I recently bought a domain from Porkbun (thanks to all of the comments on this post!) and I want to self-host some services myself. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and I’m not quite sure if it can handle these things:
- A matrix homeserver
- A lemmy instance
- A website with static HTML pages
- Privacy-respecting frontends (Piped, Redlib etc.)
I am thinking about getting a maxed-out Raspberry Pi 5 with a whole 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Is it worth it? I need a machine that is quiet, doesn’t draw that much power and is overall pretty good for the money.
Edit: I bought this Mini PC instead of the Raspberry Pi 5. Thanks to all the comments!!
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A Pi 5 8GB is very expensive once you buy the power supply, case, cooling, adapters, etc… And you’re stuck with ARM64 stuff which doesn’t support some things.
Personally in your shoes I would spend $80 or so on a USFF PC with an 8th or 9th gen Intel CPU off ebay.
I replaced 4x Pi4 4gb with a single N95 mini PC with 16gb ram and wont look back.
Only PI left in my home is just running a 24/7 USBIP bridge.
the only reason to use a pi is if you need GPIO pins for custom devices.
USBIP bridge as in USB over ethernet?
Yip, I have a Linux VM running on one of my boxes in the garage that is plugged into a video matrix so I can bring it up on any screen in the house, I use the pi to connect Keyboard/Mouse/controllers etc to that when I’m using it.
Well that sounds cool
Why not get an Intel N100? It’s about the same price and much better performance. Raspberry Pis is kind of overpriced these days.
Just looked them up, and found products 2x my Pi 5. Maybe there are sales out there?
RPi5, plus a PSU, plus a storage device, plus any extra cooling, plus a case ends up about the same as an N100 without anything extra. For the extra $10 or so, the N100 ends up being the better buy.
Just bought one a month ago. RPi5 was $80 (8gb ram, $60 for 4gb), case with fan was $5 and USB-C PD supply was $10.
Lowest n100 I see is $150. Still, they do look more beefy and probably worth it for some.
A case for $5 is a good find unless you found literally the cheapest thing you could find. For a half decent case I’d expect $10-20, and more if you want something fancy.
What are you doing for storage?
I was weighing the same options recently and went with a n100 mini PC with 8gb RAM and 256GB m.2 SSD for $150. Absolutely no regrets.
I noticed you didn’t list storage with your RPi5. Are you just using eMMC? I’d strongly recommend against eMMC as your only storage if you’re doing anything write-intensive, since the life cycle of eMMC is generally much shorter than even cheap SSDs (and performance is much lower compared to m.2 via PCIe) and it’s not something you can just swap out if it dies. On my existing Pis and other SBCs, I use any eMMC only for the bootloader and/or core OS image (if at all) and store anything else either on physically attached SD cards, SSDs, or mounted network volumes.
This additional storage adds even more cost to the Pi, even if you go with my recommended minimum of a SD card (low life cycle, but at least you can replace it). So now the 8GB Pi is $80 + $10-15 for case with fan and heatsinks + $10-15 for power supply + $15+ for a SD card or other storage = $115-125+ total.
In comparison, the $150 n100 mini PC comes with case, power supply, and storage. Both the included m.2 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM are easily replaced or upgraded using standard SSDs and laptop memory (up to 16GB DDR4-3200). The Intel n100 scores more than twice as high in Passmark compared to the ARM Cortex A76, and includes a full Alder Lake QuickSync engine (meaning it can hardware encode/decode a large variety of video codecs with the integrated GPU including very new and demanding ones like 10-bit AV1). I’ve stress tested it recently and it was capable of simultaneously transcoding 2x 4K HDR movies (both full UHD Blu-ray quality, one of them 60fps and 100Mbps bitrate) with tone mapping in Plex in real time while also doing a full library scan and credit detection. In addition, x86 architecture is still more broadly supported than arm, so compatibility is less an issue. (That said, in this particular case, the n100 is only fully supported in newer Linux kernels. I upgraded Ubuntu 22.04.4 to 6.5 kernel and installed a few other driver packages to get it fully working, which wasn’t hard, but it’s an additional step).
For me, in the end the price difference was at most $25 and the advantages made it clearly worth it.
That said, if all I wanted was a much lower powered SBC just to run a handful of light services, I might look at one of the cheaper Pis or similar and just accept that it’ll eventually die when the eMMC dies (and back up any persistent data I’d want to retain).
I’ve noticed the same thing. Every Intel N100-based machine costs ~200€ on Amazon.
I got a Dell Optiplex for £68 on eBay to replace my pi4b Home Assistant.
It’s running Home Assistant plus a Windows machine Arr stack with Plex and transcoding, a music server, a NAS storage and Adguard at the moment and I still have ram to spare.
How does your music server work?
Logitech Media Server aka Squeezebox. It works mostly on plugins. The server runs on almost anything and connects to a client software on a pi in my bedroom and 3 Google Home Minis I have dotted around my house.
It’s a work in progress at the moment. I have it connected to YouTube and Spotify but I’m working on pulling all the music off my old iPod I have in the car, sorting it from the mess Apple made of the files and putting them on my NAS.
Last night I was trying to get LMS to see that music. But alas I couldn’t work out how to mount a Samba share to the container so today I’m gonna be trying FTP instead.
LMS is great but it takes a lot of tinkering to customise to what you want.
Because I can’t power an N100 via PoE.
You probably could. Though I don’t see the point in powering a home server over PoE.
A random SBC in the closet? WAP? Sure. Not a home server though.
Though I don’t see the point in powering a home server over PoE.
There’s a lot of technology I don’t see the point in; it doesn’t mean it’s not useful to somebody else.
I’ve never heard of Intel N100 before, what’s that? Just so you know, a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 Gigabytes of RAM costs ~90€ in my country (Germany). I wouldn’t really count that as overpriced. Could you show me some machine examples with Intel N100?
I think he meant something like these mainboards (german comparison portal). These mainboards contain the CPU.
However, you also need memory, a case, storage and a power supply, which brings you closer to 200€.
They essentially mean something like https://a.aliexpress.com/_EIX2dNj
The price is comparable to a Raspberry Pi
True, they are much cheaper on aliexpress than on our local suppliers.
An AliExpress account is something everyone should have. The savings are wunderbar!
Look into beelink mini s12 pro for example. Currently 199 eur on Amazon. Just install Linux on it and Bob’s your uncle. It’s x86 so no weird arm issues. Full support of the hw in mainline kernel.
Intel, 500 GB SSD , 16 GB ram, GPU acceleration, WiFi 6, Bluetooth, 1 Gbps link. You can add another SSD drive. Raspberry is clearly an underdog here.
That’s cheap. If a raspberry pi 5 with power supply, case, nvme ssd is about 270 euro in my country. That’s about the same for a N100 mini pc.
Why not get a minipc? For the same cost you can get way more performance
I’m running my Matrix and Lemmy on a VM smaller than that, so it should be fine. Just don’t run it off an SD card as the others have said, because that’s going to be a database heavy workload which means loads of writes to storage.
Another option would be to install an im server that is low on resources and not eating your sdcard. I think xmpp would work a lot better on a pi. Prosody, ejabberd or snikket should work nicely.
In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution anymore it used to be. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.
And you can upgrade a NUC with more RAM up to 32 GB if you pick a model which supports that amount.
My go to is a refurbished slim mini pc. Like a dell or HP for sub $100
I’ve got a BeeLink N100 system that’s just a bit bigger than a NUC, has two 2.5Gb LAN ports and came with a 512gb nvme drive. Works a treat as a Jellyfin server with TONS of processor and ram headroom. N100 is a great little chip, so long as you’re not expecting i5+ power.
If you don’t need the I/O pins, look into a mini PC. In the US, used can easily get you something under $100 US. New would probably be around $100-$150.
If you get a low CPU, they idle around what the PI would be doing.
A PC would give you faster, more durable storage, inside of a case. And maybe memory upgradability, if you need it eventually.
A PC would be bigger, but some are not much bigger, especially if you add any USB dongles or external storage to the PI.
The YouTube channel “Hardware Haven” has a bunch of random old “junk” computers he’s worked on.
I agree.
Pis are great for tinkering, GPIO things, or ultra low power.
Plenty of older hardware out there that is as powerful (or more so), more reliable (ie, not an sd card), and more maintainable (ie can swap CPU/ram/disks/fans/psu).
But, power consumption is always a concern. At $0.30/kwh, 10 watts is $27 per year.
So, if a pi draws 5w and an SFF draw 25w, thats $55 per year. Any price benefit of a larger/older PC is negligiable after a year or 2, so reliability probably wont come into it.The last video from “hardware haven” I saw (not the last released, just the last I saw) found:
Fuzzy memory on details: a 5th or 6th gen Intel idled at 7 watts vs an ultra efficient at 5 watts. He calculated out that it would take 2-4 years, depending on your electricity, to pay for the cost difference of a new ultra low power machine. CPUs and even graphic cards have gotten much better at idling very low.
5th and 6th gen are pretty ancient.
An i3-12100 motherboard bundle is about £160, will idle with dual NVMes about 20w, and will absolutely slay a similar 5th or 6th gen low power build.Anyway…
A Pi 4 will idle around 3 to 4 watts, and run 6 watts when the CPU is pegged. A Pi 3 is 2w idle and 3.6w pegged. (https://www.ecoenergygeek.com/raspberry-pi-power-consumption/)Here is a low power 6th gen intel build.
https://mattgadient.com/building-a-low-power-pc-on-skylake-10-watts-idle/
Idle draw is 10w. Total pegged draw is 50w.
They mention an i7-6700t has lower TDP (35w), so that power draw under load would be probably 25-30w.
Which is still 2x higher at idle, and 5x higher under load than a raspberry pi.
Chances are the i7 would run closer to idle when tasked with work that would be stressing the pi, considering it is twice the clock speed and twice the thread count. So, maybe 2x more draw on average (6w vs 15w)?As for costs, im seeing i7-6700t selling used for £60, new DDR4 is probably another £40, and a new cheap motherboard is £60. A quick ebay search shows refurbbed " i5 6th gens" (no model number) with 8gb of ram and 256gb ssd going for £140 (16gb of ram is £5 more, but for the sake of comparison).
I can buy a 8gb pi4 starter kit for £104 (psu, case, sd card, hdmi cable & pi4 8gb).
Which is cheaper than a refurbished i5 6th gen, and is lower power.If i was running virtualisation, i would absolutely pay more for something i can eventually stuff 64gb (or more) ram into, as well as multigig/10gb networking.
But for running some home services in a docker compose stack? A pi4 is going to be cheaper in the short and long term.
Is there an intel/amd/x86_64 computer I can power via PoE?
A quick google found things like these:
https://things-embedded.com/us/edge-computers/poe-computers/Obviously tailored more to the industrial/automation/embedded side of things with odd IO. And probably a ridiculous prolice tag.
PoE++ (802.3bt) can deliver 60w. UPoE extends this to 100w. So, there is a LOT you can power from that!Neat, and agreed that the price is probably stupid money.
With that in mind, it’s why I like the Pi for smaller projects - I can power them via PoE.
You will need an NVMe adapter and a bigger SSD to store the Matrix database and it will put a lot of stress on the system if you join bigger rooms.
Otherwise it should be fine, although I personally would recommend skipping Matrix all together and rather install an lightweight XMPP server (and if you really need it a Matrix gateway for that).
You can try a mini PC, you mentioned Germany so for example this https://amzn.eu/d/0Evab2M I think that should be a bit more powerful than a Pi, but not sure by how much.
By leaps and bounds
Not sure if that much, their CPU benchmark is pretty close.
It depends on the CPU however having an AMD64 type CPU means that you will have better performance
The question you should be asking is how much power will it draw
Is a Pentium powerful enough? I recently found a YouTube channel called “Wolfgang’s Channel” and he also has a home server with a Pentium. He says it is plenty enough for these kind of tasks.
If that’s not powerful enough a raspberry pi isn’t either, that CPU ranks slightly higher than the one on a pi 5 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5743vs2633/ARM-Cortex-A76-4-Core-2400-MHz-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4400T
Also I don’t know how I forgot about this (since it’s what I do a lot of the times), but you can buy from other Amazon’s in Europe, for example in Spain you can get this CPU https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6500T+%40+2.50GHz&id=2627 which is almost double the benchmark of a Pi for 127 https://amzn.eu/d/6UwsUqf
Those mini PCs are awesome, the only reason my home server isn’t one of them is because I have a 3.5" HDD which doesn’t fit in them, but I’m looking to switch to some other alternative because the franken-desktop I have now uses too much power for what it’s doing.
As someone that has only recently started selfhosting stuff, I can’t offer much advice. But having bought an RPi5, which runs most of my things, I’ll tell you this finding from my research. They’re awesome, but the SD cards don’t last long, so ideally you want to minimise the writes. I’m not sure a Matrix server allows you to do that. Though it absolutely can handle all of the above.
but the SD cards don’t last long
This is what scares me the most. Ideally, I want a whole SSD to store data. I really don’t want to lose any important data. I plan on hosting public services (like the services I’ve mentioned above) under my domain, so having a reliable drive would be really helpful.
General rule: if you have “important data” don’t go cheap. Get a real computer. Have backups. Test them.
Yeah. You can pretty much mitigate all of your concerns with an SSD. But I’ve never run anything public facing. So make sure you confirm that there’s people running said services on Pis before you pull the trigger.
I personally recommend you to go for a GMKtec G3 instead, you will not regret it. Good luck.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PSU Power Supply Unit Plex Brand of media server package PoE Power over Ethernet RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage nginx Popular HTTP server
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I bought a CN62 Chromebox, and put MrChromebox’s Bios on it – I did the rounds comparing it with a Pi 4 and it was 2.5x faster, and could easily saturate my gigabit connection. It came with 16gb of storage, and 2gb of ram; but using ACTUAL DRAM slots. I could upgrade it to 16gb if I needed to down the line.
The whole thing, cost me like $45 shipped; power supply, storage, everything needed…and it’s an X86 instruction set - so I can use whatever version of Linux I want, without any crazy Raspberry Pi specific patches/builds.
