• Sure, but “better” is massively subjective. For me, when I set up a pi, I’m not usually making use of the GPIO or the camera inputs. I’m generally throwing together a headless server. To do that, in addition to the board itself, I need storage, power, heat sinks, an fan and usually some sort of case.

    Using the prices at CanaKit as a rough guide, you can come up with this search on Ebay.

    The first entry I saw drew my attention. It’s a 7th gen i5 with 16GB RAM and a 120 GB SSD. Not sure the 500 GB HDD would survive shipping, but it’s $100 shipped. Biggest concern is that the seller only has 65 sales. Possible scam?

    On the higher end of that bracket there is this. 6th gen and only 8GB RAM, but the seller does have a history.

    With the prices on the Pi5 your potentially getting into the price range where it might make sense to look at the Beelinks mini PCs, based around a 12th gen Intel.

    Like I said, prices right now are at a spot where I can’t just say throw a Raspberry Pi at the problem. They are great boards but for someone self-hosting their own services they don’t necessarily always make sense anymore.

    • Schwim Dandy
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      fedilink
      221 days ago

      With the prices on the Pi5 your potentially getting into the price range where it might make sense to look at the Beelinks mini PCs, based around a 12th gen Intel.

      Wow, wish I had known about that before. That looks amazing! I ordered one and will give it a shot. Do you happen to know of a community based around mini-pcs? If not Lemmy, forum, etc. I use places like Tomshardware but would love to see things like the Beelink when they pop up.

      • Not that I’m aware of.

        The only time I heard anyone talking about it was on the podcast Self-Hosted . Supposedly it’s a NUC clone with performance similar to a then current (2023) mid range laptop and draws about the same amount of power. I think they said the N100 processor had Intel QuickSync for hardware transcoding.