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From: Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Raspberry Pi5 versus other cheap Intel based boxes for general
 computing
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2024 07:27:31 -0700
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On 4/4/2024 2:19 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
> Some of the best designed PCs are from the gaming community suppliers. If you 
> remove the graphics card entirely the main CPU graphics system is more than 
> good enough for all 2D design and some 3D rendering work.

But the graphics card often has value in the applications you might run
on the box!

> They perform incredibly well and have huge slow fans so under ordinary heavy 
> loads they remain very quiet. Ones intended for corporate office workers tend 
> to have inadequate power supplies and small noisy fans reflecting their typical 
> workload and noisy environment.

Office- and consumer-class machines are intended for grunt work and
ease of replacement.  You'll likely not find a desktop from a corporate
setting that is worth it's weight in *paper*.

> Your choice but owning several machines of the same vintage leaves you exposed 
> to any glitches in the new machines or their OS's. MS has been known to brick 
> portables on Win10/11 from time to time - not fun at all.

That's an argument for avoiding MS, regardless of hardware choice!  :>

OTOH, you know exactly which problems you are likely to encounter on
each, instead of having to track the quirks of each.  I've always planned on
duplicates (computers, printers, scanners, monitors, etc.) for my own use.
It's nice to be able to move to another seat and know that nothing
has changed (other than the seat!).

It also is a diagnostic tool expedient.  I "lost" a disk (back when 4G drives 
were $1K) from an OS upgrade, once.  Frowned ("these things happen") but
was able to install the identical "backup" disk in its place.  And, lost
THAT, too!  ("no, THAT never happens!").  So, now I know the OS upgrade
dragged something into the mix that didn't belong there (thankfully,
had another backup on MO media so I was able to recover both drives
after rolling back the OS to its earlier state).

Likewise, had a problem rendering some 3D CAD models (back in the days of
AutoCAD's "Advanced Modeling Extension").  Being able to reproduce the problem
on a second (identical) machine made me damn sure that it was an AutoCAD
bug (it was).

[I had bought my licenses at a discount on the condition of "no support"
so the rep was irate when I came to him with the problem:  "I'm not asking
you to hold my hand.  I'm asking you to send this model to the folks at
Autodesk and see what they have to say about THEIR problem!"]

Now, the only real issues are monitors crapping out and keyboards
needing to be cleaned (so, I keep an ample supply of both on hand).
Being able to swap out monitors when one dies while in use (do they
ever die when NOT in use?) is a big win as it's hard to remember what
was on the screen just before it died, otherwise!