It's not that I don't really, really love the Lenovo ThinkCentre M78 I've been using for a year-and-a-half or so, thanks to a supportive donor. I do love the machine. It's dual boot Windoze/KUbuntu (I've probably used Windoze twice in the last year), Quad-core 3.7Ghz, 16Gb of RAM, etc. What's not to love?
Well, my electricity bill.
Yeah, I know that air conditioning is probably a much larger piece of that bill than my computer, but I'm the kind of guy who starts yelling at people to turn off the damn (low-wattage LED) lights when they leave the room after I get a big bill.
And this tower probably pulls upward of 100 watts, maybe 250 when it's under a heavy load.
While a Raspberry Pi 4 under 400% CPU load stress pulls about 6.4 watts.
I've got the CanaKit "extreme" kit (8Gb of RAM, 128Gb SD card -- it's got two HDMI ports to support my dual monitor needs as well!) on my Amazon Wish List. If nobody really, really, really wants to buy it for me but the value of crypto keeps its on-and-off climb going, I'll probably grab it soon.
I like the Raspberry Pi. I bought the Model 3, but handed it off to one of the kids some time back. Not quite powerful enough to run fast for the load I put on it, but the Model 4 has a better CPU and a lot more RAM, so I expect it would be a workable desktop computer.
And if not, I might just pay Cox for extra bandwidth some month so that I can turn it into a Lightning node. Which would likely defeat the purpose of conserving electricity, but which would also be really cool.
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