this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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There's lots of ways to make existing hardware more efficient at the cost of performance. Under-volting the CPU and RAM (or just putting them in "efficiency" mode) can probably save more electricity than you lose in generational improvements. Considering how much more powerful PCs are compared to SBCs, you'd probably still have better performance than an SBC. Also, a more powerful CPU that takes double the power but as a result can idle for more than 50% of the time would be more efficient than a less powerful CPU never idling.
There's a lot of other variables (like idle power draw, efficiency at various power levels, idle latency, etc), but in general I think your statement would be inaccurate at least 60% of the time.
Oh I am not saying specifically get a raspberry pi, personally looking at a bee-link N150 mini PC. It isn't even that much more expensive than the 16GB raspberry pi and as its x86 I can just run normal debian installs in proxmox.
The post is talking about RPis and other SBCs. Mini PCs are in a whole different category.
Yeah, but this is about self hosting and it's costs, so the comparison is relevant.
Yes it's relevant. I have been one of the people making it. However they didn't specificy what they were actually comparing in their first comment. So it ends up they are saying something false. Your average laptop could easily beat a raspberry pi in performance per watt.