Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it’s so sad what’s become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don’t understand why they haven’t explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you’re using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can’t use any normal USB charger with it.
Is there a RasPi alternative that’s competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
Thank you for your recommendation. I’ve looked at some of those SoCs and they’re impressive but none of them do what I’m looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that’s folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn’t have to be practical.
Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they’re cheaper and superior.
I’m assuming it’s like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn’t really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it’s not too bad.
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Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it’s so sad what’s become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
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Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don’t understand why they haven’t explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you’re using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can’t use any normal USB charger with it.
But it does support usb pd, starting with pi 5, you can use any usb pd power source, so long as it can provide the needed wattage
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Is there a RasPi alternative that’s competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
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I’d recommend Orange Pi 5 plus. It’s much more expandable than OP 5.
Id recommend avoiding Orange anything until they can unfuck their flashing software.
Fucking windows-only chinese shitwear. Fuck Orange Pi. I’ll never buy another one.
yep. Banana pi also use Windows-only Flashing Software. but that depends on the chip used, if I am not mistaken.
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Thank you for your recommendation. I’ve looked at some of those SoCs and they’re impressive but none of them do what I’m looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that’s folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn’t have to be practical.
Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they’re cheaper and superior.
Low end Intel like Gracemount N200 are lower power and higher performance than Raspberry Pi.
Even an old JasperLake is like 24 watts max to Pi5’s 27 watts.
What non standard thing are they doing with the power supply? The PSU looks like a regular usb c PD supply to me (even supports 12v, nice!)
Edit: wtf! 5v@5a yeah thats non standard. What were they thinking?
I’m assuming it’s like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn’t really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it’s not too bad.
Well, I don’t expect more from ot rather than low-power home server.