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Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

thesizzle.com.au

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Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#171

Post by kutkloon7 »

The raspberry pi's selling points are: 1. It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card.

2. It is tiny

3. It is quite power efficient

4. It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware.

5. It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software)

6. It is cheap

All of this makes it fantastic for education and as a gadget. The whole point of the raspberry pi is to be unlike other computers. You can set it up as a server, but this is not its main purpose.

The Dell Optiflex FX160 probably outperforms the pi at all measures, but it is just stupid to compare it to a raspberry pi, because it has none of its unique points which make the pi a good choice in the first place.

Now, there are actually some better raspberry pi clones out there. For those products, a title like this might make sense.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#174

Post by moron4hire »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #171

The raspberry pi's selling points are: 1. It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card. 2. It is tiny 3. It is quite power efficient 4. It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware. 5. It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software) 6. It is cheap All of this makes it fant…

> You can set it up as a server, but this is not its main purpose.

I thought the article was very clear about that as it's point. If you were thinking of using an RPi as a server, it's not meant for that, here is a better alternative.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#176

Post by gr3yh47 »

moron4hire wrote: post #174
kutkloon7 wrote: post #171

The raspberry pi's selling points are: 1. It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card. 2. It is tiny 3. It is quite power efficient 4. It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware. 5. It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software) 6. It is cheap All of this makes it fant…

> You can set it up as a server, but this is not its main purpose. I thought the article was very clear about that as it's point. If you were thinking of using an RPi as a server, it's not meant for that, here is a better alternative.

Agree, but also, if price is a consideration the optiplex is clearly 5-10x the cost depending on what of the listed upgrades you get for it

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#177

Post by DamonHD »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #171

The raspberry pi's selling points are: 1. It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card. 2. It is tiny 3. It is quite power efficient 4. It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware. 5. It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software) 6. It is cheap All of this makes it fant…

The Dell is absolutely not outperforming the RPi on power consumption. I run multiple internal- and external- facing servers (eg multiple static and Java-based Web servers, SMTP, DNS, NTP, etc) and the total power usage is generally much less than 50Wh/day.

I can throw my Internet connection router and FTTC box on as discretionary load but that's another ~300Wh/day; it is quite staggering how relatively efficient the RPi is, compared to presumably similar or lower processing requirements in the other two boxes!

http://www.earth.org.uk/off-grid-stats.html

(You can only see the RPi's power consumption when the networking gear is pushed back onto mains.)

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#178

Post by DamonHD »

Waterluvian wrote: post #175

This is one of those moments where I notice the stark difference in good vs. bad branding (in my opinion). Raspberry Pi. Dell Optiplex FX160.

I think that Dell would claim that their brand is the more valuable for their purposes.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#180

Post by coredog64 »

mdip wrote: post #39
logicallee wrote: post #16

The 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 fo…

I keep having awful luck with USB power adapters and RPis, to the point that I buy a specific adapter to go with each Pi.
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