I see I was picturing a 25 pile stack of PC’s this makes a lot more sense thanks for the explanation.

I’m not sure if running multiple single SSD machines would provide much redundancy over a server with multiple PSU’s and drives. Sure the CPU or mobo could fail but the downtime would be less hassle than 25 old PC’s.

Of course there is a learning experience in more hardware but 25 PC’s does seem slightly overkill. I can imagine 3-5 max.

I’m probably looking at this from a homelab point of view who just wants to run stuff though, not really as the hobby being “setting up the PC’s themselves”.

Of course, but installing everything on multiple bare metal machines which take IP addresses, against just running it in VM’s which have IP addresses… It just takes a lot of extra power and doesn’t achieve much. Of course that can be said about any hobby, but I just want OP to know that there is no real reason to do this and I don’t understand so many people hyping it up.

I don’t understand why people want to use so many PC’s rather than just run multiple VM’s on a single server that has more cores.

In my experience they’re very solid. They also have thicker PD charging cables.

Asus is a bit faster. Steam deck is cheaper.

I believe there’s going to be a new rog Ally soon too.

You need those metal ones with braided cable

They have some of the best USB cables (strongest, least breakable). Used to be cheap too until they started spending big bucks on marketing.

Depends on what it’s doing. The Pi5 has lower idle power usage but if it’s under constant load it’s actually very inefficient. Keep in mind that the Pi5 has a 25W max TDP, almost as high as the N100.

The reason that the N100 is seems less efficient in Jeff’s video is because it’s clocked a lot higher. And power usage increases exponentially with higher clockspeeds

The Pi5 is made on the 28nm node, which is from around 2011. Of course it has other efficiency improvements like the GPU and the ARM architecture, but pound for pound I don’t think the Pi5 even beats a 6 year old desktop in efficiency if the desktop was properly downclocked and not running some inefficient HDD’s or the likes.

Rockchip boards on the other hand are made on 22nm, which is why they tend to be a bit more efficient.

New X86 processors are as efficient as the Apple M series. They are far more power efficient than a Pi under load, though they will consume slightly more at idle. But not nearly as much as you’re suggesting.

The Pi 5 isn’t very power efficient. X86 CPU’s from a few years ago were already on a more efficient process node

Rockchip based boards are gaining traction. Whlie still not as easy as Pi’s, the community is starting to jump after they got ditched for corporations during Covid. Orange Pi is offering good value these days but it can still require tinkering if your use case hasn’t already been done by someone before.

Don’t forget to deep fry it a bit in JPG fat every repost.

They have to break the law to make sure that you aren’t “breaking the law”.

Well he also repair macbooks and does a lot of good stuff for right to repair.

But his most popular videos are angry old man screams at cloud so that’s probably you keep seeing.

Bought a Home Assistant dongle to support them and have a hopefully well supported piece of hardware. Sorely disappointed in it my my old 15 dollar dongle was better.