In my self hosting journey, which is very much in its infancy mind you, many times I’ve longed for an extra machine I can use to try following tutorials on setting up samba shares, home assistant, what have you without having to worry about messing up my main machine and having to clean up after myself. As for acquiring such hardware on the cheap, I keep reading how the laptopocalypse w/ Windows 10 end of life will flood the markets w/ literally unlimited free e-waste bro!!! But my own experience hunting these EOL once in a lifetime deals has been more frownie face than happy face. Lots of $100+ listings and, idk that just seems like a lot to ask for something like that.
So just for fun I searched eBay for “raspberry pi” and came across this listing for a raspberry pi 3 w/ 1 GB RAM for $25. 1 GB of RAM seems like not very much, but then again I’m not trying to break the sound barrier here, I just want something that can sit on my desk basically unnoticed and hook it up to my KVM switch so I can switch to it from time to time, like whenever I want to try following a tutorial and not losing any sleep if I fail (and I fail often).
I’ve also kinda always had a little bit of envy from not being in the raspberry pi club, so this is my shot at getting into the club. I think I’m going to spring for this one, so my question for the audience is, but like honestly am I about to piss $25 down the drain? Would this be good enough for my purposes or is the 1 GB of RAM going to bottleneck me like a boss?
Sorry for the run on sentences, my brain’s tired today.
eBay has plenty of x86/x64 computers that don’t technically support Windows 11. An old Lenovo desktop/sff with a 7th gen i7 could be a pretty cheap entry point. 8th Gen and up will be more expensive since they can still run windows 11
Hell my home server is a i7 4700. It’s a solid experience, though it is missing a few nice to haves these days. I have three Linux desktops in the house, i7 6700. One dell one lenovo and one HP. The Dell and Lenovo I have no need or desire to replace them for the little amount of gaming, etc. I do. They have decent graphics cards since I do 3D modeling. RX 580 and NV 1050.
The HP, I don’t know if there’s legitimate hardware failing somewhere on it, or if it’s just HP suckage. I have a little power HP Elite Book with an AMD processor and APU on it, and that thing is awesome. But this little business tower was struggling with Windows 10 before they killed it off. It’s better with Linux, but it’s still a shadow of the other two similarly-spect systems. Who knows.
When going for older hardware, though, my biggest recommendation is to don’t get the low end. Go for something higher. A similarly specced i7 Perfectly offer a significant performance boost over the i5. If someone gave me an i3 I could find a use for it. But I would never buy one.