I’d been talking with someone about Rockchip boards for Chia activity, and had long been pondering the plotting capabilities of the Raspberry Pi 4b. Obviously had low expectations, but wanted to have some data points to reference.
So I tested on a Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB model, an Orange Pi 5B 16GB model, and my non-SBC T7910 dual Xeon… and failed to complete tests on a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB and a Zimaboard 216 for reasons.
tl;dr:
I can’t recommend the Pi (22.1 hour plot time for Gigahorse C5), but it does work.
I can recommend the Orange Pi (4-7 hour time depending on storage options), and I’m churning out a few plots still on that.
If you already have a nice dual Xeon with a GPU, it will give you similar power efficiency to the Orange Pi 5B, but if you’re buying it new-to-you, the up front cost is noticeably more.
If you’re wanting to run something on a single solar panel, the dual Xeon is probably out. But the others can run under 10W easily.
Feel free to check the full report out over on Reddit, and for a change it’s worth looking in the comments. Some good conversations going on. I’ll try to keep up with comments (if any) here, and I have a couple of tests that will be added in the next week.
Like some of the crew mentioned in the original thread, it’s a very narrow use case, but it does check a few boxes. Honestly I’d lean toward it satisfying the ‘I found something neat to do with my Pi’ use case the most. If prices keep falling on SSD storage I’d love to see a micro farmer built without spinning drives - that’s on my list.
I wouldn’t have any feedback for you, in part because I think you missed the context, and in part because you didn’t give any specifics on the Z420 you got and even if you had, it wouldn’t mean someone could predictably and consistently get one for that price.
Obviously a workstation class system, an older dual Xeon server, or even a relatively recent Intel NUC (Nuc10i7 is one of my favorites) will do much better than any of these, and the NUC10 will probably come in under 50 watts most of the time. But these are some interesting, accessible, affordable-for-many options for people wanting a conversation piece/plotter or a low power, high spouse-acceptance-factor plotter for their Chia adventure.
Yep. For a while I had 2-3 antminer U-series bitcoin miners on a RockPi4, not because it made me rich, but it was a unique 9 watt conversation piece.
Yup. I have one of these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BWWTH9JS) but they’re rated for 6 watts, and my Orange Pi farmer was hitting 11 at times with two SSDs attached. What I might try is using one of these to recharge a passthrough-charge-capable battery pack. I have a ZMI 10000mAh USB-C pack. Wish I could use two panels to charge it.
Please send me one, going by your statement I’ll assume its free.
I actually have 10Gbps networking, so I can make use of that as well, although my internet upload/download speed is very limited, so it won’t make any difference there.
