Fruit Flan Or Moon Cake ?

Geezer

Geezer

For a cheap, relatively low spec machine to be used headless, what is better, Raspberry Pi or fanless industrial PC?

Better meaning, ease of installing Freebsd as well as reliability and longevity. And of course, price.

There seem to be a few flavours of Raspberry Pi, and various extra bits that you can get, like a case! And there is a plethora of Chinese fanless industrial boxes that seem to be used in ATMs and other kiosk stuff.

[ There is good fanless industrial stuff from Supermicro, which might sound great but costs many times as much. So I don't want that. ]
 
I keep on looking at fanless industrial PCs, but have yet to take the plunge. I want an amd64 one to run pfSense, but don't need to hurry.

I have a pi3b and a pi4, and use them both continuously as firewalls (same code, different locations).

The pi4 runs alarmingly hot. It needs help with cooling. I got a Chinese-sourced aluminium CNC milled exoskeleton case with two small fans, which went noisy within a week or two.

I thought about buying quality fans, but just switched them off as the milled case keeps it cool enough without fans -- it generally stays within 20C above ambient.

The pi3b is five years old. The pi4 (never run without its heatsink case) is two years old. Both have performed flawlessly. So my experience of reliability is good.

Sorry, I can't comment on installing or using FreeBSD. I run them with Raspbian (Debian) with /boot on the SD card, and everything else on a thumb drive.
 
Geezer said:
what is better, Raspberry Pi or fanless industrial PC?
Click to expand...
To me the Arm stuff is niche. Ports Software is often broke and it is a messy situation.
I vote for Fanless Industrial PC.
Which to me means NUC or Brix or APU (APU is sold out now until 2022 so nix them).

I want to shine a light on overlooked hardware. Sophos.
This hardware is for Sophos Firewall Distro but it works with FreeBSD too.

Right now I am salivating over a Sophos XG106W for $100 on ebay.
These are E3920 cpu and 4 network ports, but this one has HDMI too. Usually these have eMMC for OS.
So turnkey NanoBSD boxes.(You want NanoBSD on eMMC to avoid burning out flash built onboard) with Wifi card.

Ok now some dirt. Arm is now Tier One. Wowee. That took a while.
Problem is all the old boards (Bpi,BBB,Pi2) are tossed aside forced to used GenericSD image and deal with U-Boot yourself!
That is the definition of Tier One on Arm. Build it yourself.

Now compare amd64 and you get stablity and real gigabit ethernet.
Not crippled experimental boards that are like the flavor of the month.

Arm is not bad but it has additional costs to entry.
 
Great point about heat. As the Pi comes around to descent speed it now requires active cooling.
One of the prime reason to use arm was fanless. Now what is the advantage? Their sexy USB bus?
 
I've used Protectli machines and Intel NUCs with BSDs - all been fine, but one of my NUCs has thermal issues occasionally, though.

Don't think either tick the cheap box, though!

I have a few Pis but find the SD card stuff a bit fiddly - keep meaning to look at the other options (and that's a good thing about Pis, lots of options!)
 
I needed 10G on my home OPNSense Firewall as it is the top of the rack.
So I used Advantech AIMB272 motherboard. This uses Sandy Bridge Mobile CPU in ITX factor.
I used an aluminum HTPC chassis that had a low profile slot. There I have a Chelsio 10G T520 with fan I attached.

So it is frankenstein. I had to drill vent holes in side for Chelsio fan. It was right up along the side and struggling.
 
Regarding the Sophos I lust after. I have bought so much stuff that is not what I thought it was.
Here is my warning sign on this box.
www.ebay.com

Sophos - NA1Z1CSEK - XG 106w rev.1 (EU/UK/US power cord) - USED | eBay

Part Number: NA1Z1CSEK. Network Security/Firewall ApplianceMarketing Information: Sophos XG Firewall provides comprehensive next-generation firewall protection that exposes hidden risks, blocks unknown threats, and automatically responds to incidents.
www.ebay.com
The closeness of the ethernet jacks makes me suspicious.
This resembles the separate 4 port switch as found on some products. Also in literature I saw SFP port is shared.
That could mean you lose one wired 1G port. It could mean something else. Like weird shared bus for ethernet.
These separate switches are problematic(unsupported). But this is all an educated guess based on past buys.

That is the problem of buying unknown deals. You have to be willing to take chances.
Especially with OEM gear with little hardware documentation.

Now in saying all that I have the XG105w. The XG106w is the cpu refresh.
The w(wireless) is significant in that models without the w have no mini PCIe socket. Solder pads only on XG105.
There was some weirdness on XG105w with eMMC boot0 and boot1 were separate MMC flash drives.
I built NanoBSD for it because of flash.

A valid question is why do I need this item. I have all the gear I need.
The SFP port just intrigues me so much. 1.5" tall machine with fiber. Why don't I see more of that.
I need 10G but I like where this is heading. why is it taking so long.
 
To wrap it up. Notice that all my suggestions have video out. It is hard to find an serial-only platform these days.
APU2/3/4 is one of the only I can think of.
Even Pi has Mali graphics and hdmi.

Moon Pies and Fruit Cakes.
 
I vote for Pi due to better heat dissipation. When I see the word 'fanless', that has me worried and thinking about a cooling solution already. Yeah, Pi is actually fanless, too, but you can always find a case with some cooling available. And, a Pi is actually pretty capable these days - like a proper UNIX utility, it should be doing (controlling) one thing/task, and doing it well. The rest of the power should be on the device being controlled (the slave device).
 
Cheers gpw928 , richardtoohey2. Maybe I will give the Pi a miss then.
Cheers astyle. Maybe I won't then.

Phishfry , that's a lot of good info there. Pleased for that.

Ebay is good for the western hemisphere, but either they won't send to me or with postage and tax it is too expensive. I do like that Supermicro though, I have always like SM. They go on forever.

Phishfry said:
Regarding the Sophos I lust after . . . . . A valid question is why do I need this item. I have all the gear I need.
Click to expand...

Lust, needs, possessions, existential questions. It's a precarious life being a programmer.
 
Regarding fanless. On Intel it really depends on the CPU used.
I have one bunch of new embedded PC that run very very hot.

DFI EC800-CD2041 Mini-PC (Intel D2550 2x1.86Ghz, 2GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 2x LAN, 2x COM, 2x MiniPCIe) [FANLESS] [ Intel MiniPCs ]

www.cartft.com www.cartft.com
D2550 was not a good choice for fanless. Expecially considering the compact chassis size.
To remedy this I added a chunk of aluminum to the vesa mount to sink the heat.
On the other hand I have extensive fanless usage of the Intel E38xx series. They are cool running.
These are Intels slow fanless CPU's. The sucessor E39xx series are probably the same. I need one to test.
 
Geezer said:
Maybe I will give the Pi a miss then.
Click to expand...
They are so cheap they are worth a look! But if you want something small in a case with good compatibility - probably not going to be a Pi - but I wouldn't want to have put you off looking. (Extra caveat: I've only used Raspbian on them, so don't know how much extra effort to get a BSD going on them).

I've had a good run with Supermicros (one died because of the Atom C2000 series bug but otherwise no issues). Before then it was Soekris (RIP).
 
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