Hey all, I’m looking to build a couple dashboards out around my house. I’ve done this before with rokchip boards and they are… fine, but not great. Is rpi the best option right now? Are there alternatives you really like? I’d like to keep it a single board to easily mount behind things where it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and I won’t lie I like the DIY feeling of it over something like a thin client.
If you search ebay for Intel based thin clients, many are more powerful than RPi while being passively cooled and having very similar power consumption.
Never have seen a thin client that goes below 7ish Watt on idle. Basically every RPi does. https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
Thin clients based on J5005 or J4105 generally idle under 5W. (Futro S740, Wyse 5070,…) They consume a bit more when 100% loaded (11W vs 8W), but they also provide about 2x performance of Pi4.
(That article you shared is measuring power consumption on the USB port, which does not take into account overhead of USB adapter itself)
Pls, provide some proof for those numbers. The ‘under 5W mark’ gets often claimed but i still have not seen a valid proof (a simple measurement with a wattmeter) of it other than some spec sheet.
The overhead does not matter really. USB 5V power supplies are cheap and efficient these days, yes you need to look out for an efficient one but even one with only 50% efficiency (which is really really bad) would only add 1W to the (lower than) 2W power in idle. That would still result in lower power in idle.
