Agree with your comments. Which is why I've gone for "stock up" (well, 2 spare boards and cases) as my main response to the boards going EoL.
There are too many scams and rip-offs from China. Quality and support are horrendous.
True, and I can't imagine it's easy or cheap to order from AliExpress in the US at the moment.
That said I have had good luck (and I suppose it is luck to an extent) and not been scammed when buying stuff - though support is non existent, as you say.
There are a plethora of devices and it is not always clear who the original manufacturer is, the one I have is labelled GF-1388NP-12 on the PCB, but identified as a "Techvision TVI7309X" in the SMBIOS data. Techvision might be badge engineering a board by Bluetech, or maybe not, who knows.
But, it works, it has a reasonable specification and although I mostly just use it for short term projects where it doesn't matter if it stops working.
Intel still has objectionable market segmentation policies. Any system with an Intel processor which supports what my current APU2 supports is more than 5 times the price, at least based on what Netgate and others offer.
If ECC is on your must-have list yes, it's going to be expensive as you are probably looking at "industrial" SBCs (which always have ridiculous prices from a hobby perspective), a lot of the "router" boards are pricey as well, as you observe.
In the end we were a bit spoilt by the APU series being so flexible and such good value for money. They were showing their age performance wise but the BIOS update which enabled the 1.4GHz turbo manage to redress that a bit.
There was (apparently) an APU7 prototype with I225 NICs - that would have been interesting, especially if coupled with a slightly beefier processor such as the GX 420MC though a single lane of PCIe2 x1 might have struggled to keep up at 2.5Gb/s. I think that processor might even still be available.
Another board which is suggested as a replacement is the Banana Pi BPI-R4 - this seems to be available starting around $135 from amazon.com
I do not really object to a non-x86 processor, but nothing available has sufficient memory and peripheral support, and ECC. The non-x86 environment is very fragmented.
Nod, especially if you want ECC though how critical that is I'm not that clear.
A low power desktop can completely replace an APU2. The only question is how low can the power be pushed.
A more powerful but still low power desktop would also allow virtualization, perhaps making up for its higher power draw by encompassing other systems.
That's definitely a "how long is a piece of string" question - too many variables - CPU speed, number of cores, load, platform.
Using "powerstat" on my cheap Chinese toy (N5105 4 cores, 4 threads) gives an idle power draw of ~3W, just under 30W at 2.8GHz and 16W at 2.1Ghz where I have the long term power average set in the BIOS - that did need a bit of tweaking from the stock settings.
OTOH my desktop despite being a "low power" CPU (i7-12700T) idles at ~12W but readily shoots well over 100W with a bit of a load.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
