost more. N100 systems don't have enough PCIe lanes to replace certain I/O heavy uses. Some people don't like the x86 ecosystem. N100 fans try to tell everyone that there's more software because it's x86, but that's a negative thing for some of us who prefer to install from source. Intel gatekeeps products by removing features when there's no reason to do so. Even my 2014 AMD Athlon 5350 systems, which are very decently performing low power systems and which I'm still using as routers / firewalls / servers in many places, have ECC support in the CPU. (I wonder how the N100 would compare with a 2014 Athlon 5350, but that's a question for another time.) The primary reason for me is a little different: Intel makes shitty decisions. All of the CPU vulnerabilities found that I know of have affected Intel CPUs more than AMD or Arm CPUs. Why? I think it's because Intel tries so hard to chase performance and marketing points that they prioritize this over security and reliability. I bought an eight core Bulldozer in 2012 for compiling because I preferred eight integer cores over four cores plus hyperthreading in a Core i7-2600. Benchmarks then showed the Intel beat out AMD in many benchmarks then. However, more than a decade later, with toolchain improvements and with performance impacts of Spectre and Meltdown, my Bulldozer now beats an Intel i7-2600 at many modern benchmarks. But it's not just security - Intel's 13th and 14 generation degradation debacle again shows that Intel is more concerned with marketing and benchmarks than having good, reliable products. That their CPUs can take hundreds of watts to compete with Ryzen illustrates this well. Would this be an issue with N100? Probably not, but I don't want any CPUs from a company that will compromise their products for profit and marketing purposes. They tried to do AVX-512 and made a huge mess of which products have it - again, Intel were more concerned with benchmark results. After all, Intel's not going to release benchmark figures that show the effects of dropping the whole CPU's clock while running AVX-512. They tried to play us. The bottom line is that I don't trust Intel, which is why I'll never get an N100, and all of these other reasons are why I'd never recommend them.
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qingcharles 1y ago
Word of warning on those GMKtec PCs. They put all their drivers on a Google Drive account that they don't pay for, and there are no known mirrors of some of the drivers. So when you suddenly need to do a reinstall one day, remember that their GDrive will be over-quota for a month and you'll be SOL for a few weeks unless you can match the drivers to the ones from the OEMs.
- transpute 1y ago
  Could a cumulative set of drivers be mirrored to a Github repo or archive.org?
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  This is the most wtf thing I have read on Hacker News in a day or so. Thanks, I was considering them as an N100 alternative to my Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe I'll search a little more...
  - fud101 1y ago
    What drivers does one need for the N100? Mine just runs Ubuntu 24 and I've never needed any vendor drivers.
    - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
      Windows drivers
- joshuaissac 1y ago
  Copy it directly to your own Google Drive, then download it from there, and it will use your quota instead of theirs.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    It does not :( I have a paid Goog sub and this was the first thing I tried. It will not bypass their quota.
tshaddox 1y ago
Is there a reason these mini PCs still have all USB-A ports? That strikes me as a bizarre choice.
- octo888 1y ago
  How many USB-C keyboard/mice do people have?
- 654wak654 1y ago
  Probably for easy mouse & keyboard support? Also, mini PCs are usually used in offices a lot and I bet most places that buy these things still have lots of USB-A storage devices as well.
- Zren 1y ago
  Also, probably the price of the connector. USB A is also a simple standard and no one will expect to treat it as a display out.
roscas 1y ago
While looking at the site I noticed https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own-media-considered-harmful-updated https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own... Youtube is amazing! It hosts billions of videos to all kind of bad content, but still make true content creators feel it's long arm of their laws! It is just pathetic. Just like other anti-social networks like Fakebook and Twitter.
tills13 1y ago
I built myself a 1U server using off-the-shelf parts I had lying around to run my Proxmox instance. I wanted to expand my cluster & also give myself a dedicated node for Plex (so that it could have direct access to the CPU w/ QuickSync) so bought myself a Beelink with an N100. The little Beelink sips power and has never once stuttered while streaming Plex. Going forward, I plan on replacing my 1U server with a cluster of Beelinks.
etempleton 1y ago
The Raspberry Pi has moved too far upmarket to the point where something like the N100/150 is a better value for cheap compute. Raspberry Pi should perhaps focus on becoming increasingly affordable versus increasingly capable. Perhaps that also leads to a dead-end.
dottjt 1y ago
How are these things for emulation?
anon-3988 1y ago
I have an RPI5, its in a weird zone of not cheap enough for embedded and not powerful enough as a NAS. I should have gone with N100 instead.
crowcroft 1y ago
Semi related, what’s the best source for a consumer to buy mini-itx boards with the processor on? I want to get a board (ideally with two gigabit Ethernet) and BYO ram, SSD and enclosure.
tonymet 1y ago
my ryzen7 Beelink has been the best PC I've owned. Great performance, excellent reliability (only 1 BSOD in 2 years), great utility. I ended up consolidating 3-4 Raspis onto a single HyperV server and alpine / debian VMs. Pi zero 2 is the last compelling raspberry pi . Great for running cpu-bound servers like DNS, static web, network monitoring. Pi-5 performance, especially with IO, is not worthwhile.
worik 1y ago
I do not understand I cannot get one of these x86 computers for twice the price of a fully pimped RPi5 Even second hand they are usually twice the price $/mips may be a different story, but RPi5 has way more than I need, so I care about capital cost in total Is there some class of computer I am ignoring? This just seems so wrong
- Aerbil313 1y ago
  No, you are probably correct for your own circumstances. I was shopping for something to run Home Assistant on last week. (if you don't know about HA, check it out, it's crazy good!). I was befuddled, I kept coming back to online threads like this where people claim these mini PCs are much better than a Pi 5 setup AND cheaper too. That's just not true for my region, because of a very confusing, complex set of constraints: - Most of these good, new, low-power Mini PCs are not imported into my country - The ones that are imported are higher-end versions (e.g. Beelink S12 Pro) which cost more than twice the Pi setup - I can buy from Ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress etc. and get it imported but the import tax is so huge it stops being cheaper - I can easily get a second hand Mini PC in the cheaper-than-Pi5-setup range, but all of them are old machines with high power consumption that'll them more expensive than the Pi5 setup in a single year or two, with my current price of electricity In the end I opted for a Pi5 4GB, which is more than enough for running HA. The total was $125 for the full setup with cooler fan, 128GB SSD and original power supply. Though I got the Pi5 second hand, otherwise the total would be $145.
theshrike79 1y ago
I've been saying this for a long time. Unless you need something raspi-specific, like GPIO access or a specific HAT, you'll always get better price/performance + upgradability either with a Nxxx machine from China or an old company Lenovo/Dell/HP minipc.
andrewstuart 1y ago
Jeff loves Raspberry Pi, which is fine, but as I recall from watching this video when it was released, he tested Windows on Intel and Linux on Raspberry Pi then somehow drew conclusions from that. Not apples versus apples.
turtlebits 1y ago
I never understood why people use rpi's as servers. They're good for gpio and form factor/portability.
refurb 1y ago
I recently purchase a miniPC with the N97 chip. I didn't have a specific use in mind that would require CPU speed (e.g. gaming or emulation), just a miniPC that I could tinker around with and maybe use as a media server or VPN. I went with the N97 chip versus N100/N150 since the price point is significantly lower and I didn't want to spend several hundred on computer I'm just tinkering with. What surprised me is that it's actually pretty fast. I'm running Win 11 for now and it's pretty snappy. The only thing that jumped out to me is that disk transfer speeds are noticeable slower. It easily exceeded my expectations as I expected a PC that struggled with win 11. No doubt if I stressed the CPU I'd see it throttle and slow down pretty quickly, but as a basic PC for web browsing or MS Office work, it's absolutely fine.
ksec 1y ago
Intel N150, Gracemont Core, Intel 7 ( Intel 10nm ), no data on die size. I wished Intel had made a similar die size SOC. The BCM2712 D0 is only 38mm2, on an older generation 16nm node!.
yamapikarya 1y ago
i bought dell wyse 5070 with 30gb ram and 2 tb ssd to replace my raspberry pi 4. currently building some talos cluster and other linux distro. im not sure if this setup is a good idea, but so far i learned a lot how to host baremetal server

303 points by transpute 1y ago

Unless you need the features on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO connector or very low power consumption a mini PC is a much better bet for general compute.

jeroenhd 1y ago
As the article shows, even power consumption can be debatable. If you're looking to get a certain amount of work done, the Intel mini PC can do it faster expending less power thanks to the smaller transistor size it uses. Maybe there are scenarios where continuous idle power is more important and the RPi still wins (there's no idle power graph in the article) but even if you're power-constrained, the Pi isn't the best choice anymore. The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly watching up to ARM.
- ekianjo 1y ago
  it was over as soon as the Pi went out of stock and unit price skyrocketed since 2020.
- whazor 1y ago
  Note that the Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 can do less than 2W< idle, which is competitive with the RPI5. The next generation H4 is even more efficient.
baq 1y ago
rpi 5 is _not_ a low power device, or at least not noticeably lower power than atom systems.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
giantg2 1y ago
I think I mostly agree. To me, the Pi Zero is the real product these days. The regular Pi models are too expensive and more powerful than they need to be. The Zero is more in line with the original concept in my opinion.
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wpm 1y ago
The Pi 5 isn’t very low power at full tilt, but it’s much slower than any of the x86 SBCs from the last few years. There are at least two SBCs that have N100s and an RP2350 or 2040 onboard that can do you gpio, and at least one that has native GPIO. I have a Radxa X4 and it runs Arch great (only downside is the crappy stock cooler, no cases, and the unfortunate Pi B form factor).

close04 1y ago

> But newsflash: used is different than new. I'd put it differently, "you can't have used without the new". They might not be all that different in practice but you can't have everyone buying used. For every used unit sold, someone had to buy it new first. I agree with the rest. Having a bunch of RPi up to RPi4 in the house, I'm having a harder time finding its proper niche. I don't need the GPIO or the relatively small footprint in general, and from power and performance perspective it doesn't have an edge anymore. RPis stopped excelling at many things they used to, as the price to fix some of the bigger downsides. It just doesn't strike the best compromise for most of my uses (same from what my RPi-fan friends tell me). But despite reviews like this everyone should make their own assessment. There's no one size fits all. I run a RPi because I could power via PoE. Another one because there was no room for anything larger.

willglynn 1y ago
I've had great results with N100 mini PCs including Power over Ethernet. Here's an N100, PoE, 2.5GBASE-T, case, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD for $129 refurbished: https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-refurbished https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-... I have zero applications where a Pi5 makes more sense than either a mini PC or a large microcontroller.
- irusensei 1y ago
  The s100 is not very stable on PoE+.
- close04 1y ago
  Great suggestion, I'll keep an eye on this. Not sure if this is 802.3af, or 802.3at, or even 802.3bt. I wouldn't want to upgrade the switch for this alone. The S100 product page gives me this brilliant description :). > The processor Intel N100 is the perfect home for the architects of Gracemont and the perfect combination of processes and processes, 7 d'Intel, 4 cores and 4 threads, maximum RPM at 3,4 GHz, 24EU and graphite centroids and TDP. seulement 6 W. La consommation and production of chaleur It’s the perfect place to be. It’s a great deal, it’s a process, it’s N5105, it’s N100, it’s a sign, it’s augmentation, it’s maximum CPU, it’s 500 MHz, it’s L3 cache, it’s 2 MB.

analog31 1y ago

I think the appeal of the RPi has to do with the amount of online tutorials that beginners can understand, and the experience of assembling something from pieces.

unsigner 1y ago
I agree with the experience of assembling something from pieces is valuable. But if you don't want that, there's no need for "online tutorials for beginners" and that shouldn't be counted as an additional appeal. It's just Windows.
hypercube33 1y ago
Also, rasbian is super solid to those tutorials I have found - they don't seem to pull repositories every version so you can still install things easily.
poulpy123 1y ago
There are even more tutorial for mini-pc since they are using a x64 architecture.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Not for a lot of use cases, like how to get 4G/5G cellular connectivity, how to monitor something using an embedded/tiny camera and a small machine learning model, or how to build a little HMI device using a 4" touchscreen... For basic homelab use cases, almost any computer is fine, but for IoT-style stuff especially, a Pi-focused will have a lot more hits, and the tutorials won't apply to any of the mini PCs.
kccqzy 1y ago
At least half of the "how to do X on a raspberry pi" beginner tutorials don't actually use any RPi specific features like GPIO and apply equally well to Linux desktops.
ChrisRR 1y ago
The problem with a lot of pi stuff is that a lot of it is just so out of date, especially as the community just didn't fully transition to the RPI5 So for running things on an N100 it works in the same way as any other PC

Havoc 1y ago

Yes. You can stick 32gb memory in a N100 and don't need an adapter to get away from the god awful SD cards... Can still make sense for the tinkering ecosystem and compatibility for niche uses cases, but overall the value just isn't there and hasn't been since gen4

g-mork 1y ago
what is this, memory for ants? you can fit a 48 GB stick in there. insane premium, but who doesn't want their pocket mainframe to be as packed out as possible
- Havoc 1y ago
  Yeah heard 48gb works, but also heard of people having stability issues above 16gb. I personally had 32gb work out but all seems pretty hit & miss
- deleted 1y ago
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hn_throw2025 1y ago
I got away from the SD cards some time ago... Just about the only source of unreliability I have experienced on the Pi platform. You can boot from a USB attached SSD or HDD.
- Havoc 1y ago
  >only source of unreliability I have experienced Consider yourself lucky then. Tried that then discovered there is a Pi/UASP incompatibility with the USB adapter I bought. So need to disable that murdering what little speed the USB contraption had. And then the power supply isn't sufficient anymore so buy a different one. Only to discover it was actually the cable not the supply. Then you start to investigate SSD power draw realize wait how does that even work USB can't provide that much. Only to learn that USB attached SSDs run in low power mode. Not that it matters cause it's USB throughput constrained anyway and adapters don't use x4 lanes on the nvme. I do have multiple rasps set up like that, but I consider it mistakes learned the hard way rather than a desirable setup.

nottorp 1y ago

> DDR5 SO-DIMMs are not compatible with DDR4 SO-DIMM slots—just something I learned on this project... I knew full-size DIMMs were incompatible due to the extra on-stick ECC circuit on DDR5 RAM, I just didn't know the same applied to SO-DIMMs. Obvious in hindsight, but something to keep in mind. Umm... what?

Retr0id 1y ago
Which part is unclear?
- wtallis 1y ago
  The on-die ECC used by DDR5 (and pretty much all other recent DRAM) actually doesn't have many compatibility implications, precisely because it's done entirely on-die unlike traditional ECC memory modules that include an extra one or two chips to enable end to end ECC managed by the CPU's memory controller. The more significant incompatibilities between DDR4 and DDR5 are in the power delivery (DDR5 has voltage regulators on the module rather than on the motherboard) and rearranging of the address bus and command encoding.
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    Oh, right, yeah I see the meta-confusion. They are incompatible for a bunch of reasons, of which ECC is not particularly relevant.
- scrlk 1y ago
  The incompatibility between DDR4 and DDR5 DIMMS is also enforced by a physically different notch and slot. It's always been this way.
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    Sure, but it's only obvious once you know that. Given that the N100 itself supports both DDR4 and DDR5, I think the confusion is entirely understandable.

PoshBreeze 1y ago

Yes. You can get dirt cheap mini-pcs / NUC like devices on ebay for next to nothing and they aren't too crazy on the power front. The biggest problem for the Raspberry PI platform if you are using it as a home server or like a lite desktop is the lack of proper storage. However I do like the pi for things where you set them up and forget about it. I run a pi-hole on an old Pi 2. However that could be run as a docker container on a small home server / NAS.

subscribed 1y ago
You cannot just compare raspberry pi specifically with all the slew of the random no name / ephemeral mini-pc builds, they're not the same. I was trying to find something deemed reliable for myself (I need two: one to replace kodi, one as the home storage) and I just don't know. Some have good prices and terrifyingly bad reviews, some look decent but in-depth reviews show significant design shortcomings (eg very bad air circulation inside, 2.5G ports but one chip for this and dosk, for example.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  If you want a name brand mini PC, I'll note that System76 also sells one under the name of Meerkat. And traditionally Intel sells them itself but these days the official successor is ASUS.
- PoshBreeze 1y ago
  You can compare them because they overlap in use cases especially as lite-desktop/emulation/media/home-server. The PC ecosystem is more open so of course you are going to find lots of no name brands on amazon/ebay/ali-express or wherever you are looking. These N100/N150 piece of kit have 1000s of reviews on youtube. There are a few brands that seem dominate and seem to be reasonably well built. A lot of the mini-pcs / nuc you find on ebay are Dell/Lenovo/HP decommissioned stuff that you can put 16/32gb of ram in and a proper NVME. To do something similar with a PI you need to buy a PI5 and some additional hardware, it about two/three times more expensive. Yes they do consume more power but typically it isn't crazy. The ARM ecosystem isn't just RPi either. There are other manufacturers offering small credit sized arms boards but their drivers/software/firmware isn't nearly as good as the RPi.

LikeBeans 1y ago

I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.

voxadam 1y ago
> However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Plus, neither pfSense nor OPNsense run on Arm or any non-x86 system.
giantg2 1y ago
You can't run a DNS server on the same mini PC? Seems like that would be ideal. I run PiHole on a Pi Zero, which isn't really comparable to any mini PC in cost or performance. It uses such little resources that I'm surprised that most new routers don't offer the DNS filtering features out of the box these days.
- p_ing 1y ago
  Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially supported OSes - https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole. I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number of available DNS server options built into the distribution.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Yeah, thats why I asked about a DNS server running on there and not just a PiHole. Is there any reason to perfer PiHole over the Opnsense options?
    - geerlingguy 1y ago

transpute 1y ago

Some industrial Atom N150 boards include GPIO, SATA, M.2, discrete TPM and TXT/DRTM-capable BIOS for Windows IoT and future Linux, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/ https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/. There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/ https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom N150 devices.

ThrowawayR2 1y ago

I'm kind of curious as to why Gflops is the chosen basis for asserting performance superiority? Most user workloads exercise integer and I/O performance much more heavily. Linpack HPL evaluates CPU (not GPU) floating point performance IIRC so it's not a representative workload.

geerlingguy 1y ago
I typically run a suite of workloads (see https://sbc-reviews.jeffgeerling.com https://sbc-reviews.jeffgeerling.com), but I like HPL as it's been a consistent relative performance metric for decades, especially for efficiency utilizing all available memory. There's always danger to focusing on one metric or benchmark too much, but I also enjoy comparing each system or cluster I build to the historic 'top500' list, to see what decade we're in for small clusters of mini computers.

syntheticnature 1y ago

> I have a video that goes through everything in this post, embedded below: > If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue: More sites like this, please

MrGilbert 1y ago
I also like "tl;dr:" at the beginning. Straight to the point.
Gracana 1y ago
I recently noticed that Skatterbencher does this, with articles for each video. It’s a fantastic format, especially in cases where the content is something you might want to refer to later without having to rewatch the whole thing.
- pbronez 1y ago
  This is probably something AI can help with. Given a published video, write a blog post version. With some work you can probably get a first draft with solid links and appropriate tone, reducing the effort down to an hour per post or better.
geerlingguy 1y ago
The thing is, the site earns me maybe $100-200 in Amazon Affiliates referral links per month (which is nothing to sneeze at... but that's not moving the needle on a mortgage payment). I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_ making a video, or is my transcript edited for blog/readership). My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own note search engine), but I get why many people who make video (which can earn an income) don't spend the extra time and write up decent blog posts as well. (But I prefer reading much more than video content).

Neywiny 1y ago

I appreciate the nm discussion. So often people bash larger process nodes but the wider gates are often/always better at static power consumption, and mature lithographies mean more research into optimization. It's not just smaller = better. My understanding is that smaller nodes reduce dynamic power due to lower gate capacitance (because the fet is just smaller), but there's a lot to the story, like architecture as mentioned.

firesteelrain 1y ago

Are the two boards even in the same category or class? I use RPi for little hobby projects - RPi Pico for being the payload that flies around the world in a PicoBalloon - Decoding NOAA weather imagery and storing it in my Google Drive - Full time AIS message decoder and tracker - Full time ADS-B and MLAT receiver - Runs my RetroPie setup - Runs my OctoPrint setup I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer

dvdkon 1y ago
Except for the Pico (which is very different from the full RPi), you could do all that with a mini-PC. There are certainly usecases, especially using the RPi's low-level IO, where that's not possible, but as you yourself have shown, people do often get into situations where they are competitors.
- geon 1y ago
  The more standardized hardware if the rpi tends to make a lot of stuff much easier.
  - wpm 1y ago
    A miniPC is just a PC though, with UEFI and ACPI, how are they not standard?
- firesteelrain 1y ago
  I just can’t see putting the NUC in my attic for example with my ADSB receiver
  - dingaling 1y ago
    Probably shouldn't have your decoder in the attic anyway, as they aren't well suppressed in terms of EM interference which will seep into the antenna. Particularly a cheap AC-DC wall wart, they're basically broad-spectrum noise-jammers. I shunt the USB output of the SSR dongles onto Ethernet and pipe that to the PC downstairs.

AutoAPI 1y ago

I just purchased a Beelink Mini S13 with 16GB ram and 1TB drive on Amazon for ~$200 to use as a Docker host on my local network and have been very happy with it so far. I immediately wiped it and installed Ubuntu Server. I chose Coolify to manage Docker and local domains, and that took a bit of work to get going, but now I can spin up local services and containers on local domains and play with random stuff

giantg2 1y ago
Very similar here. I got a beelink a few years about with lower specs than yours and has worked great as a ZoneMinder host after a wiping windows and installing Linux.

glimshe 1y ago

It's a no brainer IMHO. I stopped using my Pis after the N100s appeared on the market and have been advocating them since then. I like the idea of using ARM, but the value and convenience simply isn't there. The Pi remains great for certain embedded applications, though.

declan_roberts 1y ago
Did you not use any of the pi's IO?
- LtWorf 1y ago
  I think most people here just do software… which defeats the point of using a rpi.
- glimshe 1y ago
  I do not. I just needed a small computer for miscellaneous jobs, such as file serving and emulation. I think this is the case with most people who buy one.

poulpy123 1y ago

This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course). But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking. Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100. At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.

PhilipRoman 1y ago
>N100 based computer draw 9W at idle That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more efficient.
- wltr 1y ago
  How would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.
  - mjh2539 1y ago
    Buy a kill-a-watt wall wart.
    - blipvert 1y ago
      At Walmart.
  - 1y ago

nacnud 1y ago

Fan noise might be another consideration, given that some projects have to share a home with a family. Anyone know whether the N150 makes much noise?

taneliv 1y ago
N150 by itself doesn't generate any noise, but the cooling fans probably will. There are some fanless N150 solutions that are perhaps of interest? Though they are likely at a higher price point. I'm too lazy to copy and paste a link here, but search for "fanless N150" for some references.
- degrees57 1y ago
  My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.
rcarmo 1y ago
The N150 is only really useful with active cooling or a chunk of metal bolted to it, and most manufacturers will pick the cheapest possible fan, so yes, there will be some noise.

fmbb 1y ago

[flagged]

zamadatix 1y ago
Betteridge's law doesn't really apply (i.e. it's closer to 50/50 than not) to things where having an answer in the title prevents the reader from wanting to read the article. Regardless if the answer is "yes" or "no" when the headline answers the question fewer people load the article and click the affiliate links.

ijustlovemath 1y ago

My steam deck has superceded my rpi for this kind of stuff. Probably not as power efficient but I live in the South and use A/C and hot water so I feel like those are far bigger spends of electricity

user_7832 1y ago

Slightly tangential, does anyone know of a decent n100/150 board that's not super expensive, has enough pcie for at least 2 ssds, and is available ideally in India or the EU? The vast majority of mini PC's with these processors don't have pcie. The lattepanda mu is the closest product I've found so far. All I want to do is run a server with 2 disks, but it seems weirdly tough. (Ideally a small physical footprint server but I can compromise on that a bit.)

p_ing 1y ago
N150 only supports 9 PCIe lanes. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/intel-processor-n150-6m-cache-up-to-3-60-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/...
- user_7832 1y ago
  That's more than sufficient for me fortunately, I only need a few lanes of pcie. This isn't a plex server with 1gps transcode, it's probably closer to 50 or 100mbps as it'll only be documents and photos, not videos.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
If you search n100 nas board you should find some interesting stuff. Boards with 6 sata already crammed in. Potentially more if you use an m2 to sata adapter.
- user_7832 1y ago
  Thanks, that's an interesting product I didn't know existed. Unfortunately it's a fair bit too big for my use case, but I'll keep it in mind for a home server build in the future.

Damogran6 1y ago

I used RPi's for years for little stuff like DNS and file sharing and when I b it the bullet and got a surplus DELL SFF office PC things just started working a little bit better. yeah, docker images and the like are supposed to be platform intependent, but there's 'supposed to' and 'is' Running Ubuntu (and later Proxmox) on it just worked a tad bit better. I was into it for about $160 (purchased from Microcenter)

varispeed 1y ago

I got RPi 5. Wanted to create a little server for my files, source code repository etc. I bought it with NVMe hat. Gone through 3 1TB drives that supposed to be compatible with it. Unfortunately none of it was stable. File system would have weird errors, but on top of that networking would go out after few hours or days and RPi would need a hard reboot. I just threw the RPi into the drawer and bought N100. Installed WSL on Windows 11 and everything just works. It's been up for almost a year now, not a single reboot or network problem.

whywhywhywhy 1y ago

It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO. Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.

sigmoid10 1y ago
To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used market. That's why most people who bough those RPis had them collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.
  - Nextgrid 1y ago
    > tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too. At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller". You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be done on an ESP32.

dingi 1y ago

This is not even a question if you don't need GPIO. N100/N150 brings so much value for money in almost any metric compared to RPi.

stego-tech 1y ago

I’d been a staunch supporter of RPi nodes for homelab work for a decade (and don’t get me wrong, I still love ‘em), but the various N100 miniPCs have been a pleasant little game changer. Got two for $130 each fully loaded (N00/16GB RAM/512GB SSD), slapped a 1TB SATA 2.5” SSD inside, threw Proxmox on them and voila, I have a highly efficient homelab that hosts my Plex server. That said, there’s three reasons I got them versus a RPi5: * Built-in RTC with battery (no more post-power outage downtime) * iGPU with video acceleration (for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding) * PRICE (seriously, a comparably outfitted RPi5 would be twice the price of these things!) Intel has a little sleeper hit here, if they can get out of their own way on pricing and marketing it. At sub-$150 versus a RPi5, it’s a no-brainer if you don’t need GPIO support.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

Currently on holiday and browsing on a Chuwi MinibookX N150 model. Comes with Windows 11, but I quickly set it up to dual-boot Ubuntu 25.04. There were a couple of tweaks needed to rotate the display properly (except for GRUB which doesn't seem possible) and get the orientation sensor to work, but otherwise I'm very impressed with it.

enronmusk 1y ago
That appears to cost $352. Wouldn't it be much better to get a used ThinkPad for that amount of money? The ThinkPad would have better build quality and a more powerful processor.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  A ThinkPad is a different form factor. The MiniBookX is a 10.5inch lightweight (just under 1kg) machine with a 360 degree hinge (not that I ever use it like that). I've got a recent ThinkPad (running Linux) provided by my work, but it's a bit chunkier and not so good for holidaying.
  - enronmusk 1y ago
    Makes sense, thanks for clarifying!
leakycap 1y ago
I've been searching for something like this to replace the lightweight convenience of my Asus c100p running debian. Thank you for commenting, I was thinking there was nothing this small and light anymore!

o11c 1y ago

Hmm, given the performance-vs-efficiency tradeoff, I wonder what the efficiency of the NUC is if the Intel CPU is throttled to ~equivalent performance? `cpufreq-set` has been a lifesaver for me on hardware with poor fans, but it's also useful for benchmarking.

tensility 1y ago

The thing is, I don't use a RPi for desktop-like experiences, so I don't want all of the accessories you've padded the price with just to have a cheap unix node somewhere that I need a small amount of compute or, especially, physical presence. For a desktop UI experience, I have and prefer much better machines to drive full desktop UIs than either a Pi or an N1x0. For that, I use one of my Macs. Of course, I already know we don't have similar needs or desires for a desktop experience, because I haven't found a good reason to run Windows for a couple of decades (since I'm not a PC gamer type and that seems to be the primary interesting reason left for running it), other than to occasionally boot up the newest version and try it out to see if I'm actually missing much. Also, for servers that get real load, I'd often rather run them from (unix-based) containers in the cloud anyway, if only for maintainability's sake. Heck, I already have NUCs depreciating out in storage that I don't bother to use because a RPi is usually a more solid and energy-efficient choice, unless I want a decent desktop experience or need a high-load server, for which purposes an N1x0 isn't usually the machine I want or need, either. Now, that said, if you do want a cheap minimal desktop experience machine and you don't mind or even want the Windows experience, I suppose a used N1x0 probably is a great choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
- zokier 1y ago
  N100/N150 doesn't really have enough PCIe lanes to be considered good fit for a NAS.
tensility 1y ago
Of course, something like the mini-NAS that Geerling describes in the following article IS a great fit for an N1x0 machine. These are really all just a spectrum of tools we have available, many of which are better fit than others for particular niches. A NAS seems like a perfect fit for N1x0. So, yeah, my initial response was dumb, but so is dismissing the RPi simply because you're trying to apply it to the wrong kinds of use cases. <https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme-intels-efficient-chip https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...>

jekwoooooe 1y ago

Raspberry pi is fairly overpriced and doesn’t make sense unless you want to spend exactly 50$ for some reason If you need gpio, you can probably get away with an esp32 If you want a server, n100 based computer will be better

steelbrain 1y ago

Unrelated to the contents of the article, but I really like how the layout of the blog's comments is very similar to that of HN. Functional. Minimalistic.

geerlingguy 1y ago
Heh, guess what site I took as inspiration for the layout? (And honestly, I can't imagine having a blog without comments — probably the majority of my blog posts are made better by the discussion underneath.

zamadatix 1y ago

Is the N150 really 0.59 W/flop less efficient than the BCM2712, does the N150 just allow you to reach a higher peak performance if you don't care about efficiency, or is the N150 truely already limited to its optimal perf/watt? We can't actually tell because the article only compared a 35.169 Gflops workload to a 62.067 Gflops workload. I.e. how efficient the boxes running the same amount of work per second, not how efficient are the boxes when you max them out to different maxes. On the surface using Gflops/W feels like it should normalize that until you consider perf/Watt is almost never linear so you're left comparing apples to oranges in the chart.

nullc 1y ago
Yeah, in particular, what happens when you install the same amount of ram in both and downclock the N150 to match the rpi performance? It's a bit of an odd comparison though because I don't think that rpi5 is particularly power efficient among small linux capable SBCs.

hollerith 1y ago

I am writing these words on an N100. I wanted a cheap PC small enough to store easily at my girlfriend's house without a fan, i.e., without the noises that non-Apple non-Noctua fans tend to make as they get old. (I looked for a Core i3-N305 or an N200, but could not find either in a fanless mini PC.) Am very happy with my purchase.

diggernet 1y ago

I've been thinking about replacing an RPi4 running Kodi, and N100/N150 seems with looking at. But one requirement is support for remote control support, including power on and off (preferably with discrete on/off commands). Anyone have suggestions?

m101 1y ago
Is the only reason not to use a firestick for kodi local file storage?
- diggernet 1y ago
  That is one big reason, yes, but not the only one. I prefer hardware where I can install the OS I choose, and to avoid Amazon gadgets.
geerlingguy 1y ago
Not sure about power on/off—you'd have to hack together a solution for that separately, but I've had good luck with an IR dongle like the Flirc USB: https://flirc.tv/products/flirc-usb-receiver https://flirc.tv/products/flirc-usb-receiver
- diggernet 1y ago
  Yep, those are pretty nice. It's on/off that's really hard to find. Discrete on, specifically, since with Flirc you can handle off in software.

brcmthrowaway 1y ago

How do I toggle a GPIO on the N100?

gmiller123456 1y ago
Get an esp32 board for $3 and plug it in.

lossolo 1y ago

I'm in the process of buying and evaluating mini-PCs to replace my Pi 4. Right now, I'm trying out the Minix Z100-0dB, which is a fanless N100 system. It's great—around 6W idle, with zero coil whine or any other noise. I also got a Geekom A5 with an AMD Ryzen 7430U, which is a 15W TDP CPU that's about 3x faster than the N100. It's crazy, because even though it has a fan, it idles at just 4W! (That's with an additional 2.5" SSD connected via SATA, plus the standard 2 x 8GB DDR4 and 512GB NVMe that came in the box.) I mean, it scores around 15,000 on CPU Benchmark, compared to the N100's 5,000. And the Pi is way below both of them.

Venn1 1y ago

Low cost x86_64 solutions beat the pants off ARM in the PPPITA (performance per pain in the arse) department. The Raspberry Pi software ecosystem advantage nopes the moment x86 shows up to the party. Granted, it does suck the fun out of spending a weekend trying to get an application to compile. Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get something done.

reactordev 1y ago
I’m going to argue there’s no difference in “ecosystem” between arm and x86 anymore. It’s as simple as compiling with a flag. Your frustrations are your own. I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  The Raspberry Pi ecosystem makes the device worthless as soon as you factor in commodity parts that have been marked up far beyond their generic counterparts. And then worst, all of the vendors selling generics targeting Raspberry Pi devices mark those up too, so it's wash. You're better off buying the official accessories because there's no benefit to buying the generics to save money. After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a better value. So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore unless you factor in this specific requirement.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    I love my Beelink mini PCs but there’s a use case for going raspberry pi and that’s power draw. Way easier to build a system that’s solar or battery powered.
- blarg1 1y ago
  Currently with the latest pi os version, moonlight streaming's video hardware support doesn't work. While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package version has been broken for 2+ months now. If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like this.

MaiSck 1y ago

And you can run Windows! Sometimes that's needed.

blacksmith_tb 1y ago
You can run ARM Win 11 on the RPi 5, even in VMs. But that doesn't seem terribly practical, the little N100 I have running Home Assistant cost less than $90... I will stick with the Zero 2 W for anything in the sweet spot of "needs an OS but isn't doing too much, and uses GPIO" and x86_64 for anything bigger.
- rcarmo 1y ago
  If you want to call “running” it doing it without complete networking and graphics support…

gmiller123456 1y ago

I actually unsubscribed from Jeff's channel after he published that video. Anyone claiming the lack of a used RPi market means we have to ignore the used market for everything else is just an idiot. I'm going to compare the two no matter how much it bothers the fanboys.

chaoskitty 1y ago
Anyone who claims that pointing out the difference between new and used is the same as telling you to ignore the used market is just an idiot.
- gmiller123456 1y ago
  I guess I must be. Where did he "point out the difference between new and used"? All I see is "But newsflash: used is different than new", then the explicit declaration 'you can't say "Tiny PCs are cheaper than Raspberry Pis" based on used pricing versus new.'.
stuckkeys 1y ago
What is wrong with someone expressing their opinions? Nobody forcing you to watch or force shoveing the change down your throat lol. You can use any device you want. To each their own. But he does have a good point. You can get all in one n series under the price what you would pay for a rasp5.

jacknews 1y ago

"When did raspberry pis get so expensive?" from one of his videos. I'm guessing around the time they were bought/went public and became for-profit.

rcarmo 1y ago

As someone who has been avaluating ARM boards for years, the answer is hell yes. The only chipset/reference design combo that comes close is the RK3588 (not close to the N100, just much closer to it than even the Pi 5), from CPU features to PCI lanes.

knowitnone 1y ago

One has exposed GPIOs for devs to play with. If you just want a basic computer, N100s are great.

johnklos 1y ago

Reddit is filled with posts where people try to make their values in to everyone else's. Want an Arm SBC? Get an N100 instead! Want a Ryzen to transcode video? Get an N100 instead! Want a NAS? Get an N100 instead! I get it, N100 people - you get a shiny new toy, and you want to hype it up as the Next Best Thing that's a great choice for everyone. The problem is that it's not the best choice for everyone, and it's getting old hearing about it. Here are some reasons the N100 isn't best: SBCs are smaller and almost always take less power. Intel QuickSync isn't the same quality as software based transcoding, and not everyone wants to compromise on quality. Like Jeff points out, N100 systems cost more, and the added performance over a Pi of some sort isn't always needed (although it's funny that the same people who point out the higher performance of N100 over a Raspberry Pi will at the same time dismiss a low power Ryzen :P). They cost more. N100 systems don't have enough PCIe lanes to replace certain I/O heavy uses. Some people don't like the x86 ecosystem. N100 fans try to tell everyone that there's more software because it's x86, but that's a negative thing for some of us who prefer to install from source. Intel gatekeeps products by removing features when there's no reason to do so. Even my 2014 AMD Athlon 5350 systems, which are very decently performing low power systems and which I'm still using as routers / firewalls / servers in many places, have ECC support in the CPU. (I wonder how the N100 would compare with a 2014 Athlon 5350, but that's a question for another time.) The primary reason for me is a little different: Intel makes shitty decisions. All of the CPU vulnerabilities found that I know of have affected Intel CPUs more than AMD or Arm CPUs. Why? I think it's because Intel tries so hard to chase performance and marketing points that they prioritize this over security and reliability. I bought an eight core Bulldozer in 2012 for compiling because I preferred eight integer cores over four cores plus hyperthreading in a Core i7-2600. Benchmarks then showed the Intel beat out AMD in many benchmarks then. However, more than a decade later, with toolchain improvements and with performance impacts of Spectre and Meltdown, my Bulldozer now beats an Intel i7-2600 at many modern benchmarks. But it's not just security - Intel's 13th and 14 generation degradation debacle again shows that Intel is more concerned with marketing and benchmarks than having good, reliable products. That their CPUs can take hundreds of watts to compete with Ryzen illustrates this well. Would this be an issue with N100? Probably not, but I don't want any CPUs from a company that will compromise their products for profit and marketing purposes. They tried to do AVX-512 and made a huge mess of which products have it - again, Intel were more concerned with benchmark results. After all, Intel's not going to release benchmark figures that show the effects of dropping the whole CPU's clock while running AVX-512. They tried to play us. The bottom line is that I don't trust Intel, which is why I'll never get an N100, and all of these other reasons are why I'd never recommend them.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

qingcharles 1y ago

Word of warning on those GMKtec PCs. They put all their drivers on a Google Drive account that they don't pay for, and there are no known mirrors of some of the drivers. So when you suddenly need to do a reinstall one day, remember that their GDrive will be over-quota for a month and you'll be SOL for a few weeks unless you can match the drivers to the ones from the OEMs.

transpute 1y ago
Could a cumulative set of drivers be mirrored to a Github repo or archive.org?
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
This is the most wtf thing I have read on Hacker News in a day or so. Thanks, I was considering them as an N100 alternative to my Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe I'll search a little more...
- fud101 1y ago
  What drivers does one need for the N100? Mine just runs Ubuntu 24 and I've never needed any vendor drivers.
  - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    Windows drivers
joshuaissac 1y ago
Copy it directly to your own Google Drive, then download it from there, and it will use your quota instead of theirs.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  It does not :( I have a paid Goog sub and this was the first thing I tried. It will not bypass their quota.

tshaddox 1y ago

Is there a reason these mini PCs still have all USB-A ports? That strikes me as a bizarre choice.

octo888 1y ago
How many USB-C keyboard/mice do people have?
654wak654 1y ago
Probably for easy mouse & keyboard support? Also, mini PCs are usually used in offices a lot and I bet most places that buy these things still have lots of USB-A storage devices as well.
Zren 1y ago
Also, probably the price of the connector. USB A is also a simple standard and no one will expect to treat it as a display out.

roscas 1y ago

While looking at the site I noticed https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own-media-considered-harmful-updated https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own... Youtube is amazing! It hosts billions of videos to all kind of bad content, but still make true content creators feel it's long arm of their laws! It is just pathetic. Just like other anti-social networks like Fakebook and Twitter.

tills13 1y ago

I built myself a 1U server using off-the-shelf parts I had lying around to run my Proxmox instance. I wanted to expand my cluster & also give myself a dedicated node for Plex (so that it could have direct access to the CPU w/ QuickSync) so bought myself a Beelink with an N100. The little Beelink sips power and has never once stuttered while streaming Plex. Going forward, I plan on replacing my 1U server with a cluster of Beelinks.

etempleton 1y ago

The Raspberry Pi has moved too far upmarket to the point where something like the N100/150 is a better value for cheap compute. Raspberry Pi should perhaps focus on becoming increasingly affordable versus increasingly capable. Perhaps that also leads to a dead-end.

dottjt 1y ago

How are these things for emulation?

anon-3988 1y ago

I have an RPI5, its in a weird zone of not cheap enough for embedded and not powerful enough as a NAS. I should have gone with N100 instead.

crowcroft 1y ago

Semi related, what’s the best source for a consumer to buy mini-itx boards with the processor on? I want to get a board (ideally with two gigabit Ethernet) and BYO ram, SSD and enclosure.

tonymet 1y ago

my ryzen7 Beelink has been the best PC I've owned. Great performance, excellent reliability (only 1 BSOD in 2 years), great utility. I ended up consolidating 3-4 Raspis onto a single HyperV server and alpine / debian VMs. Pi zero 2 is the last compelling raspberry pi . Great for running cpu-bound servers like DNS, static web, network monitoring. Pi-5 performance, especially with IO, is not worthwhile.

worik 1y ago

I do not understand I cannot get one of these x86 computers for twice the price of a fully pimped RPi5 Even second hand they are usually twice the price $/mips may be a different story, but RPi5 has way more than I need, so I care about capital cost in total Is there some class of computer I am ignoring? This just seems so wrong

Aerbil313 1y ago
No, you are probably correct for your own circumstances. I was shopping for something to run Home Assistant on last week. (if you don't know about HA, check it out, it's crazy good!). I was befuddled, I kept coming back to online threads like this where people claim these mini PCs are much better than a Pi 5 setup AND cheaper too. That's just not true for my region, because of a very confusing, complex set of constraints: - Most of these good, new, low-power Mini PCs are not imported into my country - The ones that are imported are higher-end versions (e.g. Beelink S12 Pro) which cost more than twice the Pi setup - I can buy from Ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress etc. and get it imported but the import tax is so huge it stops being cheaper - I can easily get a second hand Mini PC in the cheaper-than-Pi5-setup range, but all of them are old machines with high power consumption that'll them more expensive than the Pi5 setup in a single year or two, with my current price of electricity In the end I opted for a Pi5 4GB, which is more than enough for running HA. The total was $125 for the full setup with cooler fan, 128GB SSD and original power supply. Though I got the Pi5 second hand, otherwise the total would be $145.

theshrike79 1y ago

I've been saying this for a long time. Unless you need something raspi-specific, like GPIO access or a specific HAT, you'll always get better price/performance + upgradability either with a Nxxx machine from China or an old company Lenovo/Dell/HP minipc.

andrewstuart 1y ago

Jeff loves Raspberry Pi, which is fine, but as I recall from watching this video when it was released, he tested Windows on Intel and Linux on Raspberry Pi then somehow drew conclusions from that. Not apples versus apples.

turtlebits 1y ago

I never understood why people use rpi's as servers. They're good for gpio and form factor/portability.

refurb 1y ago

I recently purchase a miniPC with the N97 chip. I didn't have a specific use in mind that would require CPU speed (e.g. gaming or emulation), just a miniPC that I could tinker around with and maybe use as a media server or VPN. I went with the N97 chip versus N100/N150 since the price point is significantly lower and I didn't want to spend several hundred on computer I'm just tinkering with. What surprised me is that it's actually pretty fast. I'm running Win 11 for now and it's pretty snappy. The only thing that jumped out to me is that disk transfer speeds are noticeable slower. It easily exceeded my expectations as I expected a PC that struggled with win 11. No doubt if I stressed the CPU I'd see it throttle and slow down pretty quickly, but as a basic PC for web browsing or MS Office work, it's absolutely fine.

ksec 1y ago

Intel N150, Gracemont Core, Intel 7 ( Intel 10nm ), no data on die size. I wished Intel had made a similar die size SOC. The BCM2712 D0 is only 38mm2, on an older generation 16nm node!.

yamapikarya 1y ago

i bought dell wyse 5070 with 30gb ram and 2 tb ssd to replace my raspberry pi 4. currently building some talos cluster and other linux distro. im not sure if this setup is a good idea, but so far i learned a lot how to host baremetal server