When Did Raspberry Pi become the villain?

when did Raspberry Pi become the villain was it during the pi shortage when eban Upton the CEO said they would prioritize shipments to businesses instead of hobbyists was it when the price of used tiny PCS like this one became less than scalped raspberry pies on eBay or was it when people realized you could buy a brand new n100 Mini PC running full windows with way more speed and expansion for only a little bit more money than a Raspberry Pi 5 with all the accessories you need to use it a pi a power supply active cooler and some storage but is Raspberry Pi really a villain in this story and is this thing actually better than a p and is it a good time to segue to a sponsor no it's not nobody's sponsoring this video everything you see here I bought thanks to this Channel's patrons members and sponsors so let's test whether this tiny n100 Intel PC is actually a better deal than a raspberry pi5 and let's start by looking at the price of everything that you need to get on the PC side it's it's pretty easy I bought this gmk tech mini PC from Amazon for 130 bucks shipped it comes with a 256 gig SSD 8 gigs of ddr4 RAM 2.5 gig ethernet Wi-Fi Bluetooth and even Windows 11 Pro the Box includes the PC all built out in this nice case and a power adapter for the P well things are a little more complicated you can buy just the bare Raspberry Pi 5 for 60 bucks or 80 bucks for 8 gigs of RAM it doesn't come with any storage you can either buy like a tiny micro SD card like this one for about 15 bucks or an SSD like this one for about 20 bucks but if you want to use this SSD you also need a hat to plug it into and that's going to run you another 15 or 20 bucks then you'll need to buy a power supply and this one's about 12 bucks and for protection the pie case is about 10 bucks or you could Splurge for one like this one that's about 20 bucks but there again some cases are compatible with nvme hats and some aren't so so already you can see a major difference the pi is purely DIY some assembly required but adding all this up let's say I just go with the official pie case power supply and a hat in nvme SSD for the pi that runs between 120 and 150 bucks the Mini PC in total it was 130 bucks so already a win on the tiny PC side and if you don't want maximum performance you can get the pie under 100 bucks just by sticking with a Micro SD card instead of the SSD and if you're like me and you run your pies naked with just a heat sink you can save a few more bucks and skip the case but once we get everything how's the experience setting this up the first time and first since this is already all put together I'll start with the pie if you buy the actual Raspberry Pi case it comes with this fan but if you start putting it together you'll notice that with this hat involved you can't put the fan on top so you have to figure out a different cooling solution so there again little bit of extra DIY I do need this active cooler even if I use this official case so let's get this thing set up get in there ah there's one and there's two and there's this little teeny tiny fan plug it's just like a a regular pc fan plug but super tiny and then I'm going to get this hat set up now there's actually about 10 or 12 different hats available this is the Pineberry pie hat Drive m.2 hat for Raspberry Pi 5 uh but depending on which one you get there might be different directions so ignore this if you have a different hat for your pie there are also ones that go underneath the pie but that is definitely not compatible with this case or this case or most other pie cases unless it's made specifically for that hat uh so check the instructions with whoever you buy this thing from now I have not actually used this hat with the official pie case so a part of this video is seeing if that's even possible I'm not 100% sure I think it's supposed to work one mission in life is to go through one of these projects without dropping a screw on the ground and having a fish around for it for 10 minutes so far I don't think that's ever happened to me that I have not dropped a screw a couple little flaws I see right out of the gate with this design for this hat is uh it looks like there's no pass through if you do have a camera plugged into your P which is something you can do with a Raspberry Pi that you can't do on there uh you can use webcams and things but you can't use direct DSi CSI displays and cameras if you do that this hat doesn't have a pass through for that so you'll have to kind of cram that cable in in a funny way you know what if I do this let's see if this fits I'll have to pull this fan out of here because you can't use the case fan with a hat like this but let's see if this actually fits in here at all uh you know what with those screws it does not fit into this case I don't know if you can see but uh yeah so to get it to fit in this case I think I'm going to have to screw through these holes instead of like I just did it so let's try that oh the joys of working on Raspberry Pi Projects I forgot to plug this in this is the PCI Express FFC connection so you can see this little connector here that little guy has to go into this little port and that can be a little tricky sometimes will these screws go through no they're not long enough but if I had long enough screw SCS I could probably get them to go in there what I'm going to do is just not screw it in for now and hopefully that'll work I we'll see if this case closes it's going to be close if I squeeze really tight will it go no what's going on here I think it's oh oh there we go all right so as you can see there's not a lot of clearance here I think I think if they do a second revision of this board they should cut out some holes uh to get a little more air flow CU right now there's air flow through the bottom of the case uh but the top is mostly blocked off we'll see if that affects things in performance later uh I also put this gpio pass through in here and the problem with that is I don't know if that's going to fit with this top yeah that that kind of just hits on there so that's fine if you want to experiment like this and leave this off but if you want to put that on you actually are going to have to take these off so well I'm not going to do it but uh if I just bent all these pins down or snip them all it would probably fit within here actually no uh even without that this won't fit because these little these little Clips don't have anywhere to go around the board so this particular board and the official pie case I'd say noo it fits but it's not a wonderful fit uh but you could run it like this there's no reason why you can't and I just realized to put this U NVM SSD in here I need a standoff cuz otherwise it just kind of flops so I'm going to need to take it back apart put this back in and like I said some assembly required come on ah push hard that's how you're supposed to do it oh come on let's there we go yay we got it Raspberry Pi 5 ready for action and that's always good to have a few screws left over right now there's really no database of like which hats are compatible with which uh with which types of cases and a lot of times you're just going to have to 3D print a case which not everybody has a 3D printer so yeah I I don't know how many times I'm going to say this but the Raspberry Pi is a lot more of a DIY thing you're going to learn a lot about small electronics when you buy one of these things okay so on the flip side here is our gmk Tech the box and if I pop it open we had the PC was right here I pulled it out and what else is in here there's a some sort of user manual I don't know don't need that and then there's two more boxes what's in here oh look at that it comes with an HDMI cable that's something else that if you have a Raspberry Pi 5 it has micro HDMI so if you don't already have a like that then you're going to have to buy one this one actually comes with one even though I'm pretty sure most of us probably have an HDMI cable sitting around somewhere but that's nice to include oh there's something else look at that that looks like it looks like a wall mount maybe you can mount this thing on a wall I guess yeah something like that that's cool P doesn't include a wall mount so score one for this guy that's kind of cool and we have this Strang looking advertisement for gmk tech oh it's a warranty card it says that's it there's no assembly required that's uh it's out of the box so if you're looking for a desktop computer and uh you don't want to spend all the time putting one together this is better that's not what everybody's looking for though uh but that's besides the point let's see if I can get this thing open so we can see inside it a little bit yeah look at that huh so that's it there's the guts Focus there we go has 8 gigs of RAM let's pop that out it's a little bit tight in there but there's one ram slot so you have 8 gigs of RAM included there's our nvme SSD up at the top underneath it looks like there's an A plus e key slot for uh Wi-Fi and it looks like there's another m.2 slot so you could actually add another m.2 nvme SSD like this one it looks like it's 2242 size everything else is underneath the board so the the processor on here and all that I'm not going to tear it down all the way because I haven't booted it yet I want to make sure that I'm booting it fresh and I don't accidentally damage something when I'm unplugging uh but very very uh nice build and I I like the fact that you just literally pop the top and you're in so get that back on let's get these things booted up first I'll start with the Raspberry Pi an interesting thing is you can actually use uh a cheaper Raspberry Pi power adapter as long as it provides at least 3 amps at 5 volts uh this one is a 27 watt adapter that provides 5 amps at 5 volts which is kind of crazy it's it's it's allowed but it's not a normal thing in spec for USB CPD Chargers so you can't just throw any charger at this Raspberry Pi and it'll work it has to be one that can supply enough power if you want to do things like overclock or use ssds uh but you might be able to get by with the older 3 amp uh power supply and I don't have this is this is as far as my power adapter goes let me uh let me get a different plug okay I have a kilowatt here so we can see how much power these things are drawing another fun thing about this is Rasberry pies are designed for micro SD card so this actually has raspberry pios on it and if I insert it it'll definitely boot off of it but I also flashed Raspberry p to this maker dis I don't know if that will work out of the box or not some of these hats it does if it's a newer hat that follows the Hat plus standard it should work like that but it might not and if it doesn't then you do have to boot off a Micro SD card then change some settings on the Raspberry Pi then move your OS to this disc and then you can boot off of it some assembly required so plug in the raspberry pie and we have green lights that's a good thing no sparks always good to not have Sparks when you turn on a thing the first time get out my keyboard and we'll get this monitor going for my recording setup I'm going a little non-traditional so that you can see the screen capture I have my little ninja here and it uh it actually has this adapter it's a micro HDMI to HDMI otherwise you'll need a micro HDMI to HDMI adapter for your computer all right I'm going to turn on Mr Pi Raspberry Pi desktop will it boot it's working okay well that's good and one really good thing about the Raspberry Pi uh which boots into Linux as opposed to Windows 10 is it just boots up and you're here there's no bloat Weare none of that Insanity you don't have to go through a setup wizard that wants you to sign sign your life away to Microsoft or anything and uh let's pick a really good YouTube channel youtube.com C and we'll see if YouTube is working where are the Raspberry Pi 5ivs well one of them is right here their Ai and there's an ad it's letting me do 4K now let's see if Raspberry Pi 5 can do 4K EV upt and it's we're getting some dropped frames here I mean it's it's playing and if I had a speaker plugged in or if this monitor head speakers that would work but uh it's definitely not the smoothest experience ever the pi5 is actually pretty decent if I switch down to 1080p it's probably going to be fine a lot around the floor is AI and you know co-processors npus and things and so switch to 1080P and there you go zero drop frames so it is a lot better at 1080p than it is at 4K uh but generally speaking the pi5 is a fairly usable desktop it's uh it's Linux so you're not going to have all the same stuff that you'd have in a modern Windows install and since it's not x86 there's a few more Hoops you have to jump through depending on what types of games and things you want to play again depending on the hat that you buy depending on the storage you have depending on your case all that stuff some of it works together better some of it works together a little worse that's the tough thing about pies it's kind of like building your own PC you can't just buy the parts and expect it all to go together the first time you do it you're probably going to have the wrong Ram or you're going to have a setting wrong on your motherboard or you're going to need to flash the BIOS and that's not easy to do but that's kind of how the pi is too except for small form factor this is like the pre-built PC it's all put together for you already and you don't have to do anything just buy it slap it down and hopefully return it on and it just works we'll see I do really quick want to run geekbench just to see how the performance Compares with a very generalized Benchmark like this geekbench is not the be all on end all just like cin bench and any other kind of Benchmark while geekbench is running I can check the power consumption so single core this is kind of like average use cases the typical things you do with the Raspberry Pi 5 it's uh you know four to four to six Watts that's pretty average it idles down at around three Watts uh but this is typical performance like when you're web browsing or doing things like that and if I'm running multicore tests it looks like between 9 to 12 Watts something like that so that's when you're doing heavier processing you know if you're rendering a video or you're editing video or doing things that require multiple cores having a lot of browser tabs open will do that and I can hear inside of there the fan is kicking up every now and then but it hasn't throttled so that's a good thing even with this thing covering the top of that case the Raspberry Pi 5 has not throttled yet uh which I was worried about with that hat being on top and uh here's the results let's open that up and so we got 605 single core 1626 multicore that's a little lower than I see sometimes uh so I'm going to close this out shut down the pie and let's try it on let's try the Mini PC see how that [Music] goes I wasn't recording the sound for the past few minutes uh but I plugged this in I used the cable it came with and I immediately noticed one thing that's a bit different the uh the idle power on this box seems to be we'll we'll see once Windows boots up in just a moment who knows if that'll be like 10 minutes or 30 minutes I don't know I think they're trying to like scan my body signs and take as much data away from me as possible to sell to people it's using 8 to 12 Watts while it's booting we'll see what it settles down to once it gets to idle though initial setup process the pie is winning I booted it up now you know if you have a different language or something yes and I did not not have to agree to any license agreement for the P I do have to here this is I'm not going to read all this but I guess I'll accept it I hope it doesn't say like it's going to take all my raspberry pies away no no no no it'd be a lot easier if they were just set these to no to begin with I don't know why they tried doing it the other way that's just silly all I did was create an account I don't know what it's waiting for here I do hear the fan it's it's not too loud actually it's probably it's a tiny bit quieter than the fan on the pi the active cooler is actually a pretty decent fan in terms of Noise Okay we're definitely idle at this point and it looks like it hovers around 10 watts idle this is 2.5 gigs I should be able to get that straight out of my switch because it is I think it's plugged into a port that will give me 2.5 or 10 gigs depending on the device properties there it is 2.5 GBS Wow all I did was I open open up Edge and uh no I don't want any of this stuff I open up Edge and the fan kicked on so you know that edge is a little bit heavyweight I'm going to go dark and we'll go to YouTube already it's a little bit smoother feeling let's see if we can do 4K and we'll go full screen so yeah definitely the the media playback on here is is a bit uh bit nicer there's one dropped frame instead of hundreds of dropped frames and of course if I drop this down to 1080p it's going to be perfectly fine I wonder like what is installed on here it has Spotify I don't need that has office I don't need office I don't need Outlook so yeah clipchamp I don't even know what that is and I would rather not have it LinkedIn why is LinkedIn why is that on here that's a Windows thing but uh let me grab geekbench and we'll get that running and I'm going to grab geekbench 5 because that's what I ran on the pie these are the single core tests on here so we are doing single core and if I look at the power consumption so single core is already up to 18 see 15 to 18 Watts so it is still it's it's going through faster than the P does you do get some more performance and I hear that fan the fan in here keeps ramping up and down uh more so than the pi okay now we're on to multicore tests and the the fan in here is definitely getting a workout and during those tests the the power usage goes up to is looks like almost 30 Watts so 25 26 yeah but it definitely it definitely chews through a bit more power we'll see how that power translates into performance once this test is completed 844 which is a bit faster and 243 which is also a bit faster so just doing a little bit of a quick math here it looks like the pi is getting 135 geek benches per watt uh at least multicore versus uh this little box is getting 93 geek benches per watt so on efficiency the pi actually is winning um that is one case where if you want the most power efficiency if you don't need all the performance if you're not watching 4K videos on your desktop this isn't a bad option so efficiency win pie so it's not cut and dry assuming you can buy a pi5 at retail which is 60 bucks for a 4 gig model and 80 bucks for 8 gigs it's not a terrible deal and I wouldn't buy one from a scalper for any reason unless you absolutely need a pi5 right now otherwise just wait Raspberry Pi is making almost 100,000 of these a week right now they currently the production right about 70,000 unit a week uh the goal is to get by the end of this month to get to 90,000 unit a week so that's you know uh basically 400,000 units a month scalpers won't be able to keep up so if you need a pi just use rpy locator and if you don't need a pi then yeah something like this little PC is perfect especially if you just want a tiny desktop computer what's even better is you can find n100 mini ITX boards for just a little more meaning you could build a full custom PC just like explaining computers did a couple weeks ago still not the same as a Raspberry Pi but for many people building their own system is what got them into computing and that's awesome no matter what you buy I know that's how I started back when I built my first little 386 PC and ran Doss on it I hate to say it but the answer to which one of these things is better a pie or a tiny PC it's why not both they each have their strengths and if you really want the cheapest option the pi 4 is still around and it's still only 35 bucks so yeah until next time I'm Jeff Kling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 610,907

Keywords: raspberry pi, nuc, intel, x86, arm, mini pc, tiny pc, tinyminimicro, gmktec, amazon, n100, pi 5, soc, sbc, computer, desktop, geekbench, compare, comparison, performance, review, testing, tested, maker, hobbyist, setup, guide, teardown, take apart, mod, custom, build, ram, ssd, nvme, pineberry, pi, hat, hat plus, microsd, installation, windows, privacy

Id: jjzvh-bfV-E

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024