I have a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8GB of RAM, and I’m looking for a bit more powerful solution that would have similar power consumption. I would like to host a Minecraft server, but chunks take too long to generate. Do you have any recommendations?
Look for second hand business PCs. They can be had extremely cheap and draw almost no power.
I have a Futro S920 and an HP ProDesk mini G300 (or something like that, never understood the naming). Both draw about 5-7W from the wall, which is roughly the same as my RPi3b.
The HP one has an i5 6500T and 16GB RAM, both upgradeable. There’s also a real 2.5" slot including SATA connector on the board, an M.2 slot and an NGFF slot. Really cool device. The only slightly annoying thing is, that the fan can’t be controlled (or at least Debian can’t detect any PWM devices), and it’s always slightly-on, which can be annoying. But for 100€? I think that’s a good deal.
Yeah, thin clients are the way to go, but tgey will draw more than 5-7 Watt under load.
Sure, but is that really so much more (for a given amount of compute) than an RPi?
My Futro S740 with an J4105 CPU consumes up to 14 Watts according to this article. It is faster than a rpi 4b plus i bought it refurbished for 40€. I think a system with an I5 6500t will need even more power under load.
Well, yes, but it’s also more powerful. If it’s twice as powerful as a pi, it will only be half as long under load for a given amount of computation and thus require less power overall.