Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?
174 comments
·July 4, 2025whywhywhywhy
sigmoid10
To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
FirmwareBurner
>I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks.
You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used market.
That's why most people who bough those RPis had them collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.
tw04
Depending on what you’re doing, even for gpio. Just use a USB gpio board.
chasd00
man, i couldn't hit the upvote button hard enough. That is a very cool breakout, thank you for the link. I'm already thinkking about that breakout connected to the 16 channel PWM breakout I already have. Now i can play around with servos, and many other things, right from my laptop with all my usual build tools instead of having to power up my pi zero and connect over ssh first. I love Adafruit, they do so many cool things.
comboy
There was maybe a short period of time when RPi offered a decent compute for money if ever. But all of that time it's about the ecosystem and simply being the most popular platform. Any hardware library, you take it and you know somebody tested it on this exact hardware with the same operating system. When doing hardware stuff it can be really painful to debug. You don't want to also be wondering if maybe some pin is handled differently on your box than RPi etc.
geerlingguy
Yeah; honestly if you're going to integrate I2C/UART/SPI, cellular, serial bus stuff, PoE, or anything like that into a project, the Pi (4/5) makes that simple, and almost always painless.
Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice, when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use cases.
The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in that common homelab use case.
I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
edoceo
Ethernet w/POE
venusenvy47
I found that the mini PCs with the N100 are much more convenient because I don't have to deal with custom OS or packages. I'm not a developer, and wanted the easiest method to get a Linux server running. After struggling with the limitations of the custom builds required for an SBC, I found it so refreshing to be able to install the general Linux distros available for the x86/x64 platforms.
harshitaneja
RPi is a good option if one has less RAM requirements especially if you take into account the quality of the drivers and software support in general.
RPi can be a compelling option if you need lower power draw. It does take some effort to squeeze out power efficiency but if the requirement can't be handled by a microcontroller then it is the most convenient of-the-shelf option.
For everything, RPi isn't a very compelling option. Even for GPIO, during RPi shortage I started experimenting with just using STM32 dev boards connected via USB to a NUC or an old PC and it worked well. But I just prefer to use ESP8266 or ESP32 for those tasks most of the time. Bandwidth and latency of USB communication/wifi to the main device has been low enough for it not to be a concern for me and I recon outside of very specific robotics cases it won't be for most.
CSI port is quite nice though and not many great alternatives.
mrheosuper
it's the raspberry that becomes bad in value. I feel like their price has never recovered since the hardware shortage during covid.
poulpy123
This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course).
But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.
Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.
At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.
PhilipRoman
>N100 based computer draw 9W at idle
That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more efficient.
sidewndr46
how did you get a 6500T to idle so low? Is that CPU power or total system power? I have a T part from the next generation, I don't remember the exact model. It's low but it isn't that low.
ndriscoll
The processors themselves all seem to be pretty efficient at idle (there's apparently no real reason to get a T processor. It just caps performance). It mostly depends on everything else. The only place I know of to get this kind of info is this thread[0] where people have been building this spreadsheet[1]. Some threads on servethehome.com also report when some pcie cards have broken power management which can destroy idle efficiency.
[0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste...
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18L...
wltr
How would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.
vladvasiliu
I have a regular i5-6500 in an HP 800 G2 SFF. It has 32 GB RAM (2x8+16), two Samsung 840 SSDs and a 4-port i350 network card. It Linux as a KVM host with OpnSense and Home Assistant on top.
According to some watt-meter I got off Amazon it idles at 14W with the 4 interfaces UP but next to no traffic. I consider it idling when the CPU usage as reported by the host is under 5%.
Now the watt-meter isn't some top-of-the-line exotic model, just a random Chinese thingy, but it seems to measure close enough to what I expect some other devices to pull.
PhilipRoman
I use an electrical outlet meter. It's roughly €10, the only annoying thing is everything rebooting each time I want to move it.
dgacmu
The easy path, as someone suggested, is a kill-a-watt that you just plug it into.
The less intrusive path for some definition of less intrusive is a clamp ammeter if you can expose one of the AC wires (you have to clamp around an individual wire, not both hot and neutral). But then you don't need to unplug the system to measure it.
The third overkill option is to have it plugged into a full-time power monitoring and control device, such as a zigbee home automation plug switch. ;)
evil-olive
the author has a previous blog post about his monitoring setup:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/how-i-monitor-and-con...
I can recommend those Third Reality outlets as well, I have about a dozen now and they Just Work with my Zigbee dongle (Sonoff ZBDongle-P) and zigbee2mqtt / Home Assistant setup. I use Home Assistant's Prometheus integration to get the data into VictoriaMetrics, which lets me build Grafana dashboards showing the usage of each plug over time.
mjh2539
Buy a kill-a-watt wall wart.
transpute
USB-c cables with live PD power display can be chained with PD-to-barrel converters for fixed voltage.
znpy
> How would you guys properly measure that?
I'm using smart plugs that have an open source firmware called tasmota. I can scrape the values using prometheus and can build dashboards with historical data.
null
rcarmo
Depends on what you have active on he board, especially storage that isn’t pushed to an idle state for some reason.
mmgutz
Can confirm 8-9w idle for my N100 homelab server having 1 NVMe SSD, 1 SATA SSD, 16GB RAM.
poulpy123
I may misremeber the exact number, but it was high enough compared to a RPI
Semaphor
That sounds wrong, efficient intel chips should be very comparable to pi's. Measurements for the futro s740 (j4105 CPU) were [0] around 2-4 W idle when properly configured
[0]: https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
p_ing
If you want something less "risky", ASRock Industrial has mini PCs which are great. I have an AliExpress N150, fully passive which worked just fine but then I saw the shiny of the Arrow Lake-H platform. Ended up getting a NUC BOX-225H for Opnsense. Way overkill, it's great!
https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/industrial-computer-system
The Arrow Lake-H platform can have up to 28 PCIe lanes where as the N150 gets 9. Something to think about if you want dual NIC + plenty of NVMe drives.
znpy
Weird number. I have one of those enterprise mini pc (think EliteDesk pro mini) with an i9 (8c/16t), 64gb ram and 1 nvme disk and it idles at ~2W.
The measurement was done via a smart plug running tasmota (and the tasmota exporter) so I'd say it's pretty realistic.
I also have an HP MicroServer Gen8 with a 20W Xeon cpu (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/53401/i...) and four disks... It also idles at ~21W (again, as reported from tasmota-based smart plugs).
poulpy123
I may misremember the number indeed, but it was definitively not 2W
fnord77
for US viewers, there's an N150 16Gb/512 that goes on sale on amazon for $130 every few weeks
qingcharles
Word of warning on those GMKtec PCs. They put all their drivers on a Google Drive account that they don't pay for, and there are no known mirrors of some of the drivers. So when you suddenly need to do a reinstall one day, remember that their GDrive will be over-quota for a month and you'll be SOL for a few weeks unless you can match the drivers to the ones from the OEMs.
andrewmcwatters
This is the most wtf thing I have read on Hacker News in a day or so. Thanks, I was considering them as an N100 alternative to my Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe I'll search a little more...
transpute
Could a cumulative set of drivers be mirrored to a Github repo or archive.org?
Venn1
Low cost x86_64 solutions beat the pants off ARM in the PPPITA (performance per pain in the arse) department. The Raspberry Pi software ecosystem advantage nopes the moment x86 shows up to the party. Granted, it does suck the fun out of spending a weekend trying to get an application to compile.
Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get something done.
reactordev
I’m going to argue there’s no difference in “ecosystem” between arm and x86 anymore. It’s as simple as compiling with a flag. Your frustrations are your own.
I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.
blarg1
Currently with the latest pi os version, moonlight streaming's video hardware support doesn't work.
While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package version has been broken for 2+ months now.
If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like this.
reactordev
Stale packages are a distro problem, not a platform one. You said so yourself, you can compile it and it works. Your problem isn’t with ARM. Arch on arm works fine.
rcarmo
Actually, hardware video handling and not having to faff about with weird bootloaders have been the main reasons I have preferred mini-PCs
andrewmcwatters
The Raspberry Pi ecosystem makes the device worthless as soon as you factor in commodity parts that have been marked up far beyond their generic counterparts. And then worst, all of the vendors selling generics targeting Raspberry Pi devices mark those up too, so it's wash. You're better off buying the official accessories because there's no benefit to buying the generics to save money.
After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a better value.
So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore unless you factor in this specific requirement.
reactordev
I love my Beelink mini PCs but there’s a use case for going raspberry pi and that’s power draw. Way easier to build a system that’s solar or battery powered.
syntheticnature
> I have a video that goes through everything in this post, embedded below:
> If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue:
More sites like this, please
geerlingguy
The thing is, the site earns me maybe $100-200 in Amazon Affiliates referral links per month (which is nothing to sneeze at... but that's not moving the needle on a mortgage payment).
I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_ making a video, or is my transcript edited for blog/readership).
My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own note search engine), but I get why many people who make video (which can earn an income) don't spend the extra time and write up decent blog posts as well.
(But I prefer reading much more than video content).
Gracana
I recently noticed that Skatterbencher does this, with articles for each video. It’s a fantastic format, especially in cases where the content is something you might want to refer to later without having to rewatch the whole thing.
MrGilbert
I also like "tl;dr:" at the beginning. Straight to the point.
analog31
I've got a couple of RPi4's running NAS's. One has worked for more than a decade with no downtime, the other is too soon to know. But I see no advantage over a cheap MiniPC.
Both were free, except for the drives, because people get a RPi with the best of intentions, lose interest, and give them away to the nearest geek. Power supplies are free if you watch the e-waste bin. You don't need an enclosure.
I think that for hobbyists, a microcontroller is possibly a more interesting alternative than either a RPi or MiniPC. I've been building MCU based peripherals going back to my days with a 68k Mac -- treating the MCU as a sort of smart GPIO.
The main deciding point between MCU and PC is whether your application benefits from an operating system.
I got one of the earliest RPi's, with the best of intentions, but then...
First, I realized that I could keep using MCU's to build peripherals. Second, these peripherals are platform independent thanks to USB. Third, it's easy and comfortable to do my firmware development and testing on a mainstream PC. Making it even easier, Python runs the same on pretty much any platform, and I can switch between PC and RPi with no code changes.
voxadam
Unless you need the features on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO connector or very low power consumption a mini PC is a much better bet for general compute.
giantg2
I think I mostly agree. To me, the Pi Zero is the real product these days. The regular Pi models are too expensive and more powerful than they need to be. The Zero is more in line with the original concept in my opinion.
jeroenhd
As the article shows, even power consumption can be debatable. If you're looking to get a certain amount of work done, the Intel mini PC can do it faster expending less power thanks to the smaller transistor size it uses. Maybe there are scenarios where continuous idle power is more important and the RPi still wins (there's no idle power graph in the article) but even if you're power-constrained, the Pi isn't the best choice anymore.
The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly watching up to ARM.
whazor
Note that the Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 can do less than 2W< idle, which is competitive with the RPI5. The next generation H4 is even more efficient.
ekianjo
it was over as soon as the Pi went out of stock and unit price skyrocketed since 2020.
transpute
Some industrial Atom N150 boards include GPIO, SATA, M.2, discrete TPM and TXT/DRTM-capable BIOS for Windows IoT and future Linux, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/.
There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom N150 devices.
firesteelrain
Are the two boards even in the same category or class?
I use RPi for little hobby projects
- RPi Pico for being the payload that flies around the world in a PicoBalloon
- Decoding NOAA weather imagery and storing it in my Google Drive
- Full time AIS message decoder and tracker
- Full time ADS-B and MLAT receiver
- Runs my RetroPie setup
- Runs my OctoPrint setup
I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer
transpute
Intel N150 + GPIO in credit card size form factor, https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/06/24/aaeon-up-twl-and-up-...
dvdkon
Except for the Pico (which is very different from the full RPi), you could do all that with a mini-PC.
There are certainly usecases, especially using the RPi's low-level IO, where that's not possible, but as you yourself have shown, people do often get into situations where they are competitors.
geon
The more standardized hardware if the rpi tends to make a lot of stuff much easier.
firesteelrain
I just can’t see putting the NUC in my attic for example with my ADSB receiver
Daviey
> I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer
Can you explain why?
dgacmu
I'm not the GP, but for my ads-b decoder, it runs on a Pi Zero 2W, which at the time cost under $15 and draws very little power. It's convenient having the computer right next to the antenna to avoid thinking about cables. Runs for a couple days on 100Wh of backup battery.
(I personally find a ton of value out of the Pico and the zero, and less out of the main main, higher powered raspberry Pi line)
ChrisRR
> I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer
Why is that? Because you think the N100 isn't capable enough or for some other reason? Because N100 definitely can outperform a raspberry pi
But a pi pico is definitely a totally different thing. I don't think anyone here is talking about replacing a microcontroller with a PC
firesteelrain
For the weather imagery one or any ham radio, it has to live outside which RPi is more suited such as RPi 3B
LikeBeans
I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.
giantg2
You can't run a DNS server on the same mini PC? Seems like that would be ideal.
I run PiHole on a Pi Zero, which isn't really comparable to any mini PC in cost or performance. It uses such little resources that I'm surprised that most new routers don't offer the DNS filtering features out of the box these days.
p_ing
Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially supported OSes - https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole.
I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number of available DNS server options built into the distribution.
giantg2
Yeah, thats why I asked about a DNS server running on there and not just a PiHole. Is there any reason to perfer PiHole over the Opnsense options?
voxadam
> However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it.
Plus, neither pfSense nor OPNsense run on Arm or any non-x86 system.
glimshe
It's a no brainer IMHO. I stopped using my Pis after the N100s appeared on the market and have been advocating them since then.
I like the idea of using ARM, but the value and convenience simply isn't there. The Pi remains great for certain embedded applications, though.
declan_roberts
Did you not use any of the pi's IO?
LtWorf
I think most people here just do software… which defeats the point of using a rpi.
tshaddox
Is there a reason these mini PCs still have all USB-A ports? That strikes me as a bizarre choice.
654wak654
Probably for easy mouse & keyboard support? Also, mini PCs are usually used in offices a lot and I bet most places that buy these things still have lots of USB-A storage devices as well.
Zren
Also, probably the price of the connector. USB A is also a simple standard and no one will expect to treat it as a display out.
octo888
How many USB-C keyboard/mice do people have?
It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.
Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.