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Comment by chrissnell

4 hours ago

My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to. I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.

I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.

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chrissnell

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teh_klev  3 hours ago

> My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops

I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.

xnyan  3 hours ago

> less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.

Before RAM went crazy, the Pi 4 was $75 for *8GB and $125 for 16GB.

Another consideration is heat and power consumption, I have an OptiPlex micro (also surplus) and power consumption is 8W-90W (standby versus peak), 5x-10x more than a Pi 4.