[esskay]

Technically yes but in most cases you dont need an sbc. An old Lenovo Thinkcentre or Dell OptiPlex Micro can end up being cheaper by the time you add all the additional expenses onto the pi (storage, power, case, etc). The micropc's are also infinately better performing and are upgradable.

[DrammBA]

What about energy usage for the next few years?

[doubled112]

How much does a Raspberry Pi 4/5 use with some sort of external storage running? How much does one cost once you factor in a case, cooling, storage, and a power supply?

I paid $195 NEW for a Beelink S12 Mini with 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, and an Intel N95 CPU

I believe it is said to idle at about 8W. It's a powerful enough machine you could run a bunch of small VMs on it, assuming your workload didn't involve GPIO or other hardware things.

I rolled a handful of RPis into VMs on one Orange Pi 5 because it has memory to do so and I wasn't using anything Pi specific.

[poulpy123]

on their website the cheapest lenovo is 500€ and the cheapest dell is 600€ while a kit R5 is 150€, not at all the same price

[esskay]

Yeah I'm not referring to new ones. Ebay. Dirt cheap and even the ones several generations old are very power efficient and vastly outperform the pi on both performance and cost.