this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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For this price, just get an Intel NUC (one with like an i5 or better). They're cheaper than this is on ebay.
They might not have 32GB of memory, but I'm honestly not sure why you'd need that much for a small PC like this.
I googled a cheap Intel NUC and saw power consumption numbers of 15w to 40w. Thats quite a bit of juice (and heat) for small applications.
Perhaps the newer models consume that much (under load), but the older ones are very power efficient - back in the day they ran Windows 8 and only consumed 4.6W @ idle (this is actually the same one I have, except I run HA on it which is probably much more power efficient than Windows 8 would be).
Realistically, for something like this, you probably don't want to exclusively use the full load numbers to calculate power consumption, rather you want to use the idle+load numbers for your specific use case. Home Assistant barely uses any power even over time (I unfortunately misplaced my kill-a-watt or I'd measure it for you), and the NUC barely feels warm.
Nonetheless, you can disable a bunch of the GPU stuff in the BIOS if you're concerned about power consumption. The article I linked above explains the settings a bit. These were meant to be the middle ground between a thin client and full PC, so it wouldn't be surprising if their maximum wattage & TDP was much higher than a Pi; but that doesn't necessarily mean a higher power bill or more heat.
Lastly, I mostly meant that this would be a good alternative to the device in the article, which would need a beefier power supply than the NUC. This shop listing says that its TDP is 60W, so just looking at raw numbers the NUC runs much cooler.
Running multiple virtual machines might be one use for all that RAM. I completely agree about going with a NUC (or similar x86-64) unless power consumption is a concern. I stopped buying SBCs once Intel platforms started competing on the low end.