Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer

[rcjordan]

> I thought they topped out at 8GB

I wondered if that was the case, but I'm guns-shy because of Win.

[littleman]

I've worked with far less ram,  8gb should be fine for me.  I don't do any video editing and I don't play 3d games.  Picture editing, spreadsheets, scripts and browser should all be fine with 8gb.

[littleman]

>8gb should be fine for me

So far I haven't cracked over 2GB of ram in daily use with several applications open.  The standard RPi OS is pretty well optimized.  I wasn't crazy about the default look, but I think I've got it looking more to my liking now.

[Rupert]

That is awesome! What did the who lot cost you in the end?

[littleman]

Case: Argon ONE M.2 = $45
Board: Raspberry Pi 4 - 8GB = $75
M.2 Drive: 256GB = $30.99
Power Supply: 5.25v 3A USB-C = $10

About $164 as it sits, but I really don't think  the 8GB Pi board is necessary.  A 4GB model would be $20 less.  I have the Pi overclocked to 2Ghz and everything is very responsive at that level, the default OS is very well optimized to be resource efficient.

[Rupert]

impressed.

[ergophobe]

Deep geek question... do you have a Kill-o-watt or similar meter that lets you measure power consumption? I'm curious what the power draw is.

[littleman]

That would be cool.  Doing the math on the power supply gives us 15.75 watts which would be max consumption.

A question I've asked myself is how long it will take to offset it's own carbon footprint with reduced power consumption -- not an easy question to answer.

[ergophobe]

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Kill-A-Watt-Electricity-Monitor-P4400/202196386

Kind of a geeky thing. I do not even remember how or why I have one, but I go through phases where I don't use it for a year, and then I start measuring laptops and monitors and TV in sleep mode and so forth (conclusion: most modern devices are actually extremely efficient when in sleep/standby).

[littleman]

I'll probably buy a Kill-o-watt eventually. 
According to this article the Pi4 board uses 2.85 Watts while idle and 4.425 Watts at high load.  M.2 SSDs draw between 200 and 600 milliwatts.

[rcjordan]

>Kill-o-watt

It's pretty handy. (There's one lying on the kitchen counter now. Been there a couple of weeks. hhh) I use it and an ammeter to measure likely loads on the circuits we use when we switch to the emergency generator.  Also, once I determine the load of small appliance that is routinely used I make a small label and stick it on the back.  That way, I don't have to keep answering "Can I run this and this at the same time?"

>OT
I have a couple of computers, some now getting old, that I only rarely turn off. I should slap the Kill-o-watt on those.

[ergophobe]

Wow... that's less than most routers. Much less than most full-featured routers. That's really cool.

>> OT
I don't know how old is old, but my seven... maybe eight year old i7 laptop with a separate Nvidia graphics card, and old spinning platter hard drive and all that draws almost nothing in sleep mode. I used to feel like if I were a good person, I would turn it off.

After running the Kill-o-watt on it for a few nights, I realized that a single session in the sauna (5KW heater that runs for 40 mins for a nice sauna session) is more power than my laptop will draw in sleep mode before the sun supernovas (maybe not quite, but I quit feeling guilty about it). In other words, I realized that off all the things I could do to save energy, worrying about whether my laptop is in "sleep" or "shutdown" is basically irrelevant.

[littleman]

Good to know Ergo, with the kids in at-home school all day there are a lot of laptops running in the house right now.  How much did the i7 laptop draw when in use at peak and idle?

For my two youngest I bought them refurbished i5 thinkpads with upgraded ram and SSDs; their surprisingly snappy.  I like the old thinkpads because they are just about the most serviceable laptops out there.

[ergophobe]

Just plunking along it uses anything from 25 to 45 watts, mostly around 25-35 watts.

When I put it to sleep, it spikes as high as 68 watts as it writes everything from memory to persistent memory, but then it drops to 0.4-0.5 watts. So less than most LED night lights. It's not zero, but again the 5KW heater is literally 10,000 times as much. So one sauna = 10 months of my computer on standby.

I'm trying to do something that will get the hard drive running but it won't. I'm guessing with the fan running, the CPU going all out and the hard drive spinning, it would get up to 60 watts. I have to find some poorly-written Javascript page... that seems to really get everything going.

[ergophobe]

PS - one thing about a laptop is that there is charge/discharge from the battery. To get really good numbers, I think I would need to take the battery out.