- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
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It’s not just the size constraint. The power usage is significant…
Fake news. Modern RPis need up to 25W PSU. Even old laptops could idle lower than that, as otherwise they wouldn’t be able to get significant battery life. Turning off the screen will also really lower their power consumption.
You’re comparing a laptop at idle to the power supply for a pi that needs to power it at full load plus overhead and inefficiencies. That’s like comparing apples to an orange tree.
I mean sure. If you want to compare actual efficiency then performance per watt is the metric. Here a laptop would easily win as it has higher performance for similar power. The TDP of a U class processor is only 15W normally. It would obviously help to disable things like Turbo Boost as well. Said laptop having more performance wouldn’t need to stay at high power states for as long as the Pi either as it takes less time to process requests. Returning back to idle faster is a big advantage.
If you have the lid closed, you’re looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.
Maybe a little more under high load, but those are going to be intermittent and not constant.
I’m just saying it’s not that much more electricity usage, and the recycling more than offsets the CO2.
Laptops are not generally designed to run like that with a closed lid. Heat dissipation is designed around the idea the laptop is open and some of it is through the keyboard surface. The lid closed would change that.
Systems can of course be setup to power off the display but for server/service uses open laptops may not be efficient space wise.
Having said that if the scenario is low power use the heat dissipation may not be a major issue. But if there is an unremovable battery i’d still be concerned about heat dissipation with the lid closed and even just the battery itself regardless of heat dissipiation.
Just remove the lid entirely.
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Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn’t overwhelming on it’s own, but it is “cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi” kinda money.
And you are often paying 140-200 for a pi nowadays to make it have the same usability as a laptop (pi, power supply, sata hat, data drive because SD cards simply fail after a while under server IO) while you can get cheap used laptops for 0-100.
So unless you are running it for more than half a decade (which rarely happens with selfhosters for a main server), you are probably spending more in total on the pi.
I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
Like with most things in life, it depends.
I used to think so too, but my pi-hole just died the other week after four years of uptime. Couldn’t work it out, finally pulled the SD card out to reinstall the OS and found my laptop wouldn’t recognise it.
Made me glad I don’t run my mailserver on a Pi anymore!
I join you, I used to change SD card and USB disk every 1-2 year. I bought a nas 3 year ago didn’t need to change disk yet.
I have a high fail rate with Samsung SD cards. Oddly the cheap-o no name ones haven’t failed yet.
If you have the lid closed, you’re looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.
Not all laptops make effective use of power with the lid closed, sadly. Not saying this as a correction, but for others to know that they need to make sure these settings are available in the bios of the system they are buying.
Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it’s unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I’ve never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it’s being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.
With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that’s mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.
Battery charging circuits don’t operate continuously when the device is charged. Pi also still needs a PSU, typically a phone charger, and for a server application would need an SSD or HDD in most cases. SD cards have lower performance, write endurance, and capacity after all. A single raspberry pi couldn’t match even a somewhat old laptop in performance. In terms of actual efficiency (performance per watt) Pis don’t do that well as they are using cheap processors made using old core designs and even older process nodes. Even the latest Pi 5 uses a 16nm process node with a core design from 2018. A 10 year old laptop might have 14nm process node which would be better. This means that a laptop would have more performance, so even if it had more power consumption at peak it could still end up with significantly better performance per watt, and that extra performance allows it to idle more often as it spends less time processing requests.
Of course the ultimate in performance per watt is always going to be a modern high power server or an Apple Silicon device. Mini PCs can also do well for home use, and are much lower power so better suited to less demanding usage, and have the best performance per watt for consumer devices. The M4 Mac Mini for example is pretty much best in class in performance per watt, and low power consumption at the same time.
Battery circuits come on enough to be a load that needs to be considered and will show up if you measure load on the device vs load consumed by the components connected to the power supply. In terms of low power devices, it is significant, though not the primary concern. But compared to the pi PSU, the charger not to mention the battery and internal PSU of a laptop, consume way more power and produce way more heat.
All of the rest assumes needing always on, heavy load processing which isn’t what the post I replied to was talking about. I was specifically replying to idle power load. And in my case, even with a bunch of self hosted applications, most of the time my servers are idling. If I was running a virtualization farm or something that was always under heavy load, then yes, as I mentioned, a single board server isn’t ideal.
As for disks, I don’t use SSDs on my pis except one that actually does a lot of local data processing. Everything else runs in memory and stores persistent data on my NAS, including logging. Virtual memory/swap is disabled on all and things that need temporary storage/cache of small amounts of data is cached on RAM disks where applications can’t be configured to not use disk caching. The only need for the SD card is for boot and some minimal IO needed for local OS operation. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 B i got about 8 or 9 years or so ago with the same SD card in it.
They aren’t what I use as a database server, obviously, but they are extremely low power compared to what an old laptop would need and work great for things like pihole, and other network applications as well as being a part if my home kubernetes cluster and run the majority of the cluster’s processes on demand.
Not so sure about the last part. It takes ehhh about 3kg of c02 to produce 1 Watt for a year. Carbon footprint to build a laptop is about 200kg or so, but you’re not offsetting one of those you’re offsetting the raspberry PI you WOULD have bought which is just a small fraction of that. After a year or 2 you’ve almost certainly burned through your c02 savings if it’s on all the time.
A raspberry pi is not as efficient as people are claiming. They need up to 25W PSU for a reason. Laptops can idle lower than that certainly. Something like a MacBook Air M1 would idle in single digit territory, as would any netbook basically ever made. Only really high performance or older laptops have idle power draw issues since battery life is a major selling point of a laptop. Said laptop is probably also faster than a raspberry pi. The people building Pi clusters are really not doing themselves any favors with power efficiency.
Nah no way does the average ewaste tier laptop use less power than a raspberry pi for any given task. The power consumption floor for a laptop may be lower than the rpi ceiling but that’s not a fair comparison
Benchmark it and tell me. The truth is that most RPis are made using older process nodes to reduce costs. Laptops are often made using the best avaliable process node and core design. A modern raspberry pi 5 uses a 16nm processor with Cortex-A76 design from 2018. A laptop in 2015 would be using 14nm Broadwell processors from Intel. This was a time when 15W U series processors were gaining popularity, so sustained load power consumption is quite low. A 2015 laptop is 10 years old, and wouldn’t run Windows 11, so will be ewaste this year. Same with a lot of 8 year old machines actually.
Yeah… no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
That just means they become 100% efficient in winter!
Idk, heat pumps have become a lot more popular in recent years.
So do Raspberry Pi?
Get a slightly bigger heatsink.
my 20 year old pc runs at ~5°C above room temp under load
You really shouldn’t be spending your days in a room at 45 °C.
you are joking, but my room actually feels like that.
The power constraints are more important to most than the size constraints honestly.
Yeah, my pi sips energy very sparingly. Even an old laptop is going to be drawing more just to power itself, never mind what I run on it.
That said, pis are a poor value proposition nowadays and there are better options for the same use case
Oh absolutely, it really upsets me that they never dropped the prices down after covid supply issues were resolved. They were really proud of being accessible price-wise once upon a time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What are the better options?
Pis have great software support so for GPIO experimentation it’s so useful.
There is quite a range of devices out there now with varying capabilites. Things like the Onion Omega2+, Oranage Pi, and more.
Raspberry Pi also remains good. While the Pi5 is expensive and more powerful - raspberry pi also makes the Pi Zero boards which are cheaper less capable boards which are closer to what the original raspberry Pi was but newer hardware.
I’d say the Pi5 is a heading more towards a full PC like device (hence the comparisons to cost and capability minipcs pepple are making in thia thread). But there remain plenty of lower spec machines out there now similar to the original cheap Raspberry Pi concept. And we’ve had high inflation recently - to some extent the cost perception avtually reflects money being worth less than it was and buying less for $10 or $20.
Yeah, the Pi moving to full computer thing is weird because the SD card is still a massive bottleneck on normal day-to-day usage.
Not the person you’re asking but personally I use Jetson nano for some work stuff (and when I upgrade the “old” one is mine), odroid I’ve used for some misc creations and testing, and I’m personally looking forward to trying the radxa x4 as an htpc.
What I am really excited about right now is tossing my recently acquired spare jetson nano on a drone, right now I’m setting it up to walk around with it and test CV before it gets mounted up on the drone.
Will you use a separate flight controller chip or try to do it all on board?
Going separate for now, maybe later I’ll go for all on the same
Not super familiar with the gpio side of things, and I also haven’t dug that deep into the space lately since I already own my rpi and it works for me so take all this with a pinch of salt, but I found some options that seem reasonable
- Libre Computer Le Potato
- Orange Pi Zero 2
- Radxa Zero
- NanoPi R2S
- Banana Pi M2 Zero
It’s been a while but I remember Orange Pi having terrible support? I haven’t heard of the others.
Whereas the RPi has the amazing compute module if you need it too.
Sometimes paying more is better.
Oh, for sure. It depends what you need it for. A lot of people just want a pi for something like a pihole or a stats dashboard of some kind (that’s my use case, anyway). You get what you pay for and sometimes you’ve gotta pay for what you wanna get.
You lose the I/O and power efficiency is no comparison. You can get better power efficiency and sometimes some I/O with an old router and OpenWRT, but you’ll be in the class of a Beagle Bone and a much harder learning curve. I’ve never managed to get a sensor or peripheral working on some old laptop’s SPI or I2C buses like how easy it is on a Rπ.
New low end chromebooks are much better for this anyway, an intel N4000 will consume just 8 watts at its peak and it’s even supported by Windows 11, and they are usable if you put Linux on them
You can get an esp32 or whatever and have io
l a p p i e s
That word made me hear the whole thing in an Australian accent.
True, but we don’t really say landfill, rather “tip”… So…
Strong Bad vibes
Better than an old laptop, get a mini-pc like thinkcentre tiny. They’re more upgradeable, space-efficient, power efficient, have better cooling
I have an old pentium laptop N3520 with 4GB DDR3. I removed everything and put it in a receiver box 1U size. It consumes so little energy that it can run 5-7 hours from its battery (I call it build in USV). Last time I measured 3-7w. Also passiv cooled , no noise. Another machine I use , is with a i7 4770 with 16GB for Proxmox, 7-20w , peak is much higher but rarely used , only on boot and vm startup.
Oh and the i2c etc stuff, I connected ESP32 and other microcontrollers over USB.
What is i2c?
A communication protocol used in microchips, small modules & embedded devices that uses 2 wires. Think something like USB, but dead simple.
There are also a lot of mini PCs that are comparable in price to a Raspberry Pi 5 once you factor in the cost of a case, SD card, and power supply for the Pi.
Notable mention, amd64 chipsets are more widely supported than ARM.
That’s only start up cost. What about ongoing 24/7 costs after 2 years?
Probably not much of a difference. These mini PCs can run at single digit wattage too and you won’t be buying new SD cards every 6 months.
raspberries were viable while those were cheap. I think I got a 3b (plus?) in pre-deficit years for like $25 second-hand AND I got some shitty case AND a microSD card AND it could run off of a somewhat normal USB phone charger. so using those instead of a 10 year old decommissioned desktop was an awesome value proposition.
nowadays, those devices are encroaching on trip-digits territory and the power adapter is like $30. the computing power you can buy for a third of that designates raspberries exclusively for niche use cases where footprint and power consumption are primary considerations.
not to mention fake Jason Statham just rubs me the wrong way, like all them “visionaries”. he makes this sound like he’s the head of Feed Africa or something, on a noble mission to save humanity and whatnot.
The Zero 2W is cheaper and pretty much the same spec as the Pi 3.
Oh what I was about to correct you but apparently I always assumed the Zero 2 had the dual core chip of the Pi 2, not a quad core
Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
I know its not the most ideal place, but FB marketplace where I live has lots of old PCs/Laptops for under 50 eur. I would probably start there personally.
Facebook marketplace, kjiji, etc
I wouldn’t touch Facebook with a 10’ ethernet cable. Haven’t heard of kjiji, I’ll have to check it out.
Haven’t heard of kjiji, I’ll have to check it out.
It’s essentially Craigslist, but in Canada.
Craigslist doesn’t really have a user base here.
Except in Vancouver. It’s a Craigslist city.
Interesting… I wonder why?
You’re missing out, Facebook marketplace is THE place to buy local secondhand goods for dirt cheap without getting scammed. You do need an account but you don’t need to install anything, and the payments are not done through FB
Everyone here thinks their shit tier 2018 laptop is made of gold or something.
‘Gaming laptop, only used occasionally. Been sitting around for a while because my kid’s got a new hobby. £1,200 no offers. I know what I’ve got’
The pictured laptop has a Centrino sticker on it and looks like it’s been used to dig a garden
Same here in México, a lot of people think their dual core Intel from 2011 (and even older than that) is still worth more than +$100USD. Even worse, companies usually want to resell devices to recover some of the cost, so even that option is kind of expensive. I’m waiting for some friends that can buy company devices for cheap so they can resell them to me for cheap too lol
Yep. My FB Marketplace is 75% crackheads flogging off stuff they stole from shops/actual tax payers/their neighbours/ the train, 10% delusional idiots with shit that isn’t worth half of their asking price, 10% scammers, and 5% not shit listings.
Pawn shop I would say but they are expensive too… Their is some carricatibe structure which refurbish computers and sell them gor dirt cheap. 20 Buck per tower. But that crapy computers.
Did someone fall asleep on the keyboard when they came up with kjiji?
I think it’s secretly Khajiit’s new marketplace for wares if you have the coin
We have bins around our city for people to drop electronics off for recycling. I’ve taken a few laptops from there. You’re not supposed to, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
One I gave to my buddy who needed something just for emails and web browsing and whatnot, one is running a server, and a couple more went back in to the bin because they were actually broken, but I took the hard drives for the server machine. I have one on a self ready in case the server machine dies so I haven’t gone looking for any new ones in a while.
I do e-scooter mechanical stuff, I always have a bid war with the local franchisee scooter shop nearby fighting for the scooters. I know its them, so I try to raise the bids for them as much as possible to fuck them around.
Sometimes you can find them on eBay.
I go to Ebay and sort by distance. It’s like Craigslist but they send it to you!
eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work’s IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask
Where are these cheap e waste laptops with gpio and actually low power?
The market is about to be flooded with them with Windows 10 going EoL in October.
About to be? The bottom has been falling out for desktops and laptops on processors not on Microsoft’s supported list for the last year or more. I’ve seen roughly the same system go from ~$200+ down to under $100 on the last year based on eBay pricing alone
There are usb gpio devices which can fulfill the connectivity bit. Pretty sure you are sol with the 5w though 😊
The Raspberry Pi Zero in USB gadget mode can be used for GPIO. If you don’t want to setup gadget mode, get Pi Zero W.
No gpio but old centrino laptops make excellent low power servers. My primary server was a first gen centrino from 2011 up until recently and I think it only used 12w idle after putting a SSD in there. Had it’s own UPS built in.
Digging through e-waste bins is one of my hobbies.
What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.
I’m just lucky enough to have one at my apartment building, and very wasteful neighbors.
Back when I lived in a (quite nice) apartment building I was constantly surprised at the things people threw out. Perfectly good furniture but also stuff like perfectly functional printers, artwork, computer cases…
If you go near college housing there’s usually a given day of the year (either moving day or an official cleanup day) when tons of people put out stuff they don’t want to bother with keeping/moving. It’s Hippie Christmas baby!
any luck with gpio and 5W power usage so far?
I think 5W probably can’t be achieved, maybe with chromebook-like hardware, but I guess GPIO could be solved with a USB accessory
in my opinion the bigger problem is the fire hazard of an unsupervised charger. I have seen enough that runs super hot, and even if it doesn’t, I just can’t trust them.
No, but I did get an Xbox that only needed a power cable.
Worth noting pie 4 and 5 no longer recommend 5w PSU. And tend to fail if anything is drawing on the USB.
Somebody already asked, but what are good locations to do this? Do you ever get harassed by property owners or law enforcement?
I’m in an apartment building, so I just browse the one here whenever I take the trash out. I don’t think anyone has noticed, or they’ve elected to mind their own business if they have.
There’s so much stuff that could still be used that it honestly isn’t funny, and that’s just in my own bin. How much more is being wasted across the country? But at least it’s in the recycling and not the trash, so that’s something, I guess.
It’s low power that is still making arm small computers popular. It’s impossible to get a pc down into the 2-5 Watt power consumption range and over time it’s the electrical costs that add up. I would suggest the RPI5 is the thing to get because it’s expensive for what it is and more performance is available from other options supported by armbian.
Mini PC with N200 and NVMe SSD uses around 7W when idling.
For a minimally higher power consumption you can have up to 32 GB of memory, more powerful CPU, and decent GPU for video transcoding purposes.
Yet a Mac Mini does exactly that. Or like any Intel N100 based mini PC or laptop. Those also have way better performance, IO, and software compatibility. Raspberry Pi’s fill a certain niche, but efficiency isn’t it. At least not anymore.
Low power and arm architecture are big differentiators between Pi and laptops.
I totally agree recycle laptops where possible, but they’re generally noisier and less energy efficient plus the battery degrades over time and is a fire risk.
They’re not necessairly a good fit for always-on server or service type uses comparef to a small board like Raspberry Pi. But a cheap or free second hand laptop is definitely good for tweaking, testing and trying our projects.
How many people keep up with this misconception RPis are ultra efficient? They are bargain basement SoCs. The power draw isn’t that low (25W PSU), and the performance they deliver isn’t great. They are all made using older process nodes and techniques that result in less efficient processors. Add those together and you will find they have less performance per watt than all modern laptops with the screen turned off, and less than most Mini PCs. Mini PCs and other SBCs are where it’s at for efficient home labs. If you can find a Mac with Apple Silicon for cheap they are even better. Everyone in the home labbing community pretty much knows this by now. I struggle to understand why Lemmy hasn’t got this through their brains. I think it’s partially the miconception that ARM is always better, and partially down to people not understanding that low maximum power draw and efficiency are the same thing. Not even thinking about idle power or performance per watt.
The only caveat here is the fire-hazard non-removable lithium batteries.
Replacement is usually removing 6-10 screws and prying the case with a guitar pick or old credit card. There is most likely a disassembly video on youtube. Batteries from aliexpress or the like are usually cheap (although probably more expensive than the computer). Depending on the application, the “built-in UPS” can be nice.
but what will fix the fire hazard of the charger? how will you be able to keep it plugged in 24/7?
Laptop chargers are no fire hazards anymore than raspberry pi PSUs are. In fact probably the RPi parts are worse as they are built down to a cost.
I would assume that landfill laptop manufacturers are trying to minimize costs even harder on the charger.
but what timeframe do you mean with “anymore”? laptops made in this decade, or the last 10 years, or something else? there’s plenty of old laptops that fitinto OPs category.
Probably for as long as raspberry pis have been around. There have been plenty of scares with phone chargers exploding, and that’s what a raspberry pi is powered from. Laptop chargers haven’t had many issues in the past decade or so.
I do SMB support, so I have a pretty good idea of what people tend to do.
I haven’t seen a PS brick catch fire (possible, OFC, but extremely rare in my opinion) i have seen a PC PSU catch fire, and because of the fan, it’s fucking scsry, like a jet with the afterburner.
This is, in my mind, one of the benefits of laptops over micro computers: integrated UPS. Even an old, degraded battery will probably get you a couple of hours with the screen off.
IME, power consumption is going to be worse overall, for any laptop likely to be in the recycle bin, it’s probably double the consumption of an ARM SBC. The integrated UPS and usually decent power conditioning of the power supply saves you more money with a laptop. Plus, keyboard and screen for emergencies - I just generally expect that, over there life of a micro I’m going to have to drag out and plug in a spare keyboard, mouse, and monitor because something in a device, or an upgrade, or BIOS flash, is preventing a boot.
There are a lot of good reasons to use laptops instead of SBCs, if you don’t mind the extra power draw and (as she says) don’t have size requirements.
They make batteries for raspberry pi too you know.
No, I didn’t. I don’t use Pis, I have ODroids. Heck, they may sell batteries for ODroids, too.
For me, it wouldn’t have made much difference because I have UPSes around the house serving things like routers, modems, and switches. And I do care about size and energy use. I’m only saying there are advantages to using laptops.
You can get little integrated LCD cases for Pis too, can’t you? And maybe even a little fold-out keyboard. Congratulations! You’ve re-invented the laptop!
ODroids don’t meet European legal hazard levels on poisonous fumes. I bought one back in the day and they explained they won’t apply for the test because of “the cost”… not that it uses cheap solder that don’t meet lead limits.
I didn’t know this.
‘non-removable’ lol
These things are removable with a screwdriver in most cases. If the battery isn’t completely dead it’s actually useful for backup power.
I had read about it on another thread, which was about using old smartphones as servers (they used Termux).
Those old lithium batteries, although sometimes seemingly healthy, can catch fire any time. Having them connected to the charger 24/7 is only making matters worse.
I wouldn’t trust the battery of old devices. I would probably buy a used UPS (without battery) and slap a new battery to it. This would cost more, but it would allow me to also connect other important devices to it - like the router and some lights.
Not simple to remove. They can all be taken out.
But the fire risk is a very valid point. All laptops should indicate they should not be left alone when charging. While many do. Setting one up in a unobserved location to run permanently should be batteryless or Lifepo4 adapted. So laptops may not be best suited to this environment. A used thin client or other DC input option may be much easier. Or an old desktop if batts and not wanted.
reasons to use raspberry pi: energy consumption, reliability, noise, software support, performance, an ethernet port/a way faster ethernet port, availability, faster pcie/storage, io
reasons to use laptop ewaste: saving 30 usd once
unless you buy really stupidly, every single of those points is not true.
