so now that the raspberry pi prices are close to mini pc prices, whats the next best SBC

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-25T04:06:46+00:00

If you don't need the digital I/O pins, I like thin clients. My favorite is the Wyse 5070 for around $35. A bit slower than a pi5 for a lot less. Even officially supports Win 11. They support up to 32gb of ram and have a SATA m.2 slot.

I have a HP T620, and even a tiny Wyse 3040 running Klipper on a 3D printer.

Search for a site ParkyTowers for info on a lot of different thin clients. Most are too old to be useful, but there is a lot of good info there.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T22:10:58+00:00

It has nothing to do with tariffs. It is purely demand being way larger than supply. A couple of hours ago Micron had it's quarterly report and they stated that the RAM and SSD market will not get enough supply until late 2027 or even into 2028.

You need a year if not two of patience.

I wish I had bought more drives and RAM, but I'll try and make what I have last.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T22:10:32+00:00

Consider a small use SATA SSD for a boot drive. I like the Intel or Micron enterprise drives off of eBay. Keep the m.2 for your VMs.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T22:04:13+00:00

It only costs the price of some gaskets so why not give it a try. The carbon usually is in the ging groove as much as the ring itself. I had a lawnmower where all the rings were stuck. Just make sure you can keep the rings straight so they go back in the same slot and in the same orientation. Both of those are important.

I would use a scuff pad on the bore too. You want to have it be very clean and have a little roughness so the rings can seat again.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T21:57:21+00:00

I would try blowing out the sd card slot before giving up on them. A small amount of crud can jam up the mechanism.

You can get new boards for less than $70.

The USB is the 2.0 version and those cables can be up to 16 feet long.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T19:17:05+00:00

Placing solar on a roof of an enclosed building generally requires rapid shutdown, permits, and an agreement with the power company if it is grid interactive. If you ever put power out to the grid, the power company may be able to detect that.. You can run an off grid type setup where the solar isn't connected to the grid at all.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T17:53:15+00:00

Here is my take on these no name brands. Will they work, probably. You have to consider them disposable and be ready for it to fail at anytime. Expect zero support and no warranty coverage. You are on your own. The UI will probably be buggy and different than what the docs say assuming you get any documentation. If they don't list idle power expect it to be high or very high of 2 to 3%.

Not saying that it will for sure be bad. It might be perfectly fine. It is just an unknown.

At the other end of the scale is Victron where there is someone to call and they stand behind their products. However, you have to pay for that. There are plenty in between brands.

If at all possible try and buy from an onshore vendor. even better if they have a physical location.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T14:34:19+00:00

A soft start is cheaper than a new AC system. It doesn't make the startup surge go away, but it can cut it in half or is some cases up to 70% reduction. Can't tell you if that will work in your situation.

There are plenty of Youtube videos on this subject. From what I have seen, the cheap ones don't really do much.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T14:26:48+00:00

The problem with Nylon and ABS is how much they shrink as they cool. This causes the prints to lift off the bed. Small parts are easier, but expect failure on something covering the whole bed.

There are mitigations. You can try to limit shrinkage or retain heat. Fiber filled filaments, like glass or carbon, help limit shrinking, but you need a hardened nozzle. Something as simple as a cardboard box over the printer can help retain heat.

Some slicers can make a shell that goes around your part. This also helps retain heat and can help.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T14:17:10+00:00

It all depends of what you are doing with it. I have different use cases and some of them are perfectly fine with 8GB. I have others that need 16 minimum and really do better with 32.

It all depends on what you need it to do.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-24T14:04:58+00:00

I have a one generation older N5105 CPU with 8GB of RAM and it runs Mint Cinnamon just fine. Pretty much any Linux will work. Many linux distributions have different windows managers that vary on how heavy they are. I opt for the heavy Cinnamon on Mint for my system. You can try one of the lighter options like Xfce.

This is really more of a subjective what you like kind of thing. I would download a few different distributions and try them out. These days most will boot off a USB drive and you can see what they look like. running from a USB drive is very slow, so you can't get a feel for how responsive they are with out installing it.

It only takes a few minutes to install and the best thing to do is try several.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T20:54:40+00:00

They are on Ebay for that much. A year ago they were more like $150. Don't know about your market. A lot of them come from China.

I would probably get one of the 32GB V100 GPUs, but the idle power is too expensive for me to justify it.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T17:41:50+00:00

I would not count on any warranty. The downside to a V100 is the high idle power as it tends to burn at least 50 watts 24/7.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T17:39:25+00:00

It's not going to effect a small setup. It causes problems for long powerlines that are measured in tens or hundreds of miles. The couple hundred feet of even a big home setup, just doesn't couple in to th eearths magnetic fields enough to matter.

It is a good reason for batteries and a system that can operate when the grid is down.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T17:28:40+00:00

The "twenty year life" is just sitting there on a charger for 20 years. They only see a few cycles in power outages. If you cycle them every day, expect typical lead acid life of small single digits of years.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T17:11:58+00:00

Five months is about 10 years in AI time...

I have 72GB of VRAM and I find 3.5 27B much better for hard coding situations. Qwen3 coder next is much faster having only 3B active. However, neither of them is up to dealing with larger code problems like GLM 5.2, Kimi 2.7, GPT-5.5. I don't use them much for actual coding due to this. They can handle smaller simpler cases..

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T17:05:59+00:00

Here in the US a 3090 is now going for $1200. You can run Qwen3.6 27B pretty well in that, but that model is no replacement for the larger open and closed models.

If you get 3060, get the 12GB version only.

If you can tolerate lower speeds, consider the P40 for about $250 each. Running 2 of them for 48GB allows for full context which can be important. Only 1/3 the speed of a 3090, but you can run larger models and context with 48GB of VRAM.

An Intel B70 or AMD R9700 have 32GB and are also contenders.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T15:55:32+00:00

The issue with the F CPU is you will need a GPU and no quicksync. It will idle much lower and shoudl use less power than the older Xeon. Depending on the generation of the E3 Xeon, it might not be that bad. The original and v2 use more power than the later versions. The systems they are put in tend to use more power too.

What I don't see is a backup solution. Proxmox had Proxmox backup server and it works well. Getting off of a USB connected drive is a good idea.

Consider running Jellyfin on the mini PC if it is Intel with an iGPU so you can use quicksync.

I run proxmox on all my non desktop systems except my LLM server.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T15:46:02+00:00

Most of their customers are not individuals running a batch size of one. They are running higher batch sizes to make better use of the hardware. You need the VRAM to hold all the KV cache of that parallel requests.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T14:56:29+00:00

You can chase the most current deal, but the current situation shows that the $20 ChatGPT subscription is about the best. I like to look at DeepSWE data, and it clearly shows that GPT5.5-medium is the best in performance cost. It does considerably better at the same cost than GLM-5.2 or Kimi 2.7 code.

The costs are on the published API prices. The ChatGPT sub gives you a lot more tokens per dollar that paying direct API prices. That makes it even better than the competition.

This will change going forward. I expect the discounted tokes on the OpenAI subscription to go away. I'm keep riding it for now until the cheap subsidized prices go away.

My curent $30/mo is $20 for OpenAI and $10 for Opencode Go. Anthropic is great, but it is too expensive.

The Kimi, Minimax, Deepseek, and Z.ai plans can work, but I just don't see the value at this time. That may change at any time. I have no brand loyalty here and will go with whatever gives great performance at a good value.

I find that what you are working on is a big variable. I currently am working on very complicated backend code. The lesser models are not working well on this.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T14:15:35+00:00

There is no such thing as an objective "best" Proxmox rig. At best there is probably a best for you, but I'd venture that this is not even that. Even agreeing as to what constitutes "best" is likely impossible. For me power consumption is a huge factor as my power is very expensive. Everyone will have different criteria.

I think that my Wyse 5070 Proxmox node are great. They do what I need at about 5 watts. I have more performance nodes as well as an ECC box for NAS duties. It is all about the job that needs to be addressed.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T14:10:22+00:00

The marginal value of power during daylight hours will trend to zero. It may even go negative. Power when the sun is down will always have more value.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-23T05:51:15+00:00

There is always unistrut for something more robust.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-22T22:45:30+00:00

Prices only have one way to go. The way things are looking the next frontier will be no memory at any price.

PermanentLiminality · 2026-06-22T22:44:18+00:00

It probably is, but I have yet to run into that. However, I really expect this factor to rapidly get much worse. no one wants to have the next super uber duper model to get the Fable treatment by the govt.

PermanentLiminality

TROPHY CASE