Refurb PCs as Pi Alternative - processor options - how old is too old?

General Discussion
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The recent blog post on using a thin client as a Pi alternative for DietPi inspired me to look more closely at refurbished Mini or small-form-factor (SFF) PCs as an inexpensive upgrade to a RPi for DietPi. Many of the inexpensive refurbished PCs are 7-10 years old and can have 5th or 6th generation Intel CPUs or similar AMD CPUs.

Considering the age of the CPUs in these inexpensive refurbished PCs, at what point does the scale tip in favor of the refurb over a RPi4? When is the refurb PC an upgrade over the Pi?

From another perspective, what’s the PC equivalent of an RPi 4, in terms of processor/performance?

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I used an HP 260 G2 for this. I did choose it because it has a i5-6200U CPU which has a good performance and a quite low power consumption.
I also use Apple Mac mini 2012 resp. 2014 with DietPi with also a good power behaviour (and nice hardware), but expansion options are a bit lower than these of the “1 liter PCs”.

Additionally you can calculate energy costs, especially for 24/7 applications to see whether hardware costs or long term energy costs are more relevant.
Also using SSDs lower the power consumption compared to HDDs and might be cheaper in long term.

I propose not to use CPUs older than 4th Gen and to use power saving CPUs (low TDP, see List of CPU power dissipation figures - Wikipedia).
These CPUs outperform thin clients in the computational power a lot and every Raspberry Pi even more). A try is worth.

But it is often more relevant to use the minimum needed performant CPU to minimize energy costs.

The higher powered PC devices can serve quite good as a Virtual Machine Appliance Server like Proxmox, covering a couple of RasPi devices.
I am a fan of these virtualization environments instead of several RasPis located beneath.

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Those refurb’s stomp the yard with the RPI’s…plus you can upgrade the RAM and whatnot

I have a few of em…even went so far as to take the top off one, put the heatsink on the stove and melted the short fins off (melted the solder holding the metal fins)…then epoxied a super cheapo aliexpress SNOWMAN 2 heatpipe fan on it…with all 4 cores hammered hard and running folding@home it rarely get’s above 60C.

It’s a HP EliteDesk 705 G2 Mini with a AMD PRO A8-8600B R6 processor in it, I think I paid $80~ for it…then I upgraded the RAM for dirt cheap as well.

It looks kinda ghetto…but it runs circles around the RPi’s and variants with VERY little power usage

$ sensors
fam15h_power-pci-00c4
Adapter: PCI adapter
power1:      221.85 mW (avg = 195.44 mW, interval =   0.01 s)
                       (crit =  15.00 W)

amdgpu-pci-0008
Adapter: PCI adapter
vddgfx:      900.00 mV 
vddnb:         1.11 V  
edge:         +58.0°C  

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:        +58.6°C  (high = +70.0°C)
                       (crit = +100.0°C, hyst = +99.0°C)
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I picked up this for $100. Silent, runs cool. Perfect!

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Thanks for the report. I have to look at it more in detail next week.

A nice benchmark could be the multiplier of DietPi computational benchmark and the power consumption (in [seconds / Watt]) to compare systems. :grinning:

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I installed DietPi on my old Dell Vostro V130 from 2010, with an i5-470UM and 4GB. It’s surprisingly responsive considering its age and HDD storage. I assume that’s due to the RAM and SATA bus.

It’s drawing 12W at idle, so probably about 4x an RPi3/4 with an SSD. Not great, but not terrible. And I can accept a higher energy cost if it enables me to reuse an aging PC that was collecting dust.

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Thanks for this. Very helpful.

I’ve been focused on the age of the CPU and underlying hardware and probably need to look more at power consumption, considering this will be on all the time.

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I have used both thin clients (HP T630) and micro PC’s (HP Elitedesk 800 G1) very effectively with DietPi.

One thing to note with the microPC’s is that to use in a server type environment is that you will need to use a dongle that will simulate a monitor to the displayport or the machine will not start, nor will hardware assisted transcoding work.

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#1: In case that a graphical desktop shall be used, e.g. via RustDesk, I also had to use a dongle.

#2: Doing the same via xrdp I do not need it.

#3: Having a headless system, I also do not need such a dongle.

Example: https://www.amazon.de/EVanlak-DisplayPort-Headless-Emulator-3840x2160/dp/B07YLP1GG4/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=7LNFCC9IO9IJ&keywords=displayport+dongle&qid=1685696417&sprefix=displayport+dongle%2Caps%2C185&sr=8-3

Remark: System #1 only had Displayports (Wise 3040), system #2 had an HDMI output (Mac mini). I did not investigate whether the HDMI output makes a difference, but I do not assume that.

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Thanks, I found the HP Elitedesk 800 G1 started complaining (loud beeping
) at “power on” from Bios when there was no screen or dongle in the displayport.
That was even before DietPi booted.
May be able to turn this warning off in bios, but that may disable xrdp etc.

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Here is my powertop…remember I am running folding@home with 3 cores at 100%

HP EliteDesk 705 G2 MINI (Y3R18UC#ABA)
AMD PRO A8-8600B R6, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G

System baseline power is estimated at 6.18 W

Power est.    Usage     Device name
  6.18 W    392.2%        CPU use
    0 mW    100.0%        Display backlight
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Function 3
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB XHCI Controller
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Wani [Radeon R5/R6/R7 Graphics]
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Root Port
            100.0%        PCI Device: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme BCM5762 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Function 4
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini HDMI/DP Audio
            100.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
             18.3 pkts/s  Network interface: eno1 (tg3)
              0.0%        USB device: usb-device-0438-7900
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Host Bridge
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Root Complex
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) I/O Memory Management Unit
              0.0%        USB device: xHCI Host Controller
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge
              0.0%        Audio codec hwC1D0: Realtek
              0.0%        Audio codec hwC0D0: ATI
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Function 1
              0.0 pkts/s  nic:veth505640a
              0.0 pkts/s  nic:veth2ee484f
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Carrizo Platform Security Processor
              0.0%        runtime-alarmtimer.0.auto
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB EHCI Controller
              0.0%        runtime-reg-dummy
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Function 2
              0.0%        USB device: EHCI Host Controller
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Audio Controller
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Function 0
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Carrizo Audio Dummy Host Bridge
              0.0%        USB device: xHCI Host Controller
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Host Bridge
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SMBus Controller
              0.0%        PCI Device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 60h-6fh) Processor Function 5
              0.0%        runtime-PNP0C14:00
              0.0%        runtime-PNP0C04:00
              0.0%        runtime-PNP0C09:00
              0.0%        I2C Adapter (i2c-5): AMDGPU DM aux hw bus 2
              0.0%        runtime-microcode
              0.0%        runtime-snd-soc-dummy
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Have you tried to update to latest bios?
You can download a live windows distro USB, load the bios on it, boot into the livecd, then update thru a “windows” .exe program from HP…that might fix the issues

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Thanks - purchased a displayport-hdmi conversion cable and dummy html dongle and that works brilliantly

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14

Thanks to everyone for the comments and recommendations! I recently bought a refurbished HP ProDesk 600 G2 mini desktop with an i5 6600T, 8 GB, and a 256 GB SSD. I installed dietpi and Nextcloud to get started.

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