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Unless you need the GPIO pins it is likely a better choice to go with one of the many x86 mini PCs on Amazon, although you need to ensure it is not totally no-name. I got a GMKtec G5 which is about ~3"x3"x2", has an Intel N97 CPU, 12GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD (upgraded to a 2TB NVMe disk). No need to buy an additional power adapter (included, it's Type-C), HDMI adapters, or case/fan, either. I think it was about £110 with next-day shipping from Amazon. It has remarkable performance; I tried GNOME on NixOS and it felt instantly responsive for all general purpose desktop use (web browsing, vscodium with my linting extensions, etc). The only area of my everyday workflow in which it clearly fell behind my M1 Max MacBook Pro was in Rust compilation which is obviously expected - I was just shocked how close it was for everything outside of that. This is in huge contrast to Raspberry Pis which suck to use graphically, even with the Pi 5. It has happily been sitting on my desk running Forgejo, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and acting as a personal storage server with that 2TB drive for the last ~6 months and I never even hear the fan. Sits at 0.1 load average, despite Mastodon with this many relays previously eating up the contabo VPS' CPU I was using quite handily. |
[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 [2] https://pypi.org/project/pyftdi/ [3] https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-any-computer-wit...