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Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
31–40 of 227 posts
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#32Still won't be good for a file server, backup server, media server if you care about decent write/read speeds. Sure it will prob read fast enough for your biggest 4K MKVs but those CPUs are always the limiting factor in disk IO performance. Get a fast SSD, get a platter disk - who cares! So you've got 100MB/s of throughput on your gigabit eth. Too bad! These CPUs do AT BEST 30-40MB/s write theoretical - most folks get around 10MB/s. Google the benchmarks. That's crap! Those Atom CPUs are the sorry excuse for a decade of cheap personal NAS devices (prob botnets now) with no balls.
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#33If you're in a bigger company, the IT department may have some smaller PCs like this to get rid of. Mine gave a bunch out, I have a Dell optiplex - but instead of the thin client it's a small i3, with a 320gb hdd and 6gb ram. It's dead silent and runs all the home server things like a champ, oh - and it was free. But I'd still own a number of raspberry pis since they're great for hacking or just to support a cool mis…
Do the Foundation make money when you purchase a Pi?
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#34As others have pointed out, there are definitely some flaws with the logic applied here. > It’s faster, cheaper and still relatively small Yes, the Optiplex is going to perform better at a lot of things. The prices I'm seeing are around $60 -- the Pi is either $10 for the Zero with WiFi or $45 for the "3" with a reasonably sized Micro SD card. Granted, your needs may include more storage than what's offered by a Micr…
I use Plex on the FX160 and basically nothing needs to be transcoded. Streams fine to my PS4, Chromecast and iOS devices. The content I have is in H264 though, I don't leech/encode any H265 yet.
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a great call, an atom would struggle big time running plex, I have a Thinkcentre M92p which is tiny and silent, do wish it had a tiny bit more grunt but was pretty good value for $200.
Have you ever tried an Atom processor for running Plex? I've always been curious how it would perform. I had an older Atom device running Plex server for quite a while, but back then I almost never needed full transcoding for playback -- usually 'stream direct' which just shifts the MKV container to MP4 -- relatively easy work. And when I did have full transcode, it was either from h.264->h.264 with slightly differen…
C2758 seems to handle one Plex transcode (H264->H264, maybe with AC3 to AAC) fine. If there's any particular benchmark you'd like me to run, let me know.
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a great call, an atom would struggle big time running plex, I have a Thinkcentre M92p which is tiny and silent, do wish it had a tiny bit more grunt but was pretty good value for $200.
Have you ever tried an Atom processor for running Plex? I've always been curious how it would perform. I had an older Atom device running Plex server for quite a while, but back then I almost never needed full transcoding for playback -- usually 'stream direct' which just shifts the MKV container to MP4 -- relatively easy work. And when I did have full transcode, it was either from h.264->h.264 with slightly differen…
The Atom is fine for Plex, just don't try to transcode any video, hah - it sucks at that. 99% of everything I watch doesn't need transcoding though. Sometimes the audio needs transcoding, but the Atom 230 in the FX160 handles that.
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#37My main usages with RPi 3 includes:
- SSH tunnel from outside when I concern about security / privacy
- Media box (Kodi runs pretty well)
- Running daemons (DDNS updates, torrent, etc)
- Running some nodejs scripts
RPi 3 does these very well, why bother with a more power-consuming box? Not to metion RPi 3 has WiFi builtin (I know it's slow, but good enough for my usage)
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#38For anyone who needs it, here's Dell's technical guide: http://www.sayresd.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/PC-Dell-De... There are some Amazon sellers who have put together complete systems running Windows 7 or 10 for around US $100: https://smile.amazon.com/Dell-OptiPlex-FX160-1-6GHz-Windows/... If you're buying one to use as a server this won't matter to you, but if you want a tiny Linux or BSD desktop, you may want…
Yeah, using one as a desktop with a GUI is a rubbish experience. Spend a little more and get an i5-2600 SFF box for like AU$150 and it's a vast improvement.
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#39The main thing that will be of interest to people about the comparison: >Raspberry Pi, case, power adaptor AUD$73.26. Dell Optiplex FX160 around AUD$60 translated to USD: >Raspberry Pi, case, power adaptor US $54.19. Dell Optiplex FX160 around US $44.39. (I used Google to convert the currency, didn't look up prices.)
Gah - thanks for pointing this out! I made an error that I'm guessing a few others' did -- I compared the $35USD against the $59AUD price. This makes a little more sense.
There are a few things that offset this, though. The eBay OptiPlex ships without RAM. The author points out that this adds a minimal $20AUD, but that offsets the sticker price difference. In addition, if Hacker News is the target audience and you folks are anything like me, I have a medium sized box filled with USB cables and power adapters -- more than half of which meet the specs to power a Pi, not to mention about 4 high-end multi-port units, one of which sits where my servers are and has available ports. Plus, on my nightstand next to me are three 16GB MicroSD cards that I could re-purpose for a Pi, so those costs are very efficient for me -- I'd just end up actually using something that's laying around.
Neither come with substantial storage, though. So you're going to be buying a drive to attach to either if you want to serve up video files or the likes.
This puts them about even at sticker price, but you're not leaving them in the box. You have to consider total cost of ownership with a PC just like with a car. The author states that these are silent but it has an HDD fan and it's unclear if there are other fans in the device -- these will wear. And then there's the cost of electricity. I couldn't find any data on power consumption at load/idle but a look at the specs indicates that this ships with a (rather economical/small) 50W power supply (it's 87% efficient). 50W for a PC is quite good, but it's awful compared against a Pi. The Pi is 1.4W idle and 3.7W at load[0]. Granted, more would be required for any external disks being added, but going SSD would be low power as well. Assuming the device will be 'always on', the Dell PC will cost substantially more.
[0] If this source is to be believed, anyway: https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
#40A giant difference between the two, which goes unmentioned here, is that the FX160 runs on AC power at 120 volts. If you have a deployment scenario where you already have 5 volts DC but not 120 volts AC, the pi obviously makes way more sense.