Hi I am currently struggling with deciding between Pis (all variants e.g. Orange Pi) and Nucs as I can’t find any for a reasonable price. Do you guys have any recommandation for me? German/European Stores maybe? I am looking for the best efficency to performance ratio for a low price. Basically just small computing units that I can cluster ideally in a 1U Rackmount.
I decided to go with Tiny/Mini/Micros personally. It consumes more than a Pi but it’s also more powerful. I can find second-hand TMMs locally with 8th gen Intel i5 for almost the same price as a Pi kit (Some Single Board Computers looks affordable, but you often need to add storage, a power brick, an enclosure, which can add up quickly!)
I use TMMs with a mix of 6th-gen and 8th-gen Intel i5. The 6th gen are decent for my needs, but the >7th-gen’s iGPU supports more codecs, which is useful if you want to stream HEVC. i5-8500T also have 2 more cores than i5-6500T!
Edit: those TMMs are used in a lot of businesses and often replaced every 3-4 years. They may be slightly more power hundry than newer hardware, but I like to think I am saving them from being e-waste!
Many of the business TMMs often use hardware that is easily supported across a variety of OSes common in homelabs as well, plus some have features like vPro that can provide OOB access similar (though not as full-featured) to IPMI
Another vote for TMM. Pi type devices will use less power at idle but probably by only around 5w. I have a Pi 4 that idles at 4-5w and HP Elitedesk g5 with i5 8500t that sits at around 9w. The performance difference between the two is night and day. Used Intel 8th gen really is getting to be the sweet spot with regard to price, performance, and efficiency.