When Did Raspberry Pi become the villain?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 พ.ค. 2024
- Is it possible to buy brand a brand new Intel N100 mini PC for less than a Pi 5?
Yes! But is it better? Watch the video and we'll see...
Mentioned in this video:
- Raspberry Pi 5: www.raspberrypi.com/products/...
- GMKtec N100 Mini PC: amzn.to/4brupjC
- Pineberry Pi HatDrive! Top HAT: pineberrypi.com/products/hat-...
- Samsung 512GB microSD: amzn.to/3Hs9HT2
- MakerDisk 2242 NVMe SSD: www.cytron.io/p-nvme-2242-b-p...
- rpilocator: rpilocator.com
- Where are the Pi 5s? Eben Upton interview: TODO
- ExplainingComputers Mini ITX N100 PC: • Raspberry Pi 5 vs N100...
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Sponsor me on GitHub: github.com/sponsors/geerlingguy
Merch: redshirtjeff.com
2nd Channel: / geerlingengineering
Contents:
00:00 - Raspberry Pi, the villain?
00:58 - N100 is cheaper than Pi
02:38 - Pi: Some assembly required
07:47 - N100: Prebuilt
10:32 - Pi first boot
12:33 - Pi performance
16:11 - N100 first boot
17:55 - N100 performance
20:28 - Which one's best?
Fluffing a Duck by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
The magic about the pi was the price around $35. Once it rose sky high, comparisons like yours had to be made.
especially when for a lot of people it wasnt the type of tinkering which a single board pc often is designed around, it was the affordability and convinience to purchase
When mini pcs started properly flooding the market in the last few years, and at prices not all desimilar to the raspberry pi in the early days, mixed with the raspberry pi shortage, only people wanting what the single board computers were designed around desparately sought them out,
Meanwhile people who either just wanted to tinker about with linux, have a small computer, or things that dont really relate to the hardware of the rpi, just bought either these mini pcs from amazon or the second hand ones that buisnesses flooded the market with at this point.
Too expensive for a simple gadget and too weak for some useful applications (paired with an ARM CPU too)...
I remember when it came out it was never that cheap. More like $50 something. I remember it distinctly because I bought a much more powerful ARM microcontroller dev board with lots of breakout for like $9 LOL
@@telesniper2Which one did you buy? Like was the 9 dollar microcontroller
@@comedyreliefguy5112 I actually found it the other day. It was a 2" square board with USB and a breakout for GPIO. I think it was an ARM9. Just a generic china board
The problem is that you can wipe the Windows and install any free and open-source Linux distro on N100 mini PC. Intel's mainline Linux support has always been top-notch.
If the total cost for the machine with 8GB of ram and a 512 GB SSD is $135 dollars they didn't rob you at all, the cost of Windows license for Tiny PCs is almost nothing@@dinckelman
@@dinckelman that's why you learn to build from spares
@@dinckelmanNot if you buy the barebones version, then supply your own ssd and ram.
@@dinckelman That license would have been peanuts. I imagine it's via one those mass volume licences that you can pick up off eBay for $2.
This. Also prox mox install on here and you’re off to the races. If you want a real pi experience get a pico.
My takeaway from this is that computing is so cheap nowadays! My first PC cost $1500 and had only a fraction of the CPU and storage of any of the machines shown. Now I have mini PCs, several Pis and even an old HP refurb from Amazon that lived out its life computing spreadsheets on someone's desk. I run various different OSs, have networks set up as a playground. When I started as a programmer I used to go into work at the weekends just so I could play with the hardware in the machine room, now I have all that and more sitting around my den at home.
I remember when I was in my teens in the 90's my dad got a 5GB HDD and it's echoed in my hear ever since "I don't know how I'd use all this". I have 6TB in my desktop right now, I was cleaning the other week and found a 1TB m.2 drive just hanging out at the bottom of a pile of cords lol
I remember the days when a $4000 PC got you 2MB of RAM. Oh, the days. And $4000 was a cheap price compared to some others!
@@WillSams In the mid nineties for "only" $2000 I got a pentium 75 hotrod of it's day. Then they invented these fancy fangled things video cards we called them. It was like a computer you put in your computer. Hey I hear you like computers let's put 2 more computers in your computer and link them up. We called that crossfire and all the cool kids wanted to do it.
I bought a Time computer with Windows Millennium(LOL) on it in 1999 for £1000
My first bought wass a 8086 xt with 64 kb on mobo rest up to 256 kb was on daughterboard. My FIRST pc I build my self, it was a Zilog Z80A totalling around $3000 plus case, keyboard and 8" floppy station, full decked out with 2 floppy and a blistering CGA monitor it was something like $1000-1400
Being an electronic designer, I would say it is rarely DIY is cheaper than buying, so pricing was not a surprise, but the excitement in DIY is in general worth the difference :).
For me it was definitely during the shortage when every content creator and their mother had seemingly endless access to whatever they wanted so they could show off cool projects that no normal consumer could hope to replicate unless they spent exorbitant prices to scalpers.
"Here's my 128 node Raspberry Pi cluster with 500 TB of storage that I built out of spare parts and 8 4080TI GPUs while using the money from my newspaper route..."
@@chrisnelson414 And its performance is still not nearly as good as a Mini PC at half that price
all i wanted was a cm4 with 8gb… 😂 yeah, all of the above.
And Jeff was one of them. But he got them for free. I’m a subscriber from his Ansible days. I haven’t unsubscribed, but that rubbed me the wrong way and I don’t watch most of his videos anymore.
This was it for me. It became a content creator's computer and not a hobbyist's computer.
The thing I kinda miss with older Pis is the "you already have most of what you need" ethos. You already have a phone charger, you already have a USB keyboard and mouse, you probably already have an HDMI monitor, and if you don't you can just use your TV, and there's a good chance you can borrow an SD card from something. I know better hardware is more power hungry, but it seems to have lost the kid friendly idea of buying a computer with your pocket money and not needing anything else to get started. Now you have to get a special power supply and a special display cable, and maybe a special case to keep it cool.
i absolutely hate that they switched to micro HDMI adapters. now you have to not only buy a proprietary charger but you also have to buy a proprietary video cable to use the thing. not to mention needing a fan or cooling system to even play video without throttling.
@@jimster1111Nah, you can use several different things to power them. Like just your average fast charge USB-C cable that comes with any Android based phones, as long as it's plugged into a fairly decent Charging brick that meets the however many watts they require, or...you can buy the official charging brick cable with a built-in On/off toggle switch into the cable so you don't have to manually unplug the cable to cut power to it. They're only about $20 max for the official power supply cable.
And...I completely forgot about my buddy who runs Raspberry Pi's in a server stack and they are all powered using PoE (Power over Ethernet). Where both your network connection and enough power to supply each Raspberry Pi all coming through the Ethernet port.
(I would say iPhone 15's USB-C cables as well....but Apple is so shady they just kept using the EXACT same physical cables that they've been using for a decade+ for lighting cables, but just put a USB-C connection on the end instead of a lightning port....which are all USB 2.0 speeds)
The Pi 5 doesn't come with Power Delivery, so a standard phone charger won't work. I've tried.
I'm mostly surprised they didn't use a more compliant USB-PD protocol chip to take advantage of all the USB PD power bricks out there, they decided to use one that requires 5V/5A which is technically compliant but not usually supported. The HDMI adapter is annoying than anything else.
yea but maybe you want better hardware (more recent pi) because you need better performance. Like if you're doing image recognition with the Pi while controlling multiple sensors and servos
Also, as a former dell service technician for laptops: get a magnet mat with a grid on it, to keep those pesky screws in place. Also helps with remembering in what order you took them off, though that's less of a problem with this few screws.
i mean the main advantage of using a raspberry pi is really the GPIO pins, not it being a usable computer
if all you need is GPIO pins, buy an arduino nano or an esp32 for $3...
@@TheKetsa Those don't have as much processing power if you need it, neither do they have wired ethernet, expandable storage, easy video output, etc...
Though you could buy a raspberry pi pico and an old laptop, hook them up via usb and use the laptop to control most of the GPIO on the pi pico, and have the laptop's processing power to do whatever
@@TheKetsaIf I wanted to build a fully self-sustained computer vision system with object detection, I’d need a pi as object detection is very resource heavy (using this example because it’s exactly what I’m currently doing), I’ll need the GPIO pins too, as I need to control other pieces of hardware (motors, servo’s, etc) directly from the pi.
@@demonman1234what they are saying is you can just implement sensors, motors etc on an MCU host, all the resource heavy compute is done on a laptop/pc which communicates to the MCU by USB etc. very similar to how klipper works
Most of the "issues" with the N100 box were issues with windows, not the hardware itself, put debian on it for a decently fair comparison. For reference, my N100 box, which is very similar to the one here, idles at around 4-5W, not as good as the pi, but much better than with windows.
Also I think we're kinda missing the point of an SBC here, for general desktop computing, an SBC is always gonna be a poor value. The strength of the pi and other SBCs is their IO. They're great for projects where you need to interface with the real world through sensors, actuators, indicators, and non-USB user inputs. If you're building a robot that needs potentiometers on each joint, position sensors, and status LEDs, then use a pi, that's what it's made for. If you want a small, portable, low power desktop, get a mini PC, that's what they're made for.
That's why I'm not a big fan of the Pi 5, it just doesn't really fit anywhere, it's too expensive to casually embed into a project, but not powerful enough for a good desktop experience. It's cool to have the capabilities of a Pi 5, but how many situations actually need GPIO pins AND 8GB of RAM? The niche case of moderately high-end robotics that actually has those requirements has long since been filled the Jetson nano stuff (granted, the pi is a fair bit cheaper). It just doesn't have much a real place.
I was wondering that the test was a bit unfair considering Windows has a lot of junk running in the background that it would use more energy to run.
Also, on a fresh Windows install, it does lots of stuff in the background. Windows could be more power efficient than Linux at times(for example in Laptops)
Yeah, I thought that was a bit disingenuous on Jeff's part. Getting something like an Ubuntu image on a USB drive and booting the 'live CD' version is less work than getting the OS image installed on the NVMe SSD.
If you want a slick windows which doesn't run a lot of trash at background, you can always "sail overseas", and get some enterprise/LTSC version of the OS, and go for Win10, not 11. You still get almost all advantages of Windows, including WSL, with no one of the drawbacks of the "consumer" versions.
If the goal is to interface with the real world for sensors and outputs, then a Pi running a GPOS (General Purpose Operating System) is really not the best option anyway. the ESP32 with it's RTOS (Real Time Operating System) is far better suited to the task, and they are cheap as chips too...
ESP ate Raspberries lunch, and their lack of supply and rising prices don't make that any easier. Perhaps the Pi is already on its trajectory to becoming a defacto embedded GPOS within business PIC systems, the very market that was getting supplies when the rest of us were put on hold by Raspberry for nearly 3 years. That decision combined with the introduction of the ESP32 will doom the Pi for tinkerers which form the backbone of the Pi community, that in itself is the very reason commercial customers even looked at the Pi in the first place...
One of feature that he missed in the video is that You can upgrade the RAM to 32GB for the N100 Mini.
But you're stuck with 8GB RAM on Pi
The OPi 5 is the best at bringing price/ ram/ and proformance as it can come with 32gb of ram as well as faeturing a NPU.
yeah I noticed that as well but I have 64 GB DDR4 paired with an I7 K 10th gen, and there aren't many use cases where the CPU isn't the limiting factor. I know it's a laptop and the heat is the source of the issue but I imagine the mini PC would run into similar issues. I just don't see a case where something with less computing power than an i3 can use 32 GB. maybe 16 gb for a tab hoarder but I think that is still likely to crash from the CPU being over-extended in some capacity. but maybe I'm wrong after all I have no experience with the mini PC.
@@weirdwarlock625honestly you're wrong in terms of cooling because laptops have to consider thickness as a limiting factor and mini PC doesn't so it can fit larger fans and even faster fan if they want to. Cooling isn't an issue, especially if it isn't a laptop running high end CPU on a Intel generation known for generating lots of heat.
I have an old laptop that I stuck a big RAM in it and it runs really well. Unless you're playing all 4k video on 20 tabs, it won't chug down. It takes very little, almost negligible power to keep one tab running, and it doesn't render anything on screen so it's not even taxing to the system at all. Modern browser also freeze tabs that aren't in use.
@@weirdwarlock625as a tab hoarder, I don't agree that 16GB is enough. Crashed many times.32G is a different story.
@DarkExternalHeart perhaps my laptop is dirty, I was only speaking to my personal experience. I've usually encountered thermal throttling before maxing out ram with my 64 gb setup and usually hover around 35 gb usage with about 500 chrom tabs open.
Maybe your laptop has better cooling than mine. I have a msi GF 75 thin 10.
Four things:
1) With the GMKtec, you can, of course, always wipe the Windows 11 install and install Linux as well. (or just swap the drive if you want to keep the Windows license key)
2) Speaking of the Windows license key, if you subtract that from the cost of the GMKtec mini PC.
3) If you compute the performance/$/Watt, the answer my surprise you.
4) It REALLY depends on what you want to do with the systems. Proxmox on ARM is still technically experimental.
You don't get license keys stuck on the case anymore. You don't even get the key if its OEM.
The license key is stored in UEFI if it's pre-installed so when you reinstall you won't need to enter it when you reinstall. Even if you purchase a key after it's tied to that mainboard/uefi so it won't need to be reactivated.
@@AndrewMurphy1
Depends on specific implementation.
Not all Mini PCs are set up this way.
For my Beelink GTR5 5900HX, I just emailed them what's my key and they sent it to me via email.
But later on, I learned that there is actually a method where you can READ the key that's currently used/installed, so as long as you "read"/"export" that, and save that to a file, then I can skip emailing them.
@@ewenchan1239 No, it is in the UEFI. It's part of the requirements Microsoft forces on OEMs.
@@AngelaTheSephira
That's actually NOT always entirely true.
Depending on which Mini PC you've purchased, if one of the first things that you do is to extra the default Windows key, and then wipe the drive -- per your comment, you would THINK that's how it works, but that's not always necessarily how it actually works, in reality.
Ask me how I know this.
Good luck with the not-dropping-a-screw mission. I've never been able to beat that one yet either and I've been doing DIY electronics for 45+ years. Great video!
I laughed out loud at "Nobody is sponsoring this video. Everything you see here I bought, thanks to this channel's... sponsors."
GitHub Sponsors, more specifically ;) The wording is funny now that I hear it :D
I thought it was on purpose. That was pretty funny
@@JeffGeerling Don't threaten me with a sponsor lol.
Ha, completely on accident@@lewisse_8966
@@JeffGeerling I understood it from the video. It was money that could have been spent elsewhere.
Raspberry pi kinda had a mission statement. They wanted to make these cheap and readily available so that people would get interested in the hobby. At first, it worked. I got my first kit for $55 and I've been tinkering with computers ever since. We all know what happened after that with prices and availability. But I can honestly say that I'm thankful for what they did.
I would have liked to see them work towards also creating a set of standards that would enable all their work on the software and OS side to be used on a wider range of ARM SBCs. During the shortage software was always the biggest issue with any of the boards that advertised themselves as alternatives or clones. It was often extremely difficult to much with them because they couldn't run the software needed to build on something that had already been done on the RasPi.
PCs solved this issue decades ago and I wish the ARM ecosystem could do the same.
Then came the industrialists came along and bought massive quality. Then the bread crumbs that were left were gobbled up by scalpers with their 30% markup. Which means zero availability for regular plebes!!
@@splynncryth I honestly think they would've switched over to RISC-V since the actual instruction set can be completely open source with no locked out blobs like on ARM (see what companies like Atmel and Nvidia do to fuck over OEMs).
Pi still sell a $35 B. And a $17 Zero 2W. And a $5 Pico.
People talking as if that’s changed. It hasn’t.
Pi has got cheaper relative to inflation.
I belive the RPi pico is more of the focus for hobbist as the raspi A and B seem to get caught up in a mountian of problems. From scalpers to python code that does not work. It would be cool though if for the hobbist the RPi team beefed up the RPi zero and stuck it at a $20 price point.
The N100 Amazon link now takes you to a $550 device. The N100 appears to be $180.
The link now takes you to a $160 N100. I'm writing this on the first of February.
It seems like lots of Amazon products will raise their price if a popular TH-cam video links to the product. I think it's slimy of the seller to do this sort of thing.
about ~$120 on Aliexpress.
@@ddegn What’s usually actually happening is that the product had multiple vendors selling it for different amounts (some normal, some ridiculous) and when demand spikes the vendors selling it for a low price quickly run out of stock.
@@bergamt Isn't each seller listed on a separate page? I'm pretty sure a link to page on Amazon is only to that seller. So if the price goes up, that seller raised the price. At least that's the way I understand it.
@@ddegn No, a single Amazon product page link can have one or many sellers who all compete to own the “buy box” on the product page (the rest get hidden in the “other sellers” page). The algorithm that Amazon uses to pick a seller is complicated but sale price is a major factor.
Google “how to win the Amazon buy box” and you’ll find dozens of articles explaining how it works.
When the PI 4 came out, I used it for my desktop and I am (or was - I've retired since then) a full-stack professional web developer. It didn't perform like my dual-xeon server but it worked well enough. When work-from-home came around, I did switch to my laptop so I could be more productive for work, but for most people, doing a little bit of typing work, a little bit of email, and a lot of surfing, the PI 4 was great. I didn't even know the PI 5 was out until I watched this video but for all of my electronics work, controlling I/O and custom home control modules, etc., my stack of Pi 2, Pi 3, and Pi4s are doing the job just fine.
In Australia, today's price for a Pi5 without the hat, using a micro SD, with all the other bits is $214. At the same time, an 8Gig ram, 128G ssd windows 10 PC from Amazon is $158. We are a long way from the originally touted benefits of a $35 computer (which it never was here anyway).
You my friend have a corrupt incompetent Govt that is purposefully stealing from you at a clip that would make Stalin proud.
Pis are overpriced here anyway
But the Windows 10 PC doesn't have GPIO.
bro where are you getting that 214 from. $160 on core electronics. def not a better deal than any mini pc but $214 is insane
@@expression3639It does, it just requires you to rtfm to use them. In a stroke of extreme irony, NUCs have ended up being the cheaper and "hacker friendly" option where if you are prepared to learn some things about how computers work, you get a really cool machine for tinkering, while Pi has become the corporation that's grown inefficient and fat by cornering the education market where teachers force schools or students to pay inflated prices for mediocre hardware and nicely graphically designed boxes and accessories.
www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/boardsandkits/custom-solutions-header-whitepaper.pdf
I was on rpi4 for a long time until I jumped to N100 a few months ago. The first thing i did was to wipe windows and install ubuntu.
It turns out the N100 is MUCH more capable than rpi4, especially on HW encoding. I can finally burn subtitles in jellyfin real-time!
Thumbs up for wiping Windows and installing Ubuntu :)
@@JeffGeerling It's what you should have done in your test to make it fair....
even the ryzen 2200ge mini pcs great for under 100$
Same here, a N100 with dual 2.5GiB lan, multi sata and 1 ssd nvme m2 is the same price that a RP5...
@@dougle03 I guess certain drivers and settings may have had a small amount of effect.. Though not by much. You would have had the same or a small bit more performance if you switched the N100 to linux.
This depends on the distro, DesktopEnvironment/WindowManager settings, drivers installed, default kernel settings, and etc.. Not all distros are created equally, some run on an older kernel vs some running newer kernels; Release types: [Stable, LTS, Fixed, Semi-Rolling, Rolling]. I'm probably missing a few things here, but I think that's the main bits or hurdles.
Jeff and his Dad are two of the best reasons to look at TH-cam. (another radio engineer, here)
Assembling the Pi reminds me of how it used to when building your own PC - you never knew if it was going to work, and working 1st time was almost unheard of!
That's not my experience. The Pis I have all work. It's the operating systems that aren't very useful. Theoretically the Pi can play video because the chip has a hardware accelerator... but Linux doesn't know how to use it because it requires a proprietary driver which they don't want to license. End of the road for TH-cam, baby! :-)
@@lepidoptera9337 it's still like that? We are still buying SoCs with integrated GPUs that will never be used? When I got my first Pi 2 I thought this was going to be temporary...
@@reezlaw Maybe they have fixed that... maybe not. I am not using it on the internet. The ones I have are just way too slow for that and I am not going to buy new ones. They have become way too expensive. All I know is that Linux on embedded devices sucks. It wants to be too many things for too many people and is not optimized well enough to do anything well.
@@lepidoptera9337 dude what else is going to be on embedded devices? It's all Linux, all around you. This is a very specific piece of hardware and you should blame whoever makes it instead of lashing out at a kernel that has done nothing wrong lmao
@@reezlaw Is it? For one thing, I am always running bare metal on the ones I am programming. I never use any OS, not even if I need multitasking. I just write my own task specific co-operative scheduler. That doesn't take more than a couple hours and it works predictably. One can easily get sub-us response times out of that on modern 32 bit ARM devices. That you also don't know what the rest of the industry uses is simply an indication that you are clueless. :-)
You have to remember why the Raspberry Pi was created in the first place. As a tool for schools, children and the like, which earned the company charitable status. Upton decided to prioritise business's but did not relinquish the charitable status, which he clearly abused in making the decision. So it is not the Pi itself that may have become something of a villain but the creator.
Lol, a bit melodramatic dude.
@@Design_nowhen you built a brand name from the community that maximizes it's use and then betray that community by making it unaffordable for small projects, he's clearly betraying the people who made Pi so big to begin with.
@@Design_no mofo's gatekeeping emotions
Dance with the one who brought you. Raspberry Pi betrayed the customer base that built their entire company from nothing. But apparently there was a prettier girl at the shindig.
@@Design_nobud if your local food bank started giving the food you donated to rich people so they could sell marke it up and sell it to poor people yould be pissed.
But no when they take the money we thought was going to kids its okay
For me the Pi Pico has now become what the original Raspberry Pi was to me, it’s cheap and barebones with some IO. I actually have to do some engineering to get things to run on the limited resources it offers which I find part of the fun.
Yup, and finally there's meaningful USB libraries (via TinyUSB library) and useful code examples. The Pico can give a standard PC GPIO and A-D pretty easily.
And you can get it working with ESPHome, Pico is a great little device!
With the Pico plugged into a VGA or DVI/HDMI board with writable SD Card and Basic it becomes the thing that the Pi vision was described as originally: a machine like the BBC, C64, etc. that a kid could turn on, boot immediately and enter a learning environment (the Basic REPL). This exists now if a techy adult can put the pieces together for the kid. Personally, I'd replace the Basic interpreter with a Micropython REPL as it's a better language for a child to start with in the 21st centaury but I don't believe the software pieces are there yet for Micropython to self host a write / run / debug loop on the device directly, but there is no reason it couldn't.
I dabble in modifying old consoles and the pi pico is a revolution in the mod chip scene. What were once $80-100 mod chips are now $10-20. So many talented people are producing new firmware because these chips are easily accessible and the hobbyist community is so active and documents things well. We are even seeing the pico chip integrated into pcbs with flex ribbons for easy installation. And there's basically no supply shortages unlike proprietary mod designs of yore given that many follow open source principles
Comparing the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Pico is like comparing apples and oranges. The Raspberry Pi has an applications processor while the Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller.
Love your content, Jeff! Use case is everything. I built a media server running Plex on a Pi4B 8GB on which I have 6 10TB USB drives (via USB3 hub, 3 primary, 3 backup) and 1 internal NVME drive on the other USB port using the Argon40 case. 7 drives seems to be the limit for the Pi. If I bring up another drive it starts acting flaky. I think the Pi5 would be a great upgrade for that. I have Pi's all over the place including a Pi3 that runs HamClock next to my ham radio station. Really cool bit of software. You look at the display and intuitively know what time it is anywhere in the world. I also have a Pi4 NAS which probably doesn't need any upgrade based on my usage.
Now, if I'm setting up a field radio station, a lot of utilities are Windows based, like WinLink (email over RF), Outpost (packet), and Ham Radio Deluxe (remotely control radios from the PC). For that use case the mini PC would be my choice. There are Linux based utilities, but they're typically not as robust.
IMO the selling point of the Pi has never been a small cheap computer. I have never found it to provide a good general purpose computing experience. The selling point has always been the customizability and ability to integrate it into embedded projects, as effectively a quite powerful and quick to set up microcontroller thanks to the large software and hardware support base for it.
The other thing is the stable hardware. Videocore IV was kept well past its expiration date, which hurt performance, but helped old software packages work.
The Raspi has a surprinsingly narrow niche. If you are truly into embedding, there are better products like ESPs, Arduinos and similars. If you need computing power, there are better machines in the same price ranges. Raspi only shines where you need embedding AND computing power (e.g. cameras with object recognition). En even in that case, you can easily set up an ESP32 with a camera that streams the captures to a nearby computer or mobile phone (search for ESP32-CAM), having the advantage that the ESP can be rebooted in less than a second and it doesn't have a SD that wears out.
Also the Raspi 4 consumes 600mA when idle, the ESP between 100 and 250 mA. The ESP can be put to a number of sleep levels, for example, limiting WiFi/BT connection lowers its consumption to 90 mA, and putting it in a true sleep makes it consume less than 1mA. This way you have a true embedable device that can be feed from a small battery, and switching sleep modes as needed: I had a device that slept for 30 minutes, wake up, took some measures, sent it through WiFi, and went to sleep again.
I like the part where Jeff says the N100's 40-50% higher Geekbench scores are "a bit faster."
Well, I had expected the N100 would be at least 3-5 times faster. So I agree with Jeff it was only a bit faster.
this is what happens when you get paid by pi organization.
We also have no idea if Windows was done with updates, indexing, etc. As another commenter said, throw Linux on there and then compare if you want an equitable comparison.
I’ll side with “‘50% faster’ isn’t that much”. Doubly-so when it’s using a lot more than +50% power to do it.
not paid. He pays them. its sunk cost fallacy.@@VolkanTaninmis
The key point here is "if you're looking for a desktop computer". Pis have _never_ excelled at this role (despite frequent claims to the contrary), and have been downright abysmal at it up until the Pi 5. You get a Pi because you have specific connectivity needs or you're using it embedded or for a special purpose, not just because you want a "cheap desktop".
The GMKtec is a pretty slick little unit though, thanks for showcasing it!
Bingo, bingo, bingo. Came here to say the exact same thing.
A Pi is not a particularly good desktop PC and there's very little reason to try and use one as such. I don't understand why everybody who reviews Pi products immediately jumps into a desktop GUI environment and starts trying to watch TH-cam videos. What the Pi excels at is being small (especially in the CM form factor), having GPIO for interfacing with various sensors and actuators, and being embeddable - including being able to run without a dedicated fan in many configurations.
I really can't understand why anybody would buy a Raspberry Pi for video editing, or watching 4K video, etc. But to each his own. "Different strokes for different folks" and all that.
@PhillipRhodes RPI 5 is not powerful enough to be a desktop 4k video viewer... but it's got too much power for running sensors and actuators or a PIHole. RPI 3 could do it.
@@habafflofYes! Exactly this. If it’s not a good desktop, stop adding more display connectors, and stop using beefy GPUs that drive power consumption through the roof while bringing no benefit for headless users. If it’s designed to be a desktop pc, then put normal display connectors on it instead of a strange connector no one uses, and put all the ports on one side!
@@PhillipRhodes I agree, but the inverse is equally true: I don't understand why someone would spend $130+ when they could get a mini pc with better specs for double digits and just buy a $15 USB to GPIO. Cheap, and modular let us roll the dice on an I2c bit bang that might fry the board or solve a problem in a cool way. Who's doing that with $130? Not me. So who is the intended consumer? What is the intended trajectory? Personally, I'm worried it's going from Acorn computer to Apple.
@@explocevoyou could buy a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W for $5 and solder on the header pins, or get one with headers on there already for a bit more. Also, you can run the Pico on its own once programmed. Even the USB to GPIO header is expensive compared to a Pico.
At last, I witnessed the Geerling who provided all the companies I worked for their inventory of ansible roles. Instantly subscribed.
my man has a Dalek poster in the background, what a legend, I need that poster. Thank you for the video as well, very informative. just had to comment.
also not a great solution, but first thing I would do for the DSI connector is just cut the case. they really should have made an opening in the case for that. that's a little too DIY for most people.
Love the part where he says "is it a good time to segue to a sponsor? No, it's not". I like this presenter's style, goes into enough detail without overdoing it.
I've been tinkering with both Raspberry Pi and low power Intel boards for a few years. I've found fitness for usage depends on what you want to do with it. I've had a PLEX server running on a low powered Intel Celeron processor for several years.
I reached for my mouse to scrub forward. Psyched out!
Sponsorblock extension is your friend.
That was my original pi project was plex server. There was something wrong with either the power supply or mini hdmi when plugged in every few seconds there'd be an audible click and it would drive me crazy.
Interesting to watch how, over time, the Raspberrypi has moved from being a STEM part emphasizing the GPIO functionality, to being a small computer that you can sometimes hook stuff to.
Yeah, the biggest change that bothered me was the microHDMI ports so they can handle two displays. If you are trying to run two monitors from a Pi, you are doing it wrong. I want the single full size HDMI port back.
If only all the people that were using it as a mini PC to run docker and all sorts of stuff that can run on a mini PC were buying mini PCs instead
@@marcogenovesi8570most people don't need that much power, and want a well-known well-documented device
@@QualityDoggo so a mini-pc isn't a well-known and well-documented device for you?
As for the computing power, who cares, it's cheaper and idles at similar power draw
Most of the projects that I would have used a Pi to make I now use a Pi Nano. Even though the hardware is limited the price can't be beat ($10 w/BT; $5 w/o). I can make a lot of neat projects (digital thermometer, soil moisture monitor, keyboard expansion, etc) that won't break the bank and won't be overkill as it would be for something like the Pi 5.
Fun thing I found out with dropping screws, if you just put a hand towel on your desk and put the screws on that when you drop them they almost always stay exactly where you think they went.
Notice how your 4k yt-video got served vp09 codec on the Pi and av01 for the N100 that has hardware support for it.
With the Pi's price increase (yes yes I know you can technically still get one for $35 but certainly not a Pi 5), and the need to buy so many extras it's become pretty pointless to use it as a dedicated machine when mini pc's are so cheap now. Even the older Thinkcentres which can be picked up sub $100 on ebay far outstrip it in performance. I wouldn't say the Pi is a villain, but it's certainly no longer the go-to solution, not even close to it.
The shortage certainly didn't help, nor did some of their very sketchy and questionable behaviour on social media (their incredibly hostile and rude responses to people on twitter and their own forums being a prime example, they still ban new users for asking genuine questions just because they don't like hearing them) helped push people away from wanting to work with them.
I think they've just evolved. They are no longer the loveable opensource, friendly community focused product maker. They're a corporation who realised B2B was vastly more profitable, and the hobbyist market has become very much secondary. They slowed down on the push into education massively over the last couple of years to the point where they don't really seem to be interested in it anymore so it's not too surprising.
A lot of that is because there's basically no reason to cover the educational sector in that way. Schools don't teach electronic fundamentals much any more
Aside from the reliability in finding non-scalped Pis, I think they moved into a pricing segment where you could get more compatible, flexible, powerful options for a tiny bit more. Why go through the trouble of stringing together a bunch of hats and accessories when for about $120 you can get a well-capable N100? Raspberry Pis are in the uncomfortable stage where they either need to offer something more powerful than the N100 or double down on better/cheaper versions of lower segment offerings. More powerful or feature rich Pi Zeros, for instance.
Or buy Orange Pi 5 which has superior Rockchip RK3588 on 8nm Samsung process (RPI5 is on old 16nm). Basically same CPU Cortex A76 as RPI5 however RK3588 has also additional 4x Cortex A55 Little cores which gives excellent 1 W idle power consumption and higher MT performance. Also RK3588 uses original ARM Mali GPU (much better performance and drivers than home-brew RPI5 Videocore something) and as last thing RK3588 has NPU for AI acceleration with 1 TOPs (which RPI5 lacks entirely).
And Orange Pi 5 is cheaper, available and has M2 SSD port bult-in as standard. Also has 16GB and 32GB RAM options. And OPI5 Plus version has 2x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet ports which can run as home router. Orange Pi 5 is new SBC king rather then just cheap alternative RPI5.
@@richard.20000 orange pi is 200$ you kidding?
@@richard.20000 And the Orange Pi 5 has a 3.5mm audio socket.
@@richard.20000Orange Pi boards have historically been poorly supported on the software side, and models come and go on a whim. If it's just faster hardware and more features that you want, fair enough. If you require regular software updates and guarantees on long term support, you may find them lacking. There's a reason why the Raspberry Pi outsells the Orange Pi.
Yeah, they've become more powerful, but just shitty enough work heavier tasks that leaves you wanting more.
My finger was primed and ready to tap 7 times to skip forward a minute when you said "is this a good time to segue to our sponsor?" That was very good.
Also funny reference to LTT, though they only do a 10 s ad in the beginning wo only two taps in that specific case
Haha I love how you watch videos the same way I do :D
I know about how many taps per YT channel, too (like Corridor Digital, etc.). Muscle memory at this point!
It's been only a week and the N100 linked is $550 with similar products being $200+
Maybe the video created a shortage. I'm seeing them now for $159.98 with an additional $20 off coupon.
the pi 5 defeats the point of the pi imo
yep 30-40$ max
Good old pi3a still cheap and available.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W fills that role
Kind of. The point of the pi was to be a low power mirco controller based PCB with 40 GPIO pins not a desktop replacement. The pi 3B+ and pi 4 kind of went to the performance needed to be a good low cost low power general use desktop replacement.
How? Its $35-$40, same as RasPi 4. They just can't release 1GB and 2GB models until the 4/8 quantity is sufficiently scalped.
Hi Jeff, the little metal bar you wondered about is a VESA mount so you can put the mini-PC on the back of the monitor. Then you have an all-in-one computer. 😉
Technically all in two, but joined at the hip!
@@JeffGeerling With enough hot-glue, any two things can become one!
This is true @@JuryDutySummons
The main attraction for many RPi users is wanting to control or monitor external hardware with it.
For instance they might want to control LEDS, electric motors or monitor weather sensors etc.
All RPis all have a GPI(General Purpose Input Output) pin header that none of these Windows based alternatives have.
This is a main reason that many schools and colleges use RPis in their IT and science departments.
Get mini PC AND any microcontroller then, you'll get better performance too.
Prices chage with regions but for the most part you're correct.
The important thing in Pi is the GPIO header and what you can do with it; it was the reason Pi was useful and it's still useful today (SCART output, keys, led, audio over I2S), that's where Pi wins.
BUT.
The thing that is missing on a PC is that header and the flexibility given under linux... but PC hardware can do just fine as is and it wouldn't be that difficoult do build a USB (or even PCIe!) GPIO interface.
My first Pi cost $35, didn't need a fan or heat sink, and used an old USB phone charger (so free) for the power source. At first I used a couple of hand bent and drilled squares of Lexan for a "case" (eventually, cases got cheaper). It performed its automation job for all that time, until being retired a few years ago to a farm upstate (I'm told). My alternative at the time would have been a compact PC that would cost a lot more (even used), was the size of a couple of laptops stacked up, needed mains power to the case, consumed a lot of that power, had a noisy fan, and booted from a mechanical hard-drive. It WAS a no-brainer, but now the industry is very different. The Pi isn't a villain, it's a victim of evolving technology, and economies of scale.
If the Pi didn't exist, it's possible that companies wouldn't have noticed the value of mini-PCs and the market not be flooded with them now. I believe the Pi helped drive the industry to where it is today.
@@samyaspapathat's a really good take. Hadn't thought of that.
@samyaspapa - I absolutely agree! The Pi showed the possibility (and popularity) of a minimal system and then (just bad timing) went into hibernation. When people will pay >$300 for something that was $35, the market notices, and will pivot. The problem now is that Pi is chasing a market they can't compete with. I have yet to buy a 5, and I don't know if I will. I'd rather have a 3 with a little more memory, a little more performance, and less power and heat of the 4 & 5. Maybe Gb Ethernet and USB 3. If I want a small, fast Linux system, I'll buy one of these micro PCs and do an install.
You are not aware, but you alternative was ESP8266 or ESP32. As a person that came from microcontrollers before SBC, I never understood Raspberry Pi
The Pi abandoned their hobbyist base. It deserves villain status. The PI5 should run on a dozen different input voltages, should be insanely efficient by now (ie run for a week on a set of AA batteries), decrease the form factor even more. But they gave us a device that sucks energy, exhausts so much heat you need AN ACTIVE COOLER (wtf!), and can't even power it over a regular USB. The leadership team is a bunch of idiots and completely abandoned the hobby market in favor of trying to get some Emulators to run for teenagers. They will Nokia themselves pretty soon, as you said, the market has changed and they are not focusing on the right things.
The raspberry pi foundation became the villain for two reasons. During the shortage they rubbed many hobbyists face in it when they announced they were going against their own objectives. And decided to supply business customers over end users. Then hiring a surveillance cop. And blocking people when the pointed out issue.
Not just blocking people but outright mocking them!
I would not buy another pi simply based on the spy cop shenanigans
They had this kind of practices way before. It's just that fewer people had been on the receiving end.
@jeffgeerling, great content thanks. I wondered whether you found any malware on your w11 small form factor. Mine came preinstallled with lots of bloatware of which chrome had a confirmed bad / trojan based browser extension.
0:37 boy you got me hovering over the skip 10 sec button 😂
"Is it a good time to segway to a sponsor? No, its not" hilarious. Love it.
I'd say it's when the social media account of the manufacturing side attacked and blocked people for simply asking why they hired a former surveillance officer to a higher position in their company.
That's when they became the villain in my circles, too. The guy boasted about building surveillance gear out of raspberry pis and how much fun it was. When was that ever going to be received positively?
So much this.
yuge if true
@@burtburtist it happened about a year ago on both Twitter and Mastodon. Maybe 2 years ago. What is time anymore anyway?
@@JouvaMoufette time is a kind of weird soup
@0:40 THIS!
Or: How not wasting my time earned you a like and a subscriber!
love the channel jeff! I just bought my first raspberrypi and I'm really excited to try out some DIY projects and learn more about electronics. First thing I want to get for it is the NVME hat and a ssd but what are the differences between pineberry's hat drive and the one from pimoroni ? other than the lack of the LED do they both have the same performance?
About a year ago I bought a used dell miniPC instead of a Pi for a game emulator project. The experience definitely changed my opinion on SBCs, unless I need something very tiny and barebones, it almost always makes sense to go with these x86 miniPCs now that they’re about as cheap and almost always more powerful.
plus: mainstream. You can put Windows and Linux it, without tinkering. Easy and nice.
I did the exact same thing. Offices sell these in bulk for practically nothing.
13:01 Only _'really good'_ are you kidding me? That's the very best YT-channel out there..
Can you provide the name of that _'Ninja' screen_ ?
Hey Jeff think it’s cool you still read and respond to the comments loved the video. A sad effect of all videos like these is the great valued product mentioned is always bumped in price a bit by the seller once traffic is driven to it by a video (for reference the mini pc mentioned in this video is now around 160) nothing can really be done about it just stinks as a side effect lol. Thanks for the great video again.
I don’t think it was just SBC which stole Pi 4/5’s lunch. ESP32’s also became very popular, cheap and incredibly versatile. ESPHome made them very easy to configure compared to the days of .ino files.
True-plus the Pico and Zero 2 W eating the low end on Pi's own side.
Absolutely. ESP32 devices are absolute gems. Love them 💯
ESP32 have been ruling over Arduinos too. ESP32 Master Race
Especially the esp32c3 version. Yes its a bit different in terms of specs, but they often gets below $1.5
@@JeffGeerling There is a gap between the Pico and the PO. I can't wait until they fill it with something, be it more variants of the RP2040 (with more RAM) or a Coretex M3 or even M7, maybe something like a combination of the RP1 and the RP2040.
User-upgradable RAM is another advantage of the tiny PC. Also, Rpi OS does come with an office suite and other software which could be considered “bloat” if you don’t need it.
I think RPi became the enemy when they gave people what they said they wanted: a desktop replacement Pi.
considering windows doesn't come with any office software, but comes with _linkedin_ of all things, I would consider that a win for PiOS
@@Klaevin Jeff says the N100 machine with Win11 has Office at 18:42. Also, Win11 is pretty bad overall, so I'm not dying on that hill. But the hardware... I mean, you could run a plethora of Linux distros on any X86/X64 machine and a TON more Linux software than on the Pi.
Don't get me wrong, I like that RPi comes bundled with an Office suite. But you can't have that as a plus on the RPi and a minus on the Win11 PC. You either want Office (or Libreoffice or whatever) or not.
@@MarcosCodas I missed that part. Sorry. I would like to add that since you have to pay to keep office on windows, and it comes pre-installed, it's more if a bloat, than something that just comes bundled. I wouldn't call windows defender "bloat" but "1 free year of Norton!" definitely is.
This seems like a gray area and trying to say where the line is for "bloat" is going to be personal. I mean, some people consider GUIs as bloat.
And often more upgradeable than the specs indicate. With the exception of the N100's that have soldered on memory, of which I own a few, many of the N100's that use laptop memory can indeed be upgraded to 32G of ram instead of the spec 16G that Intel states. This is also true for the 8 core N305's as well. Most of my N100's have dual 2.5G NICs as well, plus wifi.
There are more expensive N100's with soldered memory - but these things are TINY, may as well be called MICRO'S .. We're talking 3 inches square by 2 inches tall. Some of these have FOUR 2.5 G NICs.
@@Klaevin Yep, totally
"Some assembly required"
The DIY nature of the Pi is not a negative at all IMO. In fact, it's to a large degree the very point.
A part of the use-case of these devices since its inception is to teach children/people about computing and electronics.
Making people navigate through relevant conventions, standards, processes, and procedures to do things gives them a logic and intuition for computers, and problem-solving skills that would simply not be there if all it was was a plug-and-play solution. And for experienced people, the assembly is either enjoyable, or so easy that it's no trouble at all.
The DIY nature and requirement of Pi's is a good thing.
Is the N100 "wall mount" really a VESA adapter to mount the mini PC on the back of a monitor for a sort of all-in-one?
On of the biggest selling points for me are the GPIO ports. With a Raspberry Pi you get a computer that also works as a full fledged microcontroller. In that aspect, it's just wonderful
You can buy a usb gpio port expander for 30 bucks. Problem solved.
@@originalmianos Yeah, of course, but that just defeats the purpose of a cheap pc+microcontroller. I buy used raspberry pi's for 15-20€
@@adriabruicortes490 Raspberry Pi also has nothing to do with cheap pc+microcontrollers anymore.
@@antagonista8122
That is why i buy gen 1-2 pi-s, they are dirt cheap (you can find 1rst gen for 5$), and they are still functioning pretty well with CLI systems. In bonus i found them more stable than rp4/5, they need less power (one of them is literally running from the USB-port of my router), and again, they are dirt cheap. You don't need the power of a pi5 for an MCU(especially with all the crap you need for it, 5A power supply and cables will get it anywhere but to the place you want to actively use a gpio at), there are better solutions for that.
@@adriabruicortes490 thats not what pi is for, get an arduino clone
If you drop screws on the ground, put a flashlight on the ground to cast long horizontal shadows from any little speck on the floor. Makes it so much easier to find things.
Or utilize a magnet, even though we still haven't figured out how they work
Don’t do this if you have young kids and pets because all you’ll find is the horror show of fur, hair, and crumbs blanketing the floor you thought was clean.
@@hamothemagnif8529 Every time I have to find a screw I find out how my carpet is not as clean as I think it is.
Have you tried talking to a scientist?
That works, or put a small magnet near the tip of your screwdriver to catch any screws as they come out.
I got a magnetic pad, it's about the size of a mousepad, and you can set a screw down on it and it stays put. It has grid lines so you can put the screws down and remember where they go.
I loved that sponsorship head-fake. :) You're a pro, man. Nice.
I think one of my original draws for the PI was power consumption. This video has made me reconsider if maybe its time to go the mini pc route going forward.
I chimed in on this issue on your channel a few months ago, but Pi’s let me down so much on limitations, and I moved on to
If there's one universal between Pis, mini PCs, homelabbing, and sysadminning, it's Ansible!
Yeah, for even less than the mini-PC.. if that's important.. you can get a 2011/2012 Mac Mini that's silent, runs Linux, and even being 13 years old will runs circles around the Pi 4 (except on power budget).
Besides N100 PCs offer upgradability. It can run VMs with sufficient memory since its just x64. So given the right N100, N200, N300 etc. boards, you could get configs with multiple ethernet ports and run it a VM machine with Proxmox in a compact size. There are tons of variants out there each offering their own uses as NAS, VM server, based on what I/O they provide.
@@thisisreallyme3130 Or an old iMac!
@@thisisreallyme3130 Those have weird power supplies though. Obviously not everyone is off grid with a less than top tier inverter but if you are, the PFC in those can cause some crazy LED flickering.
RPi started with hobbyists. Now they cater to corporations like Samsung, LG, Sharp, etc. who are putting RPi CM4's into commercial TVs used for marketing signage, etc. There's a ton of other corporate companies buying up RPi and all this contributed to the shortages the last few years because RPi gave those corporate customers priority. This made is next to impossible to source the best CM4's and RPi4's. I bought a couple TuringPi v2 cluster boards, couldn't obtain any CM4's (at least the SKUs I wanted). Finally TuringPi released their RK1 RockChip compatible with RPi4. The RK1 is better than the CM4 and I don't need a daughter board to put it into the TuringPiv2 and they sold big heatsinks with fans.
maybe if you tell them you're gonna buy 10k in 2 months and need some samples? 😆 Sound concerned about them being able to meet demand
Those marketing signages are shit too and cause accidents. They're bright as fuck and distract drivers it's bad for road safety.
It makes sense though. A commercial buyer like that, buying in bulk, will have an agreement for guaranteed delivery of the requested quantity and the requested time, with penalties for failing. So if supplies are short, Raspberry Pi Trading must prioritise meeting their contractual obligations to those customers.
And those customers like the Pi and CM4 because it's very well supported and low cost.
@@alvaros8769 "I buy 10k now" (to scalp,. but I don't need to tell them). So scalpers get priority (as the miners and scalpers did in the times of the GPU shortage).
@@vylbird8014 It's RPT's decision to enter those contracts. You can't *make* someone enter such a contract.
I noticed that the viewport frame stat on the Rpi5 said 1920x1080 when you cranked it to 4K, while the N100 viewport frame stayed at 1280x720. Not quite like for like on playback?
Is there a list that shows some more szenarios /real world use cases where you want to choose the n100 over the pi ? I mean even for a small media server I would chose the n100 because of hardware transcoding.
You should test GNKtec with Linux, ensuring it's the same system used on Raspberry Pi for a fair and accurate benchmark comparison.
"Geekbenches per watt" is my new favorite benchmark metric
Could the bit less performant Pi 5 could be, cause you did not change the PCI Express to Gen 3 ? If its running on Gen 2 you have much less speed on the NVME? So it should lower the Geekbench score, or am i wrong?
I have bar magnets on my table edge to hold tools. Turns out they are excellent for catching runaway screws too.
A few family members have asked for a simple office pc, and I always look for a cheap, refurbished small form factor Dell Optiplex.
The quality is fantastic, they're build to run 24/7, they usually have an i5 from 3rd to 6th gen, have 8 GB of memory and nowadays they sell them with new SSD's (so I don't have to replace the old HDD myself) for anywhere between $90 and $150.
But, that new GMKtec sure does look like a great option to me.
Where have you been finding your refurbished Optiplexes? Dell's website only has the $600/$700 refurbished ones.
Ebay
I bought a GMKTek NUC-G3. I love it. Around $155.
eBay is great.
@@NoName-py4en He means 2nd hnd trade ins or ex-lease. Depending on where you are a local pc shop may have them. Dell's are quite popular here & plenty of ex lease available. The other option maybe local recycler of e-waste as we have some here that rebuild dumped pc's. Even local businesses may have some in a back room due to upgrading
To be fair to the GMKtec, you're under no obligation to use windows. It is great that it comes with a license, but you can flash linux the same way you would with the pi.
I'd rather pay a bit less and not get the 'doze licence at all...
@@cooperised They probably paid more for the box it came in than the Windows license.
@@john_in_phoenix Yes, but reality is - we're talking Chinese here; not sure how many come with legit licenses, or if it was just "hacked" and not discoverable by Microsoft.
Apologies if this has been asked before but I've just ordered the GMKTec and wondered if anyone including Jeff had managed to successfully install and use an SSD in the M242 slot on these? Cheers
I have one. That 2242 slot is only for sata m.2 drives. It will not accept nvme.
Hey Jeff, great video, would anyone know if it would be possible to replace the motherboard in the NUC G3 to be compatible with DDR5 ram? As far as i'm aware the n100 is compatible with DDR5 ram but it seems most of the systems built with it use DDD4. I'd be intersted in replacing my pi with an n100 system but would love if I could upgrade it's RAM so the system could better handle emulation.
Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated, It would be great to just buy a G3 and swap out the motherboard but I have a striking suspicion that likely wouldn't work. Does anyone more familir with mini pcs know if it's practical to build an n100 system with DDR5 that is reasonably priced?
Definitely in the "dropping a damn screw on the ground and searching for it for 10+ minutes" club right with you. Between drones, 3D printers, and computers, I've dropped enough screws to fasten a car together...
You realize you *have* to wear shoes because otherwise you'll have a few screws embedded in your foot soon enough!
@@JeffGeerling That's how I find them!
Use a cloth or something soft on your workbench, the screws wont bounce when dropped. Use a cloth with a contrasting colour to what you are working with.
@@Voyajer. Keep in mind Jeff suffers from a chronic condition like a lot of us do. Mine is diabetes, he explained his in another great video. These conditions often reduce your body's ability to fight infections, so shoes are a MUST have for those who can't afford to have damage to their feet.
@@trulsvian Or one of those great magnetic pads from iFixit. :)
I actually bought the GMKtec NucBox G3 recently (I was also considering Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 Plus) - my use case is a home server / TV media center. I bought barebone version and added 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB NVMe (I didn't care about Windows and just installed Debian Linux on it). At least in my area the cost was pretty much te same for N100 vs Rasp 5 (Raspberry is less cost effective than it used to be and it gets worse if you have to buy a HAT for SSD).
One thing I can say is that Linux is a bit more energy efficient than Windows - at idle my GMKtec NucBox G3 was consuming 8 W. But then, I noticed that in BIOS pretty much all energy saving options are disabled by default. Once I enabled Render Standby for GPU, C states for CPU, all ASPM options for all PCIE slots that allow it and I turned off some things I don't use (like SATA controller, also disabled WiFi and Bluetooth in the OS) I finally ended with 4 - 4.5 W range in idle.
Yeah, that's more like it, your idle numbers mirror what's been reported on the STH forum megathread for the N100 devices. I've got the N100's older brother, an N5105, and with 2-3 2.5 Gbe ports active and no real BIOS tuning, it sits a little over 8.5 w running OpenWrt linux...
How do you add a load of io pins to the n100 so you can do all the fun stuff like you can with the pi? Do people sell pci boards with them or similar?
To be honest, the comparison is a bit silly since you don't need to run windows on the N100 PC, and you don't need to run Linux on the Raspberry Pi. What has happened lately is that a lot of people who used to use a Raspberry Pi as a multi-purpose device. For their web server, network storage or emulation. (And didn't really need what made the RPi unique, lite the GPIO or camera interface) have found the device a lot less desirable these days due to price... Personally I bought a brand new z75 ITX motherboard with used parts; a core i5 3570K + 16GB DDR3. The total was ~80$ incl shipping from China (I added a GTX1050Ti I had laying around). The great thing about the motherboard that it had full PCIe 3.0 4x NVMe support + six SATA ports. For me it works great as a storage server, HTPC + living room gaming machine. Power draw isn't much of an issue since it isn't always turned on anyway (And yes, I use Linux on it). It was cheaper than a RPi5, especially since I had a motherboard and PSU laying around.
I think this is what is starting to happen. Not all people need a RPi for every project, and the pricing competition of different devices is becoming quite fierce for the general purpose stuff. So the RPi is starting to settle in more to the projects in which it was designed for.
Spot on. Everything has gotten more expensive, and some companies have been hit harder or have become greedier. I'm not sure which it is in this case, maybe greedier if they continue on this path of less value / higher prices. Wacom has a $2.5k 17in Pro tablet touch screen -- the competitors offer somewhat similiar offerings for $1k less.... End of story, some companies doing rather poorly evaluating how much their customers can stomach. Even companies have a limit to what they can permit in 2x or 3x recessions in a row.
For me the biggest problem is people using raspberry pi for purposes that would be better served by a repurposed thin client or old office pc.
This video was timely. Just last week I decided I'm done with the Pi. There's tons of applications that it's perfect for, but it just doesn't suit my emulation needs anymore. I have a Pi 4 running Retropie and it was alright a few years ago when I finished the project, but now that mini pcs are at this price point they're just the best option. I wanted to do this again with the Pi 5, but it's just too much trouble for too little return. Supply shortages, a world of crappy cases that don't fit my needs, waiting months or years for the Retropie team to cobble together a stable build, poor performance...I bought the exact same GMKtec a few months ago for an arcade cabinet project and the thing doesn't run into any problems until I try to run a Dreamcast game. For $320 I could get something that runs PS3 emulators.
Hell for 320 you could get your hands on the Deck.
I think for less than 320 you could get an actual ps3. something that occurred to me during the video was the repurposing of used school chrome books. Their silicon is still working but they get limited by Google's updates to phase them out within two years. It is way more work than the mini PC and possibly the Pi as well since you have to basically jailbreak them but from my understanding, the price to performance not including sweat equity is not so bad.
I saw on amazon Intel mini pc with i7 11th gen cpu, with Iris XE graphics for $199 (16GB ram + 512GB NVME).
my athlon 5150 runs dreamcast games with ease lol
and i bought that 8 years ago with mini itx motherboard for £50
I have to admit. I have been playing with Raspberry Pis forever. I have about a dozen of them in various sizes. I've build a NAS, an OpenVPN server, a Media player, a rain detector, remote hedgehog camera system, CCTV DVR etc etc - but this December I bought 2 BMAX mini PCs for around $100 (well £85 TBH) each. I now have a PC NAS (Openmediavault) and I'm using the other as a media player. I can't imagine buying another Pi unless I need something with digital I/O.
The reason I like my RPi is how little power it uses, which gives two benefits:
1. I don't mind keeping it running 24/7 for a small-time server, or doing some stuff overnight that takes a lot of time. I don't have to mind the electric bill with RPi running all the time.
2. It produces relatively little heat so using it with a fanless aluminum case like Flirc means that it runs totally silent. I formerly had a RPi case with a small fan and its high-pitched whirring noise was driving me nuts, especially at nights.
Also, since there is no airflow inside a passive-cooling aluminum case, it also means it is not sucking dust into the case all the time either. The fan-equipped RPi was very dusty in no time, including the fan itself.
Now I have a fanless Flirc case and I love how totally silent it is, and still runs quite cool (basically the whole aluminum case acts as a big heatsink, brilliant design). Passive cooling at its best.
Can you link me to the case you use? I'm interested at seeing what's out there
new subscriber here, may i know what keyboard are you using?
I never could find the "$5 Pi Zero" for under $25. That's the problem, they've always been way more costly than their advertised price. With the exception of the Pi Pico, with all the RP2040 clones, I can actually get one for $4. The black clone anyway.
Pi Pico is also a waste of money, it's better to spend that buck on ESP32.
The N100's iGPU is its major ace in the hole - 4K HEVC transcoding, more emulation horsepower, real hardware-accelerated video editing chops... The Pi costs too much and delivers too little.
Also, the N100 has many more PCIe lanes, leading to the existence of cool router / NAS boards based on it.
@@WhiteG60 no matter how you slice it, the N100 can stream my BluRays, and the RPi 5 can't.
@@WhiteG60 TH-cam doesn't serve videos in HEVC, of course it's gonna suck. AV1 decode should've been included
@@marshallb5210it’s included on the n100. It can play 8k60 TH-cam in av1. It’s amazing.
@@WhiteG60 The problem is that it only has a HEVC hardware decoder!... no H264, no AV1, no VP9... major letdown!
Thanks for that very informative video. I've heard alot about Rasperry Pi but never really looked into it. I know a lot of folks use it for SDR(Software Defined Radio).
unrelated question, but what keyboard you are using?
The most surprising thing about this video was how fast 20 minutes can go. Great video, keep up the good work.😊
I would say its a scary thing
I'd love to see what the same N100 machine would in Geekbench with a thin Linux distro running.
@18:50 Climpchamp is a awesome video editing software made in mostly Brisbane Australia (Where I am) before being bought out by MS. It was originally made to work inside a browser using service workers and I think you were able to upload 4gb of video and edit it which was pretty cool. I spoke to the original owners are various coding meetups in Brisbane around the 2017's and they spoke about the pain points of creating such tech.
What about i/o pins? Can you control any motor or sensors with the other device?
It has USB and Wifi, you'd use something more suited to interfacing motors and sensors (ie running an RTOS) like an esp32 for the gpios and have that talk to the main PC over usb serial, wifi or bluetooth.
The real problem with Raspberry Pi is just their availability.
Their popularity still means that they are the best choice in most cases, none of the alternatives have it's community support.
It's just that they seem incapable at scaling their production to the demand of their product.
Each model seems to have had this issue at launch... but most of them eventually hit a steady state. The Pi 4 was the first to achieve that equilibrium-then the shortages hit.
The CM4 and Pi Zero 2 W were both almost never available, relative to their lifespan, and are only now available in quantity :(
Hopefully the Pi 5 will overcome the supply/demand shock soon-I certainly hope the CM5 will come out of the gate better than CM4.
Well after COVID it seems to be that any new popular device,chip, MOSFET etc gets an early availability issue
Over builting production line will have consciousness later on
at 60$ starting its just not worth it.
It depends on your use case. For desktop, this micro PC is much better. You can install any Linux distro on it and upgrade it for many years. The Pi is better for experimenting with and IoT.
X64 hardware is sufficiently interchangeable, that you will have good driver support and don't get many issues ARM SBCs other than the Pi can be a mess though.
A Pi is probably still a good recommendation to someone who is very new to the field and the best for some use cases. But if you just need a low power server, just get a miniPC.
The Pi’s main strength is education and tinkering. An N100 will destroy the Pi in raw specs but not necessarily be the best educational tool. My parents got me a Raspberry Pi 1B for Christmas over a decade ago and I’m so thankful for the learning the Pi ecosystem has provided me.
For servers I run low power Dells but if I ever have kids they’re getting Pi’s!
The Pi ecosystem stopped being educational when the foundation concentrated on add-ons, more ram, cpu cycles and industrial components. It's now nothing like what Upton said was needed, wanted or would be built.
A decade ago there was nothing to beat a low power Pi...
Id rather use a raspberry pi than anything with a Intel CPU 😂
'The Pi’s main strength is education and tinkering.'
Not once they decide to cover the industrial market for more money without also pumping out the few extra to satisfy said educational and tinkering market.
@@infernaldaedra Why?
as a diy guy id personally just get the mini pc lol. good vid man
Tried to find a reference to this "Ninja" thing you mentioned, but didn't see anyone write or ask about it, so here I am:
What is that, and is it a capture device, or something I've missed out on?
Edit: Checked your description and didn't see it listed, so am grateful for your reply - thanks !
The reference is at the following section: 10:32 - "Pi first boot"
Edits to fix typos, etc
It's called an Atomos Ninja V
@@JeffGeerling So Jeff, is it just a monitor, or can it record also?
@@JeffGeerling I must admit, the comparison between the R Pi and the mini PC is rather "worlds apart", just based on what those two things can do.
We both know this first-hand, right? I got into the Raspberry Pi scene a bit late, so ended up with a Pi zero w - it's a fascinating little piece of kit, if you ask me!
Thanks for the objective testing, I may have done this myself, but I'm glad you did it for me ! :)
I don't see raspi as a villain but I do think prioritizing commercial customers was a mistake. It let the scalper market thrive and drove most hobbyists to look at alternatives.
I know I haven't been able to afford continuing with them and it affected me in a way where I haven't been interested to see if the hobbyist market for raspi has recovered.
Love the product. Just can't get them, or couldn't for long enough that I've erased the platform as an option for my projects, in my own mind.
I bought one of those N100 Mini PCs for a jank NAS. Plugged in a USB 5-bay SATA JBOD hard drive dock filled with 10TB drives, and shared them on my network. No fancy backup software or anything, just drag-and-drop. One drive is used for Jellyfin media. Once I got it up and running, I run it headless, just sitting on a shelf beside my desk with the dock. It doesn't do anything except share the drives, and encoding when I'm using Jellyfin. It does exactly what I need it to do.
Neat. Maybe I will build this.been needing a nas for a while now
@@radnukespeoplesminds I could have went other ways and did things right, using something like TrueNAS, but I wanted it to be super simple and easy to use. Bought everything from Amazon, and wasn't all that expensive, in my opinion. 100ish for the mini pc, 189ish for the dock, and about 150 for each drive. I'm sure I can set it up somehow to do full backups of my machines on the network, but that's not the point of it. I just use it to keep ISOS of stuff I work on, family photos/videos, and my massive collection of media.
I guess it's not stupid/jank if it works.
Hey jeff, Thanks for the video. I wonder, if the raspberry PI cant handle 4k, how does the new TVs run android can play 4k videos with probably half of RPis spec.
Could you check UP7000? It said SBC and same cpu of that minipc. but its size is same as raspberry pi.
As a person who want to build small pc for wearable technology, the size and weight is very important.
According to their device pictures, they used bulky heat sink, I presume it could be lighter and smaller.
I wonder if you can suggest any alternative in your review.
I used to do retro pie for my arcade cabs, and have switched to running launchbox on PC with mini PCs. It got to where a pie wasn’t actually cheaper, and while windows kinda sucks, it’s more “known” in how it sucks than raspbian is. (I have a Linux laptop for work and work as a software engineer on Linux systems. I’m not scared of Unix. But retropie/raspbian behaves weird at times).
I don’t hate pies, but mini PCs got better and cheaper as pies got more expensive, and it’s kinda hard to get past that.
How do you get around the Windows update junk, marketing, Microsoft Account, etc. nonsense? There is a big appeal for a "launch and go" system for dedicated stuff (I do robots rather than cabs).
@@RobotWrangler - fair points. I still have Win 10 on some of my arcade mini PCs which avoids some of the more recent Microsoft toxicity, and the newer ones that have Windows 11, I did in fact jump through some hoops with not connecting them to the network and issuing command line overrides when setting them up to allow me to procede with local users, and not letting them download updates with metered connections, which still worked at least on my machines. So it's true that there is futzing to do with Windows, at least if you don't want to deal with Microsoft's bullpoop. But there is initial setup with a pie too, and I still find it easier to maintain the game software on the windows box than I did on the pie. Your mileage may vary for robots.
@@jmcminn1076 Why not install Linux on them?
Proton is amazing nowadays and you could setup something with gamescope like steamdecks use to have a proper feeling setup
@@RobotWrangler It's been awhile since I've installed Windows, but last I heard, with 10 or 11 you can just unplug the internet during start-up and it'll let you create a fully local account.
The updates AFAIK aren't dodgeable. And yea, they seem to do internal marketing like pitching you use OneDrive, and I'm sure that gets annoying, but I think that stuff is pretty minimal, may even be able to be turned off.
There's def. a little extra setup in Windows comparatively. But it's also only a 1-time thing. You spend 20 minutes doing it one day, and you shouldn't have to again. The updates suck.....but Ubuntu/Debian Linux isn't much better at this point. I get kernel updates like every couple of weeks and I feel like I'm constantly either restarting or delaying them. And one thing I'll say about Windows, I used to use it regularly, and only 1 time in the past ~15 years or so have I had a Windows update bork my system. But I've lost more than my fair share of video drivers to kernel updates in Linux. And then sometimes there's problems to rebuild the module and then it's like "OK, I guess my Tuesday afternoon is gonna be 'debug Ubuntu' day instead of work."
@@jmcminn1076 Why not install linux on your mini pc? Am I missing something?
I think they choose the role of villain when they literally hired a guy to advocate for police surveillance use.
PIs recently got my attention because I was looking for something viable as a native ARM build node for personal use instead of cloud which I work with. Having joinged the PI5 to the cluster which main node is just an Intel NUC I thought I might have to test various connectivity things and performand but having not defined any affinity when I booted it I found it serving the metallb L2 LoadBalancer and the Istio Ingressgateway - images for K8S not a problem and cluster compatibility was just amazingly simple so I can now taint this and target just ARM based builds to it. Mine has the Pimoroni SSD board and a 500Gb SSD.. it's barebones and the research on putting a case around it suggest that putting anything over the top is not a good idea AND with the small airgap between the underneath SSD board means you really want a cage of some sort for the ventillation not a case. Anyhow, great bit of kit and workable in this next tier.
So the pi5 has better power efficiency, but a tiny bit more expensive; but these chinese minipc I am skeptical. I am not sure about GMCtec minipcs but the ACEMAGIC AD08 has spyware malware on it does this one have it? Thanks for the comparison test...
I think a lot of people had a simmilar "journey" as me. I started hosting a few Network Services like Pihole, NAS, ... on a PI 2 where eventually I moved on to a Celeron J3455 NUC which I set up with Proxmox and 16 GB of RAM from which I now moved on to a Ryzen 2700x Server with 64 GB RAM.
xeons golds are going used for ~30/40e now, and dual mobos+~64gb of ram for 'em for ~200. for 300e you can have 48x2 lcpus at home (with that old atx box and a decent psu), that's 1ghz clpu for 1euro :-) rasberry pi's 5 bogomips shoud cost at most 10e compared to that :-)