Is there a RasPi alternative that's competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It's been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi's ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It's not like they're blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU's with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.

The integrated GPU is pretty good though.

Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.

There's also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.

[–] boyi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'd recommend Orange Pi 5 plus. It's much more expandable than OP 5.

[–] aniki@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Id recommend avoiding Orange anything until they can unfuck their flashing software.

Fucking windows-only chinese shitwear. Fuck Orange Pi. I'll never buy another one.

[–] boyi@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 10 months ago

yep. Banana pi also use Windows-only Flashing Software. but that depends on the chip used, if I am not mistaken.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago

That is only for Android no?

[–] InputZero@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for your recommendation. I've looked at some of those SoCs and they're impressive but none of them do what I'm looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that's folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it's been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn't have to be practical.

Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they're cheaper and superior.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Low end Intel like Gracemount N200 are lower power and higher performance than Raspberry Pi.

Even an old JasperLake is like 24 watts max to Pi5's 27 watts.