I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012. It’s been sitting in a drawer for years, but about a 2 years ago added it to my Tailscale network as an exit node.
It’s a single-core 700MHz ARMv6 chip with 512MB of RAM. It's a fossil—a Pi 5 is 600x faster (according to the video). But for the 'low-bandwidth' task of routing some banking traffic or running a few changedetection watches via a Hetzner VPS (where the actual docker image runs), it’s rock solid. There’s something deeply satisfying about giving 'e-waste' a second life as a weekend project.
As a fun weekend project in 2013, I stood up a weather station using Weewx and my RPI 2 with 1 GB RAM. I told myself if it ever crashes or the SD card gets corrupted, I'll just tear everything down.
Well, it's still running today on the original SD card. At noon today it processed its 1,055,425th record in the database.
Still, if it ever crashes, I'll just tear it down. :)
That's a great idea - if I understood you right, you mean you used it to make a printer "wireless / wifi enabled" with it, right? Is there any guide you can recommend for that?
Well on the other hand, at which point does it become wasteful to run something when it gets less and less power efficient compared to newer devices? According to OP's benchmarks, the Pi 1 burns 2W constant to do essentially zero work and running that on a more modern device that's already running would use almost no extra power.
Then again we use a kW or two to microwave things for minutes on a daily basis so who really gives a shit.
Enough energy to run that thing for an entire year in under 1/2 a gallon of gasoline.
When you can pretty easily offset the entire yearly energy use by skipping a mow of your yard once, or even just driving slightly more conservatively for a few days... I'm not so worried about the power use.
In my region - it's about $3.50 in yearly power costs.
> I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012.
Nice! Even though I've got a Proxmox serve at home running on a real PC (but it's not on 24/7), I do run my DNS, unbound, on a Pi 2. It's on 24/7 and it's been doing its job just fine since years.
Side note: that site has well over three hundred vendors listed for cookies! I thought they were generating fake outs without end but I did eventually reach the end
I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life. There's a few differences in Raspberry Pi 3 versions that may lead you to buy one or the other:
- The Pi 3B has 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n (single-band) WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1. Power idled at 1.4W and peaked at 3.7W.
- The Pi 3B+ removed the 10/100 Ethernet in favor of USB Ethernet (~300Mbps w/USB2.0). CPU cores were overclocked from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz (so a heatsink is more necessary), with ~15% increase in benchmark performance. It added 802.11ac (dual band) WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 w/BLE. Power idled at 1.9W and peaked at 5.1W. This is also the only 3-model supporting PoE (w/ extra HAT).
- The Pi 3A+ removed Ethernet and reduced USB to a single port. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB. Power idled at 1.13W and peaked at 4.1W. The A+ form factor is more compact. Overall the 3A+ is smaller, cheaper, and less power draw than the 3B+ (but not as low as the 3B).
The lowest power draw with acceptable performance is the 3B. For slightly more power draw and more CPU performance, go with 3A+. For "everything" (including PoE) the 3B+ is it.
If you want the 3A+ but don't need the video, want a smaller form factor, and half the power draw, the Pi Zero 2 W is it. Though the Pi Zero 2 W is supposed to be cheapest, due to demand it's often sold out or more expensive. The 3A+ is still cheap (~$25) and available, with the downside of the higher power draw and larger form factor.
(disabling HDMI, LEDs, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc reduces power draw more. in testing, the 3A+ drew less power than the Zero 2 W with everything disabled. all of them draw ~0.1W when powered off)
> I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life.
Is that with the same load? The chart in the article shows a Pi 3 and Pi 4 using the same idle power, with the 4 drawing more under full load. But the 4 can do more at full load, raising the question of what would be the 4's power usage running a load equal to the 3's full load?
Got as far as the cookie request, and this is one of those without a "Reject All" option where you have to scroll through dozens of options to deselect. I went no further.
When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out you could crash the system because the thermal throttling wasn't fast enough (the temp sensor was on the GPU not CPU). When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"
The graphs are interesting but, really, if you’re considering your readers rather than SEOing for last decade’s search engine technology, you should lead with them and discuss the findings afterwards.
I.e., get to the point quickly and then unpack the detail.
It’s interesting seeing where the incremental vs revolutionary improvements have occurred. CPU-wise, a huge leap with the 3 and then solid but steady improvement with 4 and 5. But the most meaningful jump in GPU performance seems to be 4 -> 5, and I’d be really interested in what that maybe opens up in terms of console emulation.
Anyway, fewers ads, please. Scanning through the article on mobile felt like playing hopscotch in a minefield.
Oh no, it appears to have received the hug of death?
I am interested in this, I have been using Raspberry Pis for various projects and home servers since the original - Currently one is hosting my navidrome music server, my password manager, and several other local network servers.
I feel the upgrade each time, and then get used to it, as I suppose we tend to do. I still remember the upgrade from 1 to 2 being the most impactful to me personally though. (I think maybe because that's when game emulation became viable?)
For $50 you can pick up a used mini PC with say, i5-6500T and 8GB ram, that'll be much faster than the Pi 5. And it'll be compatible with all Linux distros. Really the Pi 3 is good enough as an edge device where you want to hook up things to the GPIO pins.
The article shows how performance has always increased at a somewhat continually increasing level of inconvenience. Weird connectors, SUPER demanding power requirements, new case designs every generation, new cooling required every generation, etc.
My applications have remained the same for many years my octoprint and retropie don't require more FLOPs as time goes on but I'd really enjoy a modern board that has fewer headaches. Works on any normal USB port instead of requiring specialized power supplies, doesn't brown out and reset as much, doesn't heat up as much, etc. I suspect "a pi 3, but now with fewer headaches" would sell better than "a pi 3 but even more headaches and bigger numbers that you don't want".
I still use a PI3 as a daily driver. I never got around to the PI4 (too expensive, low availability), and when the PI 5 came along it was severely downgraded for my main usage purpose (x264/AVC playback) while much pricier too. I don't expect a further PI 6 will remedy this properly.
I suppose its unintentional comedy that they picked a 1080p H264 video playback as the benchmark. Because of course the chip in the Raspberry Pi 1 was literally designed for that! The only thing it asks of you is that you make use of the fixed function blocks that take up much of its silicon space. So no wonder that utterly fails with modern software - we need to go all the way to RPi 5 to smother the problem with enough generic computing power to overcome the careless people that spearhead much of browser development.
Yep. A Pi 1 can almost play 1080p60 with a proper zero-copy decoding setup. Pi 2 and beyond have no issue with that. As you said: The Pi5 has enough CPU power, so even the H264 decoding itself now uses software as it no longer has a hardware decoder. Oh well.
I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012. It’s been sitting in a drawer for years, but about a 2 years ago added it to my Tailscale network as an exit node.
It’s a single-core 700MHz ARMv6 chip with 512MB of RAM. It's a fossil—a Pi 5 is 600x faster (according to the video). But for the 'low-bandwidth' task of routing some banking traffic or running a few changedetection watches via a Hetzner VPS (where the actual docker image runs), it’s rock solid. There’s something deeply satisfying about giving 'e-waste' a second life as a weekend project.
As a fun weekend project in 2013, I stood up a weather station using Weewx and my RPI 2 with 1 GB RAM. I told myself if it ever crashes or the SD card gets corrupted, I'll just tear everything down.
Well, it's still running today on the original SD card. At noon today it processed its 1,055,425th record in the database.
Still, if it ever crashes, I'll just tear it down. :)
They'll run CUPS too! My B modernized some old, commercial Brother laser printers I was running.
That's a great idea - if I understood you right, you mean you used it to make a printer "wireless / wifi enabled" with it, right? Is there any guide you can recommend for that?
I've done the same thing - making a USB-only printer available on my LAN - following this guide: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-print-server/
One nice thing is I can print to the CUPS server even if the printer is off
Well on the other hand, at which point does it become wasteful to run something when it gets less and less power efficient compared to newer devices? According to OP's benchmarks, the Pi 1 burns 2W constant to do essentially zero work and running that on a more modern device that's already running would use almost no extra power.
Then again we use a kW or two to microwave things for minutes on a daily basis so who really gives a shit.
I did unplug my GPU to save 30 watts, but... 2 watts is equivalent to driving a Prius Prime 0.155 miles per day on battery power. So there's that
Yeah... 2W is just not that much energy.
Enough energy to run that thing for an entire year in under 1/2 a gallon of gasoline.
When you can pretty easily offset the entire yearly energy use by skipping a mow of your yard once, or even just driving slightly more conservatively for a few days... I'm not so worried about the power use.
In my region - it's about $3.50 in yearly power costs.
I have a few older models lying around too, there's some other minor benefits as well:
> I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012.
Nice! Even though I've got a Proxmox serve at home running on a real PC (but it's not on 24/7), I do run my DNS, unbound, on a Pi 2. It's on 24/7 and it's been doing its job just fine since years.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260114232734/https://the-diy-l...
Side note: that site has well over three hundred vendors listed for cookies! I thought they were generating fake outs without end but I did eventually reach the end
I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life. There's a few differences in Raspberry Pi 3 versions that may lead you to buy one or the other:
- The Pi 3B has 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n (single-band) WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1. Power idled at 1.4W and peaked at 3.7W.
- The Pi 3B+ removed the 10/100 Ethernet in favor of USB Ethernet (~300Mbps w/USB2.0). CPU cores were overclocked from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz (so a heatsink is more necessary), with ~15% increase in benchmark performance. It added 802.11ac (dual band) WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 w/BLE. Power idled at 1.9W and peaked at 5.1W. This is also the only 3-model supporting PoE (w/ extra HAT).
- The Pi 3A+ removed Ethernet and reduced USB to a single port. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB. Power idled at 1.13W and peaked at 4.1W. The A+ form factor is more compact. Overall the 3A+ is smaller, cheaper, and less power draw than the 3B+ (but not as low as the 3B).
The lowest power draw with acceptable performance is the 3B. For slightly more power draw and more CPU performance, go with 3A+. For "everything" (including PoE) the 3B+ is it.
If you want the 3A+ but don't need the video, want a smaller form factor, and half the power draw, the Pi Zero 2 W is it. Though the Pi Zero 2 W is supposed to be cheapest, due to demand it's often sold out or more expensive. The 3A+ is still cheap (~$25) and available, with the downside of the higher power draw and larger form factor.
(disabling HDMI, LEDs, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc reduces power draw more. in testing, the 3A+ drew less power than the Zero 2 W with everything disabled. all of them draw ~0.1W when powered off)
> I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life.
Is that with the same load? The chart in the article shows a Pi 3 and Pi 4 using the same idle power, with the 4 drawing more under full load. But the 4 can do more at full load, raising the question of what would be the 4's power usage running a load equal to the 3's full load?
Got as far as the cookie request, and this is one of those without a "Reject All" option where you have to scroll through dozens of options to deselect. I went no further.
Safari’s “Show Reader” feature circumvents this particular one, at least partially (didn’t check whether accepting things showed different/more stuff)
Here's the referenced YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQM4CD64xDE
you should try running Linpack on them all (you can find the results here mixed in with other machines I own) https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/machines.html
When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out you could crash the system because the thermal throttling wasn't fast enough (the temp sensor was on the GPU not CPU). When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"
I've been testing HPL on all my SBCs for years: https://sbc-reviews.jeffgeerling.com/reviews/results/
But still haven't gotten a full run on any Pi prior to the 4 B.
> When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"
With all due respect to Raspberry Pi and everything they’ve accomplished in the educational and hobby space,
I felt that one in my bones. I suspect a lot of people with embedded experience who worked with Raspberry Pi over the years feel it too.
Least useless Pi forums answer. it's always the same five people too.
>"why would anyone ever want to do that"
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Do we think this page loads enough ads?
The graphs are interesting but, really, if you’re considering your readers rather than SEOing for last decade’s search engine technology, you should lead with them and discuss the findings afterwards.
I.e., get to the point quickly and then unpack the detail.
It’s interesting seeing where the incremental vs revolutionary improvements have occurred. CPU-wise, a huge leap with the 3 and then solid but steady improvement with 4 and 5. But the most meaningful jump in GPU performance seems to be 4 -> 5, and I’d be really interested in what that maybe opens up in terms of console emulation.
Anyway, fewers ads, please. Scanning through the article on mobile felt like playing hopscotch in a minefield.
I'll always agree that sites should be clear of ads, but ad blockers are the true solution. I can't stand browsing the internet without one.
Oh no, it appears to have received the hug of death?
I am interested in this, I have been using Raspberry Pis for various projects and home servers since the original - Currently one is hosting my navidrome music server, my password manager, and several other local network servers.
I feel the upgrade each time, and then get used to it, as I suppose we tend to do. I still remember the upgrade from 1 to 2 being the most impactful to me personally though. (I think maybe because that's when game emulation became viable?)
For $50 you can pick up a used mini PC with say, i5-6500T and 8GB ram, that'll be much faster than the Pi 5. And it'll be compatible with all Linux distros. Really the Pi 3 is good enough as an edge device where you want to hook up things to the GPIO pins.
The article shows how performance has always increased at a somewhat continually increasing level of inconvenience. Weird connectors, SUPER demanding power requirements, new case designs every generation, new cooling required every generation, etc.
My applications have remained the same for many years my octoprint and retropie don't require more FLOPs as time goes on but I'd really enjoy a modern board that has fewer headaches. Works on any normal USB port instead of requiring specialized power supplies, doesn't brown out and reset as much, doesn't heat up as much, etc. I suspect "a pi 3, but now with fewer headaches" would sell better than "a pi 3 but even more headaches and bigger numbers that you don't want".
I still use a PI3 as a daily driver. I never got around to the PI4 (too expensive, low availability), and when the PI 5 came along it was severely downgraded for my main usage purpose (x264/AVC playback) while much pricier too. I don't expect a further PI 6 will remedy this properly.
I suppose its unintentional comedy that they picked a 1080p H264 video playback as the benchmark. Because of course the chip in the Raspberry Pi 1 was literally designed for that! The only thing it asks of you is that you make use of the fixed function blocks that take up much of its silicon space. So no wonder that utterly fails with modern software - we need to go all the way to RPi 5 to smother the problem with enough generic computing power to overcome the careless people that spearhead much of browser development.
Yep. A Pi 1 can almost play 1080p60 with a proper zero-copy decoding setup. Pi 2 and beyond have no issue with that. As you said: The Pi5 has enough CPU power, so even the H264 decoding itself now uses software as it no longer has a hardware decoder. Oh well.
Yeah.
Except it's not even fixed function blocks, it's the 12 core VideoCore IV GPU running software that does the decoding.
VideoCore is the real Raspberry Pi, the ARM block running Linux was just a subprocessor that VC controls.
Yawn, not even test of AES encryption which is probably the biggest performance boost switching to a Pi 5.