Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
268 comments
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Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
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I know its not the most ideal place, but FB marketplace where I live has lots of old PCs/Laptops for under 50 eur. I would probably start there personally.
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Sometimes you can find them on eBay.
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I go to Ebay and sort by distance. It's like Craigslist but they send it to you!
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I do e-scooter mechanical stuff, I always have a bid war with the local franchisee scooter shop nearby fighting for the scooters. I know its them, so I try to raise the bids for them as much as possible to fuck them around.
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eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work's IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask
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We have bins around our city for people to drop electronics off for recycling. I’ve taken a few laptops from there. You’re not supposed to, but ¯(ツ)_/¯.
One I gave to my buddy who needed something just for emails and web browsing and whatnot, one is running a server, and a couple more went back in to the bin because they were actually broken, but I took the hard drives for the server machine. I have one on a self ready in case the server machine dies so I haven’t gone looking for any new ones in a while.
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn't.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don't need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
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Aren't laptops typically very energy efficient? Low consumption converts to high battery life, which is a priority for laptop hardware.
Some of them consume less than 10W.
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I'm not taking electronics advice from someone who uses the term lappies.
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Where I'm from those were 10$ and legal in Quebec.
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This is generally not true. If you are using your laptop as a home server chances are it's going to be idling 99% of the time and laptops are generally pretty good in terms of idle power draw if you manage to disable the screen (or just disconnect it, take it off and find a way to repurpose it)
And in terms of environmental impact saving a laptop from landfill is definitely better since the majority of a computers impact is from the co2 emmissions from the manufacturing process. And this isn't taking into account the likely ethical considerations such as supporting terrible mining practices for resources like cobalt.
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Yes actually still sounds good. Raspberry Pis actually have quite high power draw compared to the performance they give. Like sure the number might be smallish but the performance they give and functionality they have is awful compared to even a mini PC which use similar power. Mini PCs btw are actually one of the best options in performance per watt and can still be cheap, plus they have upgradable RAM and storage. A Mac mini is more expensive but will thrash everything else in efficiency and performance per watt, although non-upgradable. Even slightly older laptops will only draw tens of watts when fully charged, vs a desktop or proper server that could pull 100W even at idle in some cases. Older laptops tended to be more upgradable too.
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There's lots of ways to make existing hardware more efficient at the cost of performance. Under-volting the CPU and RAM (or just putting them in "efficiency" mode) can probably save more electricity than you lose in generational improvements. Considering how much more powerful PCs are compared to SBCs, you'd probably still have better performance than an SBC. Also, a more powerful CPU that takes double the power but as a result can idle for more than 50% of the time would be more efficient than a less powerful CPU never idling.
There's a lot of other variables (like idle power draw, efficiency at various power levels, idle latency, etc), but in general I think your statement would be inaccurate at least 60% of the time.
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Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power? A whole 60 watts? Are you rationing AA batteries to run your household?
What is it with the bullshit fanciful rationalizations people come up with to consume consume consume?
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And that's 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.
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Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power?
Some of us live off-grid and make every Watt-hour we consume. So it may be that one man's fanciful bullshit is another man's daily life. For context, this is my 2,461st day offgrid.
A whole 60 watts?
Over the last 30 days I've averaged 2.01kWh/day, or an average constant consumption of 84w. All in. And that's on the high end for folks in similar use cases. In this scenario adding in another 60w would be significant (ie, impossible for my rig during winter months).
As Sesame Street taught showed us it's a matter of perspective.
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60w is like £120 a year, these costs add up to the point that low spec servers pretty much always cost more in energy than hardware. Of course it also depends on where you live and your energy rates.
You could buy a 20 year old server that is going to use 800w, or you could buy a mini PC that is probably more powerful and uses like 10-20w.
Then again, I used to live somewhere that energy was included in the rent so short of starting a bitcoin farm usage wouldn't really get noticed too much. In that case it would make sense to just go cheap hardware.
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A good "rule of thumb" to remember: if your electricity rates average (somewhere near) $0.11/kWh you can take the average power draw of a device in watts and that is equal to what it will cost to run that device 24-7 for 365 days.
So, if that cheap PC draws 50W more than an alternate solution, it's costing you $50 more per year to use it.
Some tasks are beyond any RasPi, but it's well worth evaluating if something like an N100 fanless mini-PC can handle it instead of loading up some Core i7 rig that's going to cost more to run in the first year than the N100 costs to buy.
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these shitty win8 laptops are surprisingly low power and efficient though.
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time
Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can "race to sleep" more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable
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lowendtalk, hella cheap vps with plenty of resources for most self hosted apps, the issue with it is usually storage space but there are ways around that connecting your drives from elsewhere
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Warning tho, hella shills too but you could literally make a post asking if certain companies on the site that have active threads are scams and get valid responses that don't get removed or anything so thats nice, like half of the ones I looked at were giving less resources than they claimed
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Where are these cheap e waste laptops with gpio and actually low power?
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No gpio but old centrino laptops make excellent low power servers. My primary server was a first gen centrino from 2011 up until recently and I think it only used 12w idle after putting a SSD in there. Had it's own UPS built in.
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Digging through e-waste bins is one of my hobbies.
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What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.
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any luck with gpio and 5W power usage so far?
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Somebody already asked, but what are good locations to do this? Do you ever get harassed by property owners or law enforcement?
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There are usb gpio devices which can fulfill the connectivity bit. Pretty sure you are sol with the 5w though 😊
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The Raspberry Pi Zero in USB gadget mode can be used for GPIO. If you don't want to setup gadget mode, get Pi Zero W.
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The market is about to be flooded with them with Windows 10 going EoL in October.
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About to be? The bottom has been falling out for desktops and laptops on processors not on Microsoft's supported list for the last year or more. I've seen roughly the same system go from ~$200+ down to under $100 on the last year based on eBay pricing alone
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l a p p i e s
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That word made me hear the whole thing in an Australian accent.
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True, but we don't really say landfill, rather "tip".. So..
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Strong Bad vibes
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The power constraints are more important to most than the size constraints honestly.
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Yeah, my pi sips energy very sparingly. Even an old laptop is going to be drawing more just to power itself, never mind what I run on it.
That said, pis are a poor value proposition nowadays and there are better options for the same use case
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I have one of those 8.1 laptops - I LITERALLY fished it out of a dumpster.
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You lose the I/O and power efficiency is no comparison. You can get better power efficiency and sometimes some I/O with an old router and OpenWRT, but you'll be in the class of a Beagle Bone and a much harder learning curve. I've never managed to get a sensor or peripheral working on some old laptop's SPI or I2C buses like how easy it is on a Rπ.
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New low end chromebooks are much better for this anyway, an intel N4000 will consume just 8 watts at its peak and it's even supported by Windows 11, and they are usable if you put Linux on them
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You can get an esp32 or whatever and have io
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A RPi is going to be smaller, quieter, and 10x more energy efficient though...
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Also, Raspberry Pi first got popular because of the size and cost. Now it's popular because it's popular. Not hating on them, I think they're cool, but they're not cheap any more. Especially with the scalping.
Getting x86_64 based systems is going to mean much less headache. Unless you truly truly need the size I wouldn't consider getting a Pi or other SBC. Just go to literally any used marketplace (Facebook, Craigslist, etc) and get anything.
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but they're not cheap any more
People say this, but they really are still cheap.
The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched for £22 in 2012. The entry level Raspberry Pi 5 is £46, but adjusted for inflation that's only £32 in 2012 money. So only £10 more expensive in real terms.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is only £14.40, which is only £10 in 2012 money. Compare this to the original Raspberry Pi Model A, which launched for £16.
People look at the headline cost of the high end RPi 5s (£115 for the 16GB model, £76 for the 8GB), but fail to recognise that there was nothing comparable to these in the Raspberry Pi lineup before, and these are not the only models in the Raspberry Pi lineup now.
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There was the supply shortage price spike, they really were stupid expensive then if you supported the hoarder/scalpers.
Since that has cleared... most of the Pi price increases (in inflation adjusted dollars) can be attributed to improved features like more RAM, or people acknowledging that having a good dedicated $20 power supply is preferable to dealing with the flakiness of that old phone charger you found under the bed.
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10£ more, or 50% more expensive?
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Inflation adjustment doesn't really tell the whole story though, it's not like salaries have gone up by the same amount. Regardless, I don't like dealing with the Zero unless I specifically need something that tiny. It's just too annoying. Don't get me wrong! They're cool! I'm just saying unless I really need a Pi Zero I wouldn't wanna work with one. I'd rather work with x86_64 than Arm. Like even just getting Java working was really tricky on Zero. Much like a microcontroller has limitations for what you can run on them but they have other benefits, Zeros aren't really general purpose.
So yeah, dirt cheap used laptop for general purpose server beats out dirt cheap Pi in my book.
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That's only true for the high-end Pi 5. Lower-powered models like the zero 2 are still cheap, and they're a lot easier to find than a few years ago.
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Which part? Because the "it's not x86" is even more annoying to deal with on Pi Zero lol.
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Pi is popular with me because it's time efficient. Meaning: when I am trying to get it to do something, it takes less of my time to make the thing actually happen on Pi hardware as compared with most of the other small / embedded alternatives. Notable recent exception: ESPHome on ESP32 hardware, but even there the more limited variation of Raspberry hardware makes it similar to those fruity phones, MP3 players and computers - since there are a limited number of variations, you can usually find information specific to EXACTLY your setup, instead of having to infer from something almost the same, but figure out little wrinkles here and there due to differences between what you are working with and what you are reading about on the internet.
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I mostly agree, and did the same with my second gen lab build - instead of shiny new NUCs like I had used round 1, I bought old off lease Dell Xeon boxes. SO MANY PROS -
- Got them up to 14c/28t each
- They can take GPUs and actually do heavy transcoding/ML work
- They can take up to like, 128GB of memory, which is GREAT when they're all hypervisors
The downsides can't be denied though -
- Even without the GPUs and beefed up CPUs, they are power hogs - the CPU alone uses more than an ENTIRE NUC
- They run HOT
- They run LOUD
The same holds true for off-lease SFF stuff, Lenovo and the likes ...
So while reuse/repurpose is absolutely of the utmost importance, no question - when it comes to technology and how quickly it advances and miniaturizes, a thorough and logical pros/cons list is often required.
I'd add another option though - if you do need what a Pi brings to the table - do you really need a shiny new Pi 5? Is it possible a used Pi 3 or Pi 4 would do the trick, and check the reuse box?
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The power aspect is a lot bigger of a factor than I would have thought. I had an old computer I was going to use as a server for Foundry that I could keep up all the time, but when I measured its wattage and did the math, it would cost me $20 a month to keep on. A pi costs like $2 to keep running, so it paid for itself pretty quick
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RPis aren't energy efficient either. Any situation where you are thinking of putting more than one of them in a cluster you should just buy mini PCs instead.
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All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
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And they passively cool better that way much of the time too...
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Technically a Pi is a single chip computer but they're called an SBC because they replaced stuff like a Motorola 68HC11.
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It's a good idea until you consider the fact that a Raspberry Pi will be astronomically more power efficient.
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If you think in flops per watt, maybe a little bit, but not a lot. Do you have one or two good procs for almost free, or half a dozen new sbcs at $100 each? Takes a while to save back that amount in power.
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My question is usually not how many flops, but how quickly and reliably those watts can give me just a few flops on demand.
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The only caveat here is the fire-hazard non-removable lithium batteries.
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This is, in my mind, one of the benefits of laptops over micro computers: integrated UPS. Even an old, degraded battery will probably get you a couple of hours with the screen off.
IME, power consumption is going to be worse overall, for any laptop likely to be in the recycle bin, it's probably double the consumption of an ARM SBC. The integrated UPS and usually decent power conditioning of the power supply saves you more money with a laptop. Plus, keyboard and screen for emergencies - I just generally expect that, over there life of a micro I'm going to have to drag out and plug in a spare keyboard, mouse, and monitor because something in a device, or an upgrade, or BIOS flash, is preventing a boot.
There are a lot of good reasons to use laptops instead of SBCs, if you don't mind the extra power draw and (as she says) don't have size requirements.
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Replacement is usually removing 6-10 screws and prying the case with a guitar pick or old credit card. There is most likely a disassembly video on youtube. Batteries from aliexpress or the like are usually cheap (although probably more expensive than the computer). Depending on the application, the "built-in UPS" can be nice.
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Not simple to remove. They can all be taken out.
But the fire risk is a very valid point. All laptops should indicate they should not be left alone when charging. While many do. Setting one up in a unobserved location to run permanently should be batteryless or Lifepo4 adapted. So laptops may not be best suited to this environment. A used thin client or other DC input option may be much easier. Or an old desktop if batts and not wanted.
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'non-removable' lol
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These things are removable with a screwdriver in most cases. If the battery isn't completely dead it's actually useful for backup power.
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I had read about it on another thread, which was about using old smartphones as servers (they used Termux).
Those old lithium batteries, although sometimes seemingly healthy, can catch fire any time. Having them connected to the charger 24/7 is only making matters worse.
I wouldn't trust the battery of old devices. I would probably buy a used UPS (without battery) and slap a new battery to it. This would cost more, but it would allow me to also connect other important devices to it - like the router and some lights.
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It's low power that is still making arm small computers popular. It's impossible to get a pc down into the 2-5 Watt power consumption range and over time it's the electrical costs that add up. I would suggest the RPI5 is the thing to get because it's expensive for what it is and more performance is available from other options supported by armbian.
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Mini PC with N200 and NVMe SSD uses around 7W when idling.
For a minimally higher power consumption you can have up to 32 GB of memory, more powerful CPU, and decent GPU for video transcoding purposes.
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Yet a Mac Mini does exactly that. Or like any Intel N100 based mini PC or laptop. Those also have way better performance, IO, and software compatibility. Raspberry Pi's fill a certain niche, but efficiency isn't it. At least not anymore.
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And for some (including me) that's our only computer (other than phone). I just can't afford anything, so all I have is a shitty laptop from 2010 that barely plays 1080p video. I deeply want something better, especially a steam deck, but doesn't look like that'll happen anytime soon (or ever). And then you see people have steam decks that just sit there, unused, gathering dust.... fuck.
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Consider buying used hardware from an office. Lots of places sell used gear for dirt cheap. A used office desktop with a used GPU from the last 3 years or so would be a massive upgrade without spending much.
Steam Deck is still a good deal for what it is though, but I wouldn't use it as a primary workstation.
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You want a steam deck to replace your only computer?
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Why not? especially when it's a laptop from 2010
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They make a quite capable desktop machine when plugged in, with the benefit of portability, and definitely better than a 2010 laptop
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The shitty 2010 laptop isn't disappearing
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Honestly, if you're in the States I have a bunch of HP ProDesks that my wife would be very happy to see disappear from our basement (I bid on an auction I didn't expect to win lol). I'd happily send one for the cost of shipping
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raspberries were viable while those were cheap. I think I got a 3b (plus?) in pre-deficit years for like $25 second-hand AND I got some shitty case AND a microSD card AND it could run off of a somewhat normal USB phone charger. so using those instead of a 10 year old decommissioned desktop was an awesome value proposition.
nowadays, those devices are encroaching on trip-digits territory and the power adapter is like $30. the computing power you can buy for a third of that designates raspberries exclusively for niche use cases where footprint and power consumption are primary considerations.
not to mention fake Jason Statham just rubs me the wrong way, like all them "visionaries". he makes this sound like he's the head of Feed Africa or something, on a noble mission to save humanity and whatnot.
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The Zero 2W is cheaper and pretty much the same spec as the Pi 3.
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Oh what I was about to correct you but apparently I always assumed the Zero 2 had the dual core chip of the Pi 2, not a quad core
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unless you buy really stupidly, every single of those points is not true.
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Low power and arm architecture are big differentiators between Pi and laptops.
I totally agree recycle laptops where possible, but they're generally noisier and less energy efficient plus the battery degrades over time and is a fire risk.
They're not necessairly a good fit for always-on server or service type uses comparef to a small board like Raspberry Pi. But a cheap or free second hand laptop is definitely good for tweaking, testing and trying our projects.
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How many people keep up with this misconception RPis are ultra efficient? They are bargain basement SoCs. The power draw isn't that low (25W PSU), and the performance they deliver isn't great. They are all made using older process nodes and techniques that result in less efficient processors. Add those together and you will find they have less performance per watt than all modern laptops with the screen turned off, and less than most Mini PCs. Mini PCs and other SBCs are where it's at for efficient home labs. If you can find a Mac with Apple Silicon for cheap they are even better. Everyone in the home labbing community pretty much knows this by now. I struggle to understand why Lemmy hasn't got this through their brains. I think it's partially the miconception that ARM is always better, and partially down to people not understanding that low maximum power draw and efficiency are the same thing. Not even thinking about idle power or performance per watt.
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Or get a used thin client (e. g. HP T620, T630, T640 or Dell Wyse 5070). Cost: ~40-100$. Biggest advantage: Passive cooling, i. e. they're absolutely quiet.
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Wanna get something like this and a large SSD going forward. Make a silent NAS out of it, and have it in my bedroom without issues.
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I would say it can sometimes be nice to have an old Laptop for this purpose, you have to slightly over build your solar but can be nice to have a mouse and keyboard attached and monitor, ssh works. Still have an hp laptop with a core i5 2nd gen sitting out in my greenhouse, is a little more power hungry but not terrible on idle, and is nice to be able to configure changes to watering without going back inside or wrecking the zen by bringing phone.
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There are also a lot of mini PCs that are comparable in price to a Raspberry Pi 5 once you factor in the cost of a case, SD card, and power supply for the Pi.
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Notable mention, amd64 chipsets are more widely supported than ARM.
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That's only start up cost. What about ongoing 24/7 costs after 2 years?
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Probably not much of a difference. These mini PCs can run at single digit wattage too and you won't be buying new SD cards every 6 months.
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The power usage will be a bit higher, but it will also have higher performance. They can have 2.5G ethernet and a couple of NVMe SSDs. The Raspberry Pi 5 only has one lane of PCIe 2.0, so it will be very bandwidth limited if you use a PCIe switch to connect a 2.5G NIC and an SSD.
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I have an old pentium laptop N3520 with 4GB DDR3. I removed everything and put it in a receiver box 1U size. It consumes so little energy that it can run 5-7 hours from its battery (I call it build in USV). Last time I measured 3-7w. Also passiv cooled , no noise. Another machine I use , is with a i7 4770 with 16GB for Proxmox, 7-20w , peak is much higher but rarely used , only on boot and vm startup.
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The day i can fit the power of a computer capable of emulating the switch 1 in a gameboy shell will be glorious.
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We must be pretty close on that by now, I can emulate a number of Switch 1 games surprisingly OK (not amazing, just OK) on my S21!
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say what again?
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You probably could with a phone
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Do you mean the steam deck?
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Deck is slightly bigger than Gameboy
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Better than an old laptop, get a mini-pc like thinkcentre tiny. They're more upgradeable, space-efficient, power efficient, have better cooling
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I wish there was a convenient place to get these
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I've thought about asking the folks at the local Free Geek about getting a laptop or two like this that I can mess around with. I had an old HP Stream 11 and I'm still disappointed that it died.
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Yeah... no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
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Only if you're running it at full load all the time and comparing that to a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount of work. Also, only if you live in a cold climate and the heat generated is not a concern and power is supplied by a renewable source so power isn't a concern.
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Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
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No reason why a laptop wouldn't work though.
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I mean, a lot of things would work, I could power it all with potato batteries if I had enough. The Pi Zero 2 W only cost ~£15 anyway.
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I agree that the Zero is up to the task, but I prefer a wired connection for my home DNS/DHCP server and if I understand correctly the Pi5 has better wired ethernet than its predecessors... Yeah, utilization is laughable, but there's something to be said for reduced lag time too:
Hostname: pihole CPU: 0.2% on 4 cores running 318 processes (0.3% used by FTL) RAM: 25.9% of 2.0 GB is used (7.4% used by FTL) Swap: 35.9% of 512.0 MB is used Kernel: Linux pihole 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 Uptime: a month (running since Sunday, May 18th 2025, 17:54:59 -
But... that's so uncool...
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I should have rebuilt an old coffee maker in to a Pi Hole instead. I'm such a rube.
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I dislike posts like this. Technology moves quickly. PIs are great for hobby electronics where you need a little computer. Want a cheap computer to run a few things 24/7 and know what you're doing? Pi it is. You don't need to run containers on a pi because you have the skills to install the dependencies manually. They cost pennies to run 24/7.
I think of pis as beefed-up calculators. I have made lots of money using a pi zero running code I needed to run 24/7. Code I developed myself.
Having an old laptop with outdated parts taking up lots of space, weighing a lot, and having components like fans, keyboard, and mousepad most-likely soon dying and needing replacing is an additional concern you don't want.
Someone below saying use an old laptop if you're living with parents and don't pay the electricity bill is a bit lame. Do your part for the world. Someone will be paying for it.
Ultimately, use what you want but if you're just starting with servers, use a virtual machine on your computer and log in to it. You can dick about with it as much as you want, and reset back to a working state in seconds.
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Yeah, theres a lot of old old laptops which make no sense to run. But there's a growing crop of more recent used devices that are only being sold off because they don't support Windows 11, and the power efficiency story changes there. The OOP mentions "8.1 lappies"; my main laptop has a 15W 8th gen which is only in the last year starting to feel less appropriate for desktop use. (And honestly, a RAM and storage bump will probably get me another couple years.)
For environmental concerns, youve got to tax new devices with manufacturing costs as well.
100% agree about VMs though.
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Laptops don't even use that much power. You guys are really not into home labbing or as good with tech as you think you are lol. Lots of people run older real servers and desktops as home servers. They use way more power than laptops. Raspberry Pis sound good but use progressively more power in each generation, and still struggle to compete with mini PCs and even older laptops in performance. They also never had good performance per watt. In performance per watt basically nothing beats a Mac Mini, though other mini PCs are also good. Laptops aren't bad in energy efficiency either. They are literally designed to run on battery so have as little idle draw as possible. They would be comparable to a mini PC if you turn off the display.
Edit: Modern RPis apparently use 25W, which is firmly in the territory of what a laptop would use when not running the screen or charging the battery.
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Rpi uses 25watts? My old acer 6th gen laptop has a 15watt TDP and remains around 8watts 24/7 even with my services and without disconnecting the internals. My 8th gen laptop pulls 6watts with the screen on. People here saying older laptops arent a good choice are insane considering the ~$100-300 diffrence between an ewaste laptop and dedicated minipc + backup power bank (laptops have internal batterys you can easily replace when they go bad)
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Jesus 25W is about what a miniPC would consume at a constant 30-50% load!
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I think this really depends on the model they're eyeballing because the Pi5 is frankly ridiculous for the price and has absurd power requirements (5V5A USB?). I wouldn't recommend one of these unless you have a specific need like a certain hat or the GPIO pins. You can get a Dell micro Optiplex for less money and have a full fledged i5 or i7 processor with similar power usage.
Plus the RPi Foundation exposed themselves as the greedy bastards they are during COVID which is yet another reason to turn your back on them.
For something like a Pi Zero, maybe go for it, but there are similar devices out there from other companies too.
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I picked up a used 2018 Fujitsu office PC with an i5-7500 for $60 (from a physical recycle shop, with a 14 day warranty) and it draws 15W idle. Way better value than a Pi (once you've added case, cooling, PSU etc) for running home server stuff.
A Pi still kills for "Arduino plus plus" use cases where you need the size, GPIO or can optimize the heck out of power usage on a battery.
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You can get a Dell micro Optiplex for less money and have a full fledged i5 or i7 processor with similar power usage.
Absolutely, I've got a cluster of mini PCs with 7th/8th gen T sku i7s, plus an Optiplex SFF running a standard i7-7700, and everything together draws less than 100W on average.
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Pi's are ARM-based, which still to this day limits the scope of their applicability.
Also, you should absolutely inspect a laptop before buying. Many, if not most, of old laptops will run just fine for the next few years.
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Pi’s are ARM-based, which still to this day limits the scope of their applicability.
Untrue.
Also, you should absolutely inspect a laptop before buying. Many, if not most, of old laptops will run just fine for the next few years.
Until the battery needs replacing, costing more than a pi, one key on the keyboard dies, etc.
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the 20 year old pc of my grandparents had a graphics card failure, i fixed it but tgey decided i should keep the pc and help them pick a new one (valid after 20 years ngl) now this PC runs debian and hosts my game servers and all
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You'll have no end of problems and won't know whether it's a hardware or software problem.
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Damn straight. Another reason not to buy a pi.
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damn you all, now I impulse bought an old thin client for 30EUR :-) but, fwiw: I mostly use RPi for my purposes, up to RPi4; RPi 5 I think missed the mark, with its active cooling requirement and power use. (and price...) the only use case where an i86 alternative is justified is my jellyfin setup (where realtime transcoding is needed).
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As a Pi Hole, the Pi 5 doesn't require active cooling.
Now, I am running a separate Pi 5 with a HAILO 8 for Frigate monitoring of a bunch of video streams, and it does need a little air movement, so I built a box with a 200mm fan pulling through a filter and I just threw all my Pis in there along with the Frigate rig so they stay nice and cool... I'm thinking that I should probably switch Frigate over to a Pi 4 for the h.264 hardware decoder, but the 5 is working fine for my needs and endless tweaking gets boring...
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You are probably right for something like a Pihole, which can easily run on a RPi 3 as well (I think I'm running it on a 3... maybe even a 2.) My fear is something like Jellyfin (which it is not suited for anyway, I know), combined with the fact that my stack of Pis is in my meter cabinet, so a fairly confined space with very little air movement, also passive. Running Jellyfin without transcoding has my Pi 5 running at just under 50 °C.
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Its all fun and games until the power bill arrives. Performance per watt is important, please look at that first. Don't be me.
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I bought a dell latitude on eBay for a few bucks and run Debian on it. This one speaks to me.
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Or any compact pc like gigabyte brix, nucs, lenovos , etc. you can get those for 70-200 on ebay and they are amazing for running any homelab projects, including stream services like jellyfin with hardware decoding.
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Add use of gpio to reasons to use pie.
While gpio adaptors are available for pc. The software architecture is not as well rounded and documented.
So for any complex hardware project development. Gpio based SBCs are often essential.
So space, low power and gpio development.
Otherwise yep old laptop or even desktop can be cheaper and more able.
But overall. The wide software support and documentation for hardware connectivity is a bloody good reason to keep pie supported.
I'm setting 2 up to control the hot water and solar dump system on my shared little boat. As I want to link 12v Lifepo4 batt charging with the solar dump and visually impaired control for AC and diesel heating of the water.
Pies really are the best option to play with. While low power and easy to design a unique low vision interface.
Also UK boat safty. Is issuing warning about permanently connected li ion batts on boats. So it is likely setting up a laptop to manage this while not on the boat. Will be banned in the near future.
Only an issue for UK boating but worth considering the risks of leaving laptops to run when not observed.
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I bet you could instead use an ESP32 for GPIO and just connect it remotely to whatever Pi alternative you use (if needed at all). Turning some switches on and off while monitoring input values doesn't sound very computationally intensive.
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Yep that can work. But ignores all the well documented and supported development community comments I pointed to while also indicating other options exist.
As for.
Turning some switches on and off while monitoring input values doesn’t sound very computationally intensive.
You realise IO wise that describes your keyboard and mouse interaction on the most powerful gaming PCs.
It's what you do with the results that matters.
GPIO supports a fair bit more then the on and off input and output. It's slow compared to other systems. But has multiple serial protocols of differing types. Simple GUI displays can also be run via gpio connections. Low Res Lidar devices are available connected via the spi connections with all the data processed on that host PC.
So no gpio use can require all levels of processing power post connection. It is after all designed for experimentation and prototyping.
For my project. You clost to correct. I just use a simple GUI displays with xorg. So a pie 0 is plenty. And way lower power then the other options. It links to a pwm controller to power 2 12v 200w water tank heaters a relay for a 750w AC heater. Bluetooth connection to a BMS and solar MPPT. While operating multiple temp sensors measuring at different levels. And warning of legionaries risk. If the tank has not been over 65c in 14 days (actually 10 days but I'm over careful given the health status of my brother and I).
So much less then the tiny Pie 0 would not be able to cope but mainly due to the need for the vision impaired interface. Speaking functions dose not take much. But doing so without being unusably slow is about the limit of a pie 0.
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I use old Mac Minis that were cycled out from a company and replaced. An e-waste laptop is still probably cheaper, but you can still find the older model Mac Minis fairly cheap too. I have 2 of them that sit vertically side-by-side in a small rack with my router stationed above them. They both run Elementary OS.
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Here too. Free 2012 Mac Mini that's been servering away for a couple of years already 24/7 on UPS power. Gets a deserved smile every time I look at it :)
I'm looking at replacing my 2018 desktop machine (a Thinkcentre Tiny) soon with one of the new AMD 395 mini-pcs. When that happens, the Mac Mini will be retired...
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I think mine are around the same year. Such great machines for random shit. I tried to run an AI cluster across them and it kinda struggled 😂. It was a fun experiment.
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I'm sure silicon valley are stepping on each other, vying to get their hands on these super cheap laptops for their 24/7 AI training.
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No Silicon Valley are the ones throwing these things away because it costs them too much money to deal with old unreliable PCs.
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Damn, I should have ended the post with /s for people like you.
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They aren't very useful for much besides hobby projects. Modern hardware is more energy efficient and will be cheaper in the long run compared to anything that would be considered e-waste. The only advantage an old laptop has is the initial cost, so it makes sense for a small home server.
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I personally needed the Pi for its Arm architecture.
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I now have a stack of Thinkpads laying around. Right next to my two RPis 😂
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I really should pick up another used thinkpad.... I've got one for my wife, one for me for work, and I would really like to have a personal in the mix to make my life easier.
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Rockchip boards are way more efficient than Pis
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Right? I made the realization a while ago that refurbished mini PCs are a way better fit for most of my homelab needs.
Sure, if power consumption is your #1 priority then you'd want some ARM solution. But for my use cases, I've found myself fighting with software support and the relatively low computational power of even the newer RPis.
Also, T-series Intel chips (the low power ones) have pretty good idle power consumption and don't spin up the fan too much given their lower power. And a lot of uses cases require sticking a fan and heat sinks on an RPi so you lose the quietness benefit.
Also also, you (still?) need proprietary blobs to use a bunch of the hardware on RPis. You can go full open source on a regular old PC.
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Look for refurbished elitedesk g5, it runs debian magnificantly! I splurged a bit on the memory and ssd and have a quite nice desktop (developer).
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this is the way
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Alternative. Cheap android box and coreelec.
You can have them for about 20 bucks. Have minimal power consumption. And small power factor. They also have ARM architecture.
They are good for low power applications.
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Too late...
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Some are talking about power consumption in this thread and I've had similar ideas. Gone are the days where I can run a beefy spec'd desktop in good conscience, it's just such a resource hog. I have a laptop that stays in hibernate mostly. My other idea for a low power consumption home computer was to get a Le Potato single board and pair that with an e-ink monitor (there's some really nice ones out there) which I think was sitting at maaaaybe ~5kwh. I think the more we can limit our power consumption, the better, all that electricty directy translates into coal being burned and additional CO2 being created. I'm no luddite, but it has impacted how I consume media which is now very mindful of the impact watching a few episodes/playing a couple hours of games versus just one or two hours of content on any given day.
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I always prefer getting an Hp 600 g5 for $100 off eBay, you get a Intel 9500, can go to 64gb of ram, and idle at a few watts
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ARM life!
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Depending on the specs, I might be paying more for those, even used, than a SBC. The joys of Brazilian tech markets...
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I second this motion
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I had the accounting self hosted web app on it until I was too lazy for accounting and now I am in so called hot water and must make bunch of shit up using mathematical apparatus
But it worked really well for a year or so
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It's not just the size constraint. The power usage is significant...
If you have the lid closed, you're looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.
Maybe a little more under high load, but those are going to be intermittent and not constant.
I'm just saying it's not that much more electricity usage, and the recycling more than offsets the CO2.
Not all laptops make effective use of power with the lid closed, sadly. Not saying this as a correction, but for others to know that they need to make sure these settings are available in the bios of the system they are buying.
Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn't overwhelming on it's own, but it is "cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi" kinda money.
Laptops are not generally designed to run like that with a closed lid. Heat dissipation is designed around the idea the laptop is open and some of it is through the keyboard surface. The lid closed would change that.
Systems can of course be setup to power off the display but for server/service uses open laptops may not be efficient space wise.
Having said that if the scenario is low power use the heat dissipation may not be a major issue. But if there is an unremovable battery i'd still be concerned about heat dissipation with the lid closed and even just the battery itself regardless of heat dissipiation.
Not so sure about the last part. It takes ehhh about 3kg of c02 to produce 1 Watt for a year. Carbon footprint to build a laptop is about 200kg or so, but you're not offsetting one of those you're offsetting the raspberry PI you WOULD have bought which is just a small fraction of that. After a year or 2 you've almost certainly burned through your c02 savings if it's on all the time.
Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it's unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I've never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it's being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.
With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that's mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.
Fake news. Modern RPis need up to 25W PSU. Even old laptops could idle lower than that, as otherwise they wouldn't be able to get significant battery life. Turning off the screen will also really lower their power consumption.
You're comparing a laptop at idle to the power supply for a pi that needs to power it at full load plus overhead and inefficiencies. That's like comparing apples to an orange tree.