Bought a mini pc with N100 and 16GB of ram, SSD included, no need to buy an enclosure, everything setup and ready, just needed to install Linux from a USB stick with the normal procedure.
I might have chosen RPI5 if it had 16GB ram, but I went with x86 and I like it because there are no software issues anymore (redpanda was not working on rpi)
I run a couple of N100s with 32GBs of RAM. They're great machines, but they are actively cooled, so they have dust (and noise) issues, and they're bigger than a RPi 5.
On the other hand, I have an "armor case" for my RPi5 which has contacts for every major IC on the board, and it runs at most at 50 degrees C (if I saturate it to the point of choking).
Plus it's way smaller, and there's no performance or software problems. One of the hidden tricks is to get an A2 card like Kingston Canvas Go+, which completely removes SD card related lag from the system.
Yep its a better deal. Counterintuitively, the N97 is newer and has higher performance than the N100, especially its built-in graphics. It does consume more power though (12W vs 6W).
Ah the ol' obligatory "a mini pc is much better" reply we see on every. single. Raspberry Pi post. I kid but seriously do we need to do this every time we discuss the RPi?
The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.
Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:
"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.
I feel like it kind of needs to be said, ever since RaspberryPis stopped being price-competitive. Most of the original sales pitch for why you should adopt an extremely weird proprietary ARM-variant was centred on price.
It needs to be said as long as RPI's are this expensive they were supposed to be VERY cheap SBC's and instead they're approaching and in some cases exceeding full commercial boxed products
Because there are a shocking number of folks that don’t realize just how cheap you can get a used mini-pc off eBay. And if the only thing you’re missing is gpio that can easily be added.
And frankly our planet needs to do a lot more reusing in that “reduce, reuse, recycle” system if we plan on leaving anything to our great grandchildren.
The reason that safety briefings on every single plane take-off is not because people might be flying for the first time- it's to reiterate important points to bury important information in your mind despite not using it.
Our brains are extremely good at getting rid of data that it thinks is not relevant, if you don't apply knowledge or information your mind will "optimise" it away. Hence, the infinite repetition.
The same is true here. If you're buying a raspberry pi just for hosting: it's foolish not to consider alternatives.
This is important for two reasons, and less important for a third.
1) It free's up supply of rPIs for people who will actually use them for GPIO and education
2) It actually gives people a better, more wholistic experience, at a better price.
3) It forces people to consider the reason for purchase; instead of piling up some e-waste because the RPI was purchased for a yet unknown reason "I can use it for anything*".
If you need a PC, as in a desktop or a generic server, by all means buy a PC.
If you need a ton of fast and sophisticated GPIO, small size, light weight. passive cooling, battery-powered operation, a PC starts looking a bit problematic. That's where an RPi fits in.
I don't know, all my use cases where I needed GPIO are better satisfied by an ESP32. If I need more compute, I connect the ESP32 to my server via the internet.
I have an Orange Pi 5 16G, which was a lot more powerful than an RPi4, and more available when I purchased it. I generally like it. It does the headless server things I'm looking for, but it has had a few quirks over time. Distro support isn't great but Armbian runs well.
For the price, and what I use, I would probably buy a mini PC at this point.
In general, with boards that aren't Raspberry Pi, always focus on the now, and not the things it should be able to do later. Often they're stuck on a kernel with whatever patches they run at release. Sometimes the community fixes that, but not always.
I'm not the OP but have a little collection of mini pcs (5 of them) so, if you'll allow me, I'll comment on why I have them...
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
At my work we use NUCs a lot - we put them into custom enclosure together with touch screen (1920x1080, not something small), then mount that on CNC machines to let users browse work plans, access ERP etc., get measuring data from dislocated unit, etc.
I just bought one for 120€ (from AliExpress). I will use it to replace my small 2-disk NAS by adding an usb HDD dock and to host some small personal servers (for managing recipes, groceries, tools, downloads, etc, nothing fancy).
I initially considered a rpi5 + SATA HAT because I don't need much power and the N100 is definitely more power hungry than a RPi but the price tag that included 16gb ram and 512gb SSD convinced me to buy the minipc.
I also considered buying a N100 motherboard with 4-6 SATA port to not rely on a single usb port for the NAS port but it was more expensive than the PC and without RAM or hard drive
There's been much debate about Raspberry Pi straying from its mission to provide affordable computers. I disagree.
Raspberry Pi offers models ranging from $10 to $120, all readily available — more so than ever.
Adjusted for inflation, the original $35 Raspberry Pi Model B (launched 2012) would be $50 today. The Raspberry Pi 5 2GB is also $50 today and vastly outperforms the original, delivering far greater bang for buck.
Though I can’t speak to their internal decisions, it’s seems from the outside that they continue to try to maximise the value of the Raspberry Pi while maintaining the original price point.
Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni, one of the first Raspberry Pi resellers.
Finally. I was seriously looking at competitor's boards for more RAM. Now despite some of the competition being faster, the convenience and ecosystem factor is in favor of the RPi, and I'm in. Now, if I can actually get one...
I agree. While the hardware is a bit lower spec'd than what other SBC manufacturers like Radxa, Banana Pi and others have to offer, even at a better price, nothing comes close to how Raspberry Pi supports their products.
You get solid OS support right from the beginning, and HATs are designed for their boards.
I still have a Raspberry Pi 1st Gen running as an OpenVPN server, which I upgraded last year to the back-then latest official Raspbian 12.
I also have a Radxa ROCK 5B with 16 GB RAM which is crazy fast compared to the Raspi 4 (this R4 is currently the core of my network), but the OS support is a horrible experience.
So I just ordered mine, which will allow me to finally upgrade and merge 2 Raspi 4, and move the MongoDB database from the Radxa over to the Raspi again, since MongoDB stopped supporting devices up to and including the Raspi 4 around 3 years ago.
The only two issues I had with Raspberry Pi was the problem they caused when they upgraded the camera stack, and now the move from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS, which will affect around 5 of my older, low memory boards (mostly Zeros).
One thing that frustrates me after running Raspberry Pis for years is that RPiOS doesn't really support in-place upgrades. You have to more or less set them up a new with each major release, despite the Debian origins where this is of course robustly possible.
I hope this is a one-off expensive Pi and not an indication of a new pricing strategy. It would be very disappointing if these hacker computers became expensive toys.
The article is very feel-good with the carbon credits and all, but the inflating pricing is a disservice to the hacker community. It shouldn’t be sort of greenwashed.
Locally (Spain), the new 16GB model costs ~140 EUR, while the 2GB model costs ~60 EUR. So if you just want a very cheap RPI, seems it's still out there, you just cannot aim for 16GB (or go for something else than RPI).
Indeed, there are options. But rpi 3 was launched for €32/$35. I hope rpi 6 is not launched starting at €120/$120+, that’s all I’m saying.
It would make it inaccessible for hobby projects that need more than one and to most kids that need to buy it for computer science classes (or schools that budget for these things). Those were very important purposes for pi, the main purposes, according to some.
And yes, one might say — but inflation. To which I would say — bust cost of living crisis. Anyways, computing should be accessible to everyone, it’s what Steve Jobs called a bicycle for the brain. If raspberry cannot afford do make this pi cheaper, they should design one they can afford.
So long as there are cheap pis (as you mention), I will continue to love the brand. Even if they have premium models. But if they shift to more expensive pricing for all pis, which is sort of what seems to be happening very gently, that would be disappointing. That’s my point.
It depends on intended usage. If I want to run it as a desktop computer - this is one case (who would do it - another question). It is very different if I want to deploy it in every room of my home. RPi used to be the solution for the second type of problem: ad-hoc smart things with exceptional connectivity and above-average computing power.
Who are these for? Raspberry Pi made sense as an educational and dirt cheap hobbyist platform when it sold for ~$30. At $120 + accessories it's just another expensive toy.
We use them for all kinds of one off R&D projects at work. University students and researchers build all kinds of stuff with these. I know several companies who build low volume specialty industrial applications powered by RPi hardware. In all these cases the difference between $50 and $150 is meaningless
You can find plenty of YouTube videos for that but I bet you rarely find anyone who actually uses it that way on a daily basis. The performance and desktop experience are just miserable.
I covered a few potential use cases in my blog post [1], but I'll list them here for brevity:
1. LLMs / AI: you can run llama2:13b on the Pi 5 natively, though at a pokey 1.4 t/s or so. Training small models for use with camera projects is easier too.
2. Web apps / consolidating containers: You could run a few 'beefy' websites off one Pi, as they're often memory constrained more than CPU-bound nowadays (my Drupal site requires 256 MB per PHP thread). (Though an N100 mini PC could be a better option if you care less about the energy efficiency).
3. Experimental gamers (probably like 1/10,000th the size of the other markets) who want to run modern AAA games with eGPUs on arm64... I'm one of like 10 people I've heard of who have attempted this lol
4. Clustering enthusiasts: usually we have more dollars than sense, and having arm64 nodes that cost $120 new with 16 GB of RAM per node means we can have more raw container or MPI capacity than with 8 GB nodes...
However you can get an N100-based box for about $150 (including shipping) with 16GB RAM and 500GB NVMe storage[1].
The N100 has a more powerful CPU[2], and can use OpenVINO which llama.cpp supports, so better token performance than the Pi. The N100 has far better storage performance due to x4 M.2 slot, and if you need even more RAM you can upgrade[3] it to 32GB.
The RPi 5 was a very niche board to begin with, the 16GB option at $120 even more so IMO.
If you want cheaper (sort of) K8s nodes, with similar more compute power / RAM you can reuse old devices (smartphones, tablets) and run postmarketOS on them.
I mean it's funny that people even have to ask, pretty much every piece of software treats RAM like it's free and unlimited nowadays. Even the most memory conscious cpp programs are so bloated at compile time that you need swap to even build them on <8GB boards.
16 GB is really a minimum for anything that's not embedded.
Bigger caches. Making entire RAMFS or tmpfs partitions (filesystems but in RAM) for applications or tinkering with things. https://wiki.debian.org/ramfs , Virtualization / VMs, databases. Loading large files into RAM instead of having to read by row/column on a HD.
I'd rather have more RAM available unused than not have RAM available and need it. Been the general rule of thumb for me for the last 30ish years.
RAMFS is a genius idea. That solves most of the SD card health and speed issues without needing to get a whole hard drive. I know Puppy[0] and MX Linux[1] were made to run like that too.
Outside of a real use-case, RPi products are well-polished and fun to play with. There are few other products with an overall presentation - from design to marketing - that are as clean and well done. Personally, I enjoy supporting that.
>Who needs 16GB ram on a PI! Like what are the actual use cases?
If you use it as you would a PC then it's actually not enough RAM. I have 16GB on my laptop and desktop computers both, and as I always keep browsers running they're always out of memory, even with 16GB swap added.
Just came in to my office.. and my office computer with the same spec had killed all the desktop applications due to memory overuse, just as it always does when I leave it alone for a few days.
Granted, I do have a lot of windows and tabs open, that's because I need to move away from stuff and do other things for a while, but when I go back I need it to be there just as I left it. But browsers are eating memory. All of them. Chromium, Firefox, Vivaldi.. you name it.
For something working as a desktop PC I'm looking for way more RAM than a meagre 16GB. For a Pi which I use just for a single purpose I'm fine with those I have.. 2GB , 4GB, 8GB (which I use for different things). I'll never run a browser on any of them though. No way.
K8s control plane node or even worker node.
4 get you a single cp and 3 workers which most helm charts require.
There's a pi hosting provider which is reasonably cheap, like 7€/m, yearly payment, but only 100mbit connectivity.
Still good enough for a learning cluster.
Where can you get that for less than 28€/month?
It's theoretically viable to run a 16TB ZFS NAS, which would be perfectly respectable for SoHo/homelab workloads.
I've been looking to upgrade my aging PowerEdge T20 (also hate the fan noise), this is looking very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Geerling makes a video about this exact use case.
The latest android phones are adopting 16GB now, so the SBC's for equivalent performance are going to do so too. One use of them is running android for development purposes among many many others. They make great self hosting servers that are really low power.
Seriously, these days, running a few dozen containers requires so much ram, I'm running a Odroid with 32GB ram and finally feeling safe from memory exhaustion.
I can't think of a single use case that wouldn't be served by a much faster MiniPC that after counting power supply, storage, box etc. would fall in a similar price ballpark. RPi and similar boards are a godsend when one needs easily accessible GPIOs without external interfaces adding points of failure and cost, but usually the amount of memory required in those contexts is much lower.
The bigger the system, the smaller the role of the CPU/GPU power consumption has in the overall sticker price. I would expect a 10TB-memory server with a couple hundred petabytes of flash storage to cost more or less the same regardless of what's the CPU inside it.
I think it's mainly for embedding into products that require a standalone AI dataset of some sort. Robotics, perhaps, or production line defect detection.
Readit News
I might have chosen RPI5 if it had 16GB ram, but I went with x86 and I like it because there are no software issues anymore (redpanda was not working on rpi)
On the other hand, I have an "armor case" for my RPi5 which has contacts for every major IC on the board, and it runs at most at 50 degrees C (if I saturate it to the point of choking).
Plus it's way smaller, and there's no performance or software problems. One of the hidden tricks is to get an A2 card like Kingston Canvas Go+, which completely removes SD card related lag from the system.
Here is a comparison between the models: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/04/intel-processor-n95-...
I keep saying this despite being somewhat a fan of ARM. If x86 or subset of x86 opens up it will still be able to compete in many areas.
Oh well. Pat is gone now I need to remind myself I shouldn't care about Intel.
The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.
Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:
"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.
And frankly our planet needs to do a lot more reusing in that “reduce, reuse, recycle” system if we plan on leaving anything to our great grandchildren.
Deleted Comment
Our brains are extremely good at getting rid of data that it thinks is not relevant, if you don't apply knowledge or information your mind will "optimise" it away. Hence, the infinite repetition.
The same is true here. If you're buying a raspberry pi just for hosting: it's foolish not to consider alternatives.
This is important for two reasons, and less important for a third.
1) It free's up supply of rPIs for people who will actually use them for GPIO and education
2) It actually gives people a better, more wholistic experience, at a better price.
3) It forces people to consider the reason for purchase; instead of piling up some e-waste because the RPI was purchased for a yet unknown reason "I can use it for anything*".
If you need a ton of fast and sophisticated GPIO, small size, light weight. passive cooling, battery-powered operation, a PC starts looking a bit problematic. That's where an RPi fits in.
But wonder if the competition has caught up.
Seems like lots of other options with more power, cheaper. Or maybe not. I'm kind of looking for an opinion on this.
For the price, and what I use, I would probably buy a mini PC at this point.
In general, with boards that aren't Raspberry Pi, always focus on the now, and not the things it should be able to do later. Often they're stuck on a kernel with whatever patches they run at release. Sometimes the community fixes that, but not always.
Also not an argument for users buying 2GB/4GB models I suppose.
Building any server on a SD card or external HD is just causing stress for their future self.
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
I run: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, VPN, Nextcloud, Qbittorrent. More things are on https://selfh.st
Everything is in Docker + Portainer. Makes it super easy to manage. The setup uses 17 watts.
THe n100 is tiny, but has enough power to run 3-8 VMs. I used to use KVM, but moved recently to proxmox after I wore out the disk.
I still have some Pis about to do GPIO stuff, but for _serving_ I used x86
Each n100 has an average power draw of < 8watts at the wall (thats when doing lots of CPU.)
I initially considered a rpi5 + SATA HAT because I don't need much power and the N100 is definitely more power hungry than a RPi but the price tag that included 16gb ram and 512gb SSD convinced me to buy the minipc.
I also considered buying a N100 motherboard with 4-6 SATA port to not rely on a single usb port for the NAS port but it was more expensive than the PC and without RAM or hard drive
I use them as xcp-ng hosts.
Basically a small server for self-hosted applications.
Raspberry Pi offers models ranging from $10 to $120, all readily available — more so than ever.
Adjusted for inflation, the original $35 Raspberry Pi Model B (launched 2012) would be $50 today. The Raspberry Pi 5 2GB is also $50 today and vastly outperforms the original, delivering far greater bang for buck.
Though I can’t speak to their internal decisions, it’s seems from the outside that they continue to try to maximise the value of the Raspberry Pi while maintaining the original price point.
Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni, one of the first Raspberry Pi resellers.
You get solid OS support right from the beginning, and HATs are designed for their boards.
I still have a Raspberry Pi 1st Gen running as an OpenVPN server, which I upgraded last year to the back-then latest official Raspbian 12.
I also have a Radxa ROCK 5B with 16 GB RAM which is crazy fast compared to the Raspi 4 (this R4 is currently the core of my network), but the OS support is a horrible experience.
So I just ordered mine, which will allow me to finally upgrade and merge 2 Raspi 4, and move the MongoDB database from the Radxa over to the Raspi again, since MongoDB stopped supporting devices up to and including the Raspi 4 around 3 years ago.
The only two issues I had with Raspberry Pi was the problem they caused when they upgraded the camera stack, and now the move from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS, which will affect around 5 of my older, low memory boards (mostly Zeros).
One thing that frustrates me after running Raspberry Pis for years is that RPiOS doesn't really support in-place upgrades. You have to more or less set them up a new with each major release, despite the Debian origins where this is of course robustly possible.
The article is very feel-good with the carbon credits and all, but the inflating pricing is a disservice to the hacker community. It shouldn’t be sort of greenwashed.
It would make it inaccessible for hobby projects that need more than one and to most kids that need to buy it for computer science classes (or schools that budget for these things). Those were very important purposes for pi, the main purposes, according to some.
And yes, one might say — but inflation. To which I would say — bust cost of living crisis. Anyways, computing should be accessible to everyone, it’s what Steve Jobs called a bicycle for the brain. If raspberry cannot afford do make this pi cheaper, they should design one they can afford.
So long as there are cheap pis (as you mention), I will continue to love the brand. Even if they have premium models. But if they shift to more expensive pricing for all pis, which is sort of what seems to be happening very gently, that would be disappointing. That’s my point.
It costs $120. If you're not an impoverished person living in the developing world, this is not "expensive."
And it’s not even low power any more.
Wouldn't that be the new Mac mini?
1. LLMs / AI: you can run llama2:13b on the Pi 5 natively, though at a pokey 1.4 t/s or so. Training small models for use with camera projects is easier too.
2. Web apps / consolidating containers: You could run a few 'beefy' websites off one Pi, as they're often memory constrained more than CPU-bound nowadays (my Drupal site requires 256 MB per PHP thread). (Though an N100 mini PC could be a better option if you care less about the energy efficiency).
3. Experimental gamers (probably like 1/10,000th the size of the other markets) who want to run modern AAA games with eGPUs on arm64... I'm one of like 10 people I've heard of who have attempted this lol
4. Clustering enthusiasts: usually we have more dollars than sense, and having arm64 nodes that cost $120 new with 16 GB of RAM per node means we can have more raw container or MPI capacity than with 8 GB nodes...
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/who-would-buy-raspber...
The N100 has a more powerful CPU[2], and can use OpenVINO which llama.cpp supports, so better token performance than the Pi. The N100 has far better storage performance due to x4 M.2 slot, and if you need even more RAM you can upgrade[3] it to 32GB.
The RPi 5 was a very niche board to begin with, the 16GB option at $120 even more so IMO.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007511663921.html (semi-random example)
[2]: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Raspberry-Pi-5-Benchm...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/179c9m1/comment/k5... (needs to be single module, not dual)
Price is precisely linear, not polynomial! $5/GiB (price= $40 + $5 * xGiB)
The graph isn't spaced correctly on the x axis, which causes confusion.
Shameless plug: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/
16 GB is really a minimum for anything that's not embedded.
I'd rather have more RAM available unused than not have RAM available and need it. Been the general rule of thumb for me for the last 30ish years.
[0] https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ [1] https://mxlinux.org/
If you use it as you would a PC then it's actually not enough RAM. I have 16GB on my laptop and desktop computers both, and as I always keep browsers running they're always out of memory, even with 16GB swap added.
Just came in to my office.. and my office computer with the same spec had killed all the desktop applications due to memory overuse, just as it always does when I leave it alone for a few days.
Granted, I do have a lot of windows and tabs open, that's because I need to move away from stuff and do other things for a while, but when I go back I need it to be there just as I left it. But browsers are eating memory. All of them. Chromium, Firefox, Vivaldi.. you name it.
For something working as a desktop PC I'm looking for way more RAM than a meagre 16GB. For a Pi which I use just for a single purpose I'm fine with those I have.. 2GB , 4GB, 8GB (which I use for different things). I'll never run a browser on any of them though. No way.
I've been looking to upgrade my aging PowerEdge T20 (also hate the fan noise), this is looking very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Geerling makes a video about this exact use case.
Add one of these to your development environment, use it for building and packaging, deliver to the lower-spec memory devices being shipped.
This can be a massive productivity boost.
And within that range there are a number of options with different CPU power, connectivity options, and RAM. Take your pick!
[1] Raspberry Pi Zero - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero
[2] Raspberry Pi 5 16GB - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5