Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? (jeffgeerling.com)

Unless you need the features on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO connector or very low power consumption a mini PC is a much better bet for general compute.

> But newsflash: used is different than new.

I'd put it differently, "you can't have used without the new". They might not be all that different in practice but you can't have everyone buying used. For every used unit sold, someone had to buy it new first.

I agree with the rest. Having a bunch of RPi up to RPi4 in the house, I'm having a harder time finding its proper niche. I don't need the GPIO or the relatively small footprint in general, and from power and performance perspective it doesn't have an edge anymore. RPis stopped excelling at many things they used to, as the price to fix some of the bigger downsides. It just doesn't strike the best compromise for most of my uses (same from what my RPi-fan friends tell me).

But despite reviews like this everyone should make their own assessment. There's no one size fits all. I run a RPi because I could power via PoE. Another one because there was no room for anything larger.

I think the appeal of the RPi has to do with the amount of online tutorials that beginners can understand, and the experience of assembling something from pieces.

Yes. You can stick 32gb memory in a N100 and don't need an adapter to get away from the god awful SD cards...

Can still make sense for the tinkering ecosystem and compatibility for niche uses cases, but overall the value just isn't there and hasn't been since gen4

> DDR5 SO-DIMMs are not compatible with DDR4 SO-DIMM slots—just something I learned on this project... I knew full-size DIMMs were incompatible due to the extra on-stick ECC circuit on DDR5 RAM, I just didn't know the same applied to SO-DIMMs. Obvious in hindsight, but something to keep in mind.

Umm... what?

Yes. You can get dirt cheap mini-pcs / NUC like devices on ebay for next to nothing and they aren't too crazy on the power front.

The biggest problem for the Raspberry PI platform if you are using it as a home server or like a lite desktop is the lack of proper storage.

However I do like the pi for things where you set them up and forget about it. I run a pi-hole on an old Pi 2. However that could be run as a docker container on a small home server / NAS.

I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.

Some industrial Atom N150 boards include GPIO, SATA, M.2, discrete TPM and TXT/DRTM-capable BIOS for Windows IoT and future Linux, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/.

There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom N150 devices.

I'm kind of curious as to why Gflops is the chosen basis for asserting performance superiority? Most user workloads exercise integer and I/O performance much more heavily. Linpack HPL evaluates CPU (not GPU) floating point performance IIRC so it's not a representative workload.

> I have a video that goes through everything in this post, embedded below:

> If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue:

More sites like this, please

I appreciate the nm discussion. So often people bash larger process nodes but the wider gates are often/always better at static power consumption, and mature lithographies mean more research into optimization. It's not just smaller = better. My understanding is that smaller nodes reduce dynamic power due to lower gate capacitance (because the fet is just smaller), but there's a lot to the story, like architecture as mentioned.

Are the two boards even in the same category or class?

I use RPi for little hobby projects

- RPi Pico for being the payload that flies around the world in a PicoBalloon

- Decoding NOAA weather imagery and storing it in my Google Drive

- Full time AIS message decoder and tracker

- Full time ADS-B and MLAT receiver

- Runs my RetroPie setup

- Runs my OctoPrint setup

I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer

I just purchased a Beelink Mini S13 with 16GB ram and 1TB drive on Amazon for ~$200 to use as a Docker host on my local network and have been very happy with it so far.

I immediately wiped it and installed Ubuntu Server. I chose Coolify to manage Docker and local domains, and that took a bit of work to get going, but now I can spin up local services and containers on local domains and play with random stuff

It's a no brainer IMHO. I stopped using my Pis after the N100s appeared on the market and have been advocating them since then.

I like the idea of using ARM, but the value and convenience simply isn't there. The Pi remains great for certain embedded applications, though.

This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course).

But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.

Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.

At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.

Fan noise might be another consideration, given that some projects have to share a home with a family. Anyone know whether the N150 makes much noise?

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My steam deck has superceded my rpi for this kind of stuff. Probably not as power efficient but I live in the South and use A/C and hot water so I feel like those are far bigger spends of electricity

Slightly tangential, does anyone know of a decent n100/150 board that's not super expensive, has enough pcie for at least 2 ssds, and is available ideally in India or the EU?

The vast majority of mini PC's with these processors don't have pcie. The lattepanda mu is the closest product I've found so far.

All I want to do is run a server with 2 disks, but it seems weirdly tough. (Ideally a small physical footprint server but I can compromise on that a bit.)

I used RPi's for years for little stuff like DNS and file sharing and when I b it the bullet and got a surplus DELL SFF office PC things just started working a little bit better.

yeah, docker images and the like are supposed to be platform intependent, but there's 'supposed to' and 'is'

Running Ubuntu (and later Proxmox) on it just worked a tad bit better. I was into it for about $160 (purchased from Microcenter)

I got RPi 5. Wanted to create a little server for my files, source code repository etc. I bought it with NVMe hat. Gone through 3 1TB drives that supposed to be compatible with it. Unfortunately none of it was stable. File system would have weird errors, but on top of that networking would go out after few hours or days and RPi would need a hard reboot.

I just threw the RPi into the drawer and bought N100. Installed WSL on Windows 11 and everything just works. It's been up for almost a year now, not a single reboot or network problem.

It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.

Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.

This is not even a question if you don't need GPIO. N100/N150 brings so much value for money in almost any metric compared to RPi.

I’d been a staunch supporter of RPi nodes for homelab work for a decade (and don’t get me wrong, I still love ‘em), but the various N100 miniPCs have been a pleasant little game changer. Got two for $130 each fully loaded (N00/16GB RAM/512GB SSD), slapped a 1TB SATA 2.5” SSD inside, threw Proxmox on them and voila, I have a highly efficient homelab that hosts my Plex server.

That said, there’s three reasons I got them versus a RPi5:

* Built-in RTC with battery (no more post-power outage downtime)

* iGPU with video acceleration (for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding)

* PRICE (seriously, a comparably outfitted RPi5 would be twice the price of these things!)

Intel has a little sleeper hit here, if they can get out of their own way on pricing and marketing it. At sub-$150 versus a RPi5, it’s a no-brainer if you don’t need GPIO support.

Currently on holiday and browsing on a Chuwi MinibookX N150 model. Comes with Windows 11, but I quickly set it up to dual-boot Ubuntu 25.04. There were a couple of tweaks needed to rotate the display properly (except for GRUB which doesn't seem possible) and get the orientation sensor to work, but otherwise I'm very impressed with it.