Cheap & silent mini PC for Bitcoin node & blockchain explorer?

[LoyceV]

Sure, but we are not talking big savings here, unless you turned all devices in your house to lower power.
Refrigerator and other devices are spending much more power and they are working 24/7.
It's not a bad idea to buy power meter for sockets to check how much power they all use.

Been there, done that. The energy crisis made me more aware.
I wouldn't compare my fridge with a node though: I can't really go without a fridge. But if I were to buy a new one, it would be an energy efficient one. Now that I check it: you're wrong on the power consumption. This one (260l fridge, 103l freezer) consumes 11.9W on average. That's a lot less than my current laptop. That's really impressive!

I even purchased totally silent analogue wall clock.

Lol. I bought one without a "tic" sound every second. But now that it's getting older, it makes 5 sounds per second.

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[Findingnemo]

Sure, but we are not talking big savings here, unless you turned all devices in your house to lower power.
Refrigerator and other devices are spending much more power and they are working 24/7.
It's not a bad idea to buy power meter for sockets to check how much power they all use.

Been there, done that. The energy crisis made me more aware.
I wouldn't compare my fridge with a node though: I can't really go without a fridge. But if I were to buy a new one, it would be an energy efficient one. Now that I check it: you're wrong on the power consumption. This one (260l fridge, 103l freezer) consumes 11.9W on average. That's a lot less than my current laptop. That's really impressive!

I even purchased totally silent analogue wall clock.

Lol. I bought one without a "tic" sound every second. But now that it's getting older, it makes 5 sounds per second.

You guys are taking things too extreme.

Minimalist life is understandable what about this new trend, power saver?

Mini PCs are not really suitable for 24/7 operations cause it comes with congested area, more heat so probability of crashing is high and many of this kind doesn't come with cooler fans.

[JossBrown]

Mini PCs are not really suitable for 24/7 operations cause it comes with congested area, more heat so probability of crashing is high and many of this kind doesn't come with cooler fans.

Depends on the manufacturer & their BIOS ofc, but you could always apply additional tweaks, so the CPU will throttle faster. And there might be more options, e.g. disabling turbo boost or (depending on the CPU) hyper-threading or a couple of cores. (But you'd need to test stuff like this, especially on an off-the-shelf PC, because going too low power with BIOS tweaks might destabilize the system, and you'd worsen the situation that you originally wanted to improve.) But if you use the machine only for Bitcoin (which you should), then some BIOS tweaks might be OK.

An occasional reboot is a good thing, too, in order to free swap memory etc. My current node is running Ubuntu Server, which is probably solid enough for a reboot once a year, even on an old office Mini PC, but I still reboot about once a month when applying system updates. If you maintain your system regularly, you will automatically reboot more often.

As for fans… that's why I'm a proponent of DIY builds. For these passively cooled boards, one chassis fan would probably be sufficient to thwart any potential heat instability issue, and you could also get a model (e.g. from Noctua) that comes with a low or ultra low noise adapter, which tend to draw less additional power. Moreover, these boards usually come with a standard BIOS, and are perfectly fine for additional low power tweaks. But, as was said earlier, DIY builds cost a bit more… it will take many years to make up for the additional investment costs, maybe never, and you might prefer to use that extra money to buy some sats instead.

[Findingnemo]

Mini PCs are not really suitable for 24/7 operations cause it comes with congested area, more heat so probability of crashing is high and many of this kind doesn't come with cooler fans.

Depends on the manufacturer & their BIOS ofc, but you could always apply additional tweaks, so the CPU will throttle faster. And there might be more options, e.g. disabling turbo boost or (depending on the CPU) hyper-threading or a couple of cores. (But you'd need to test stuff like this, especially on an off-the-shelf PC, because going too low power with BIOS tweaks might destabilize the system, and you'd worsen the situation that you originally wanted to improve.) But if you use the machine only for Bitcoin (which you should), then some BIOS tweaks might be OK.

An occasional reboot is a good thing, too, in order to free swap memory etc. My current node is running Ubuntu Server, which is probably solid enough for a reboot once a year, even on an old office Mini PC, but I still reboot about once a month when applying system updates. If you maintain your system regularly, you will automatically reboot more often.

As for fans… that's why I'm a proponent of DIY builds. For these passively cooled boards, one chassis fan would probably be sufficient to thwart any potential heat instability issue, and you could also get a model (e.g. from Noctua) that comes with a low or ultra low noise adapter, which tend to draw less additional power. Moreover, these boards usually come with a standard BIOS, and are perfectly fine for additional low power tweaks. But, as was said earlier, DIY builds cost a bit more… it will take many years to make up for the additional investment costs, maybe never, and you might prefer to use that extra money to buy some sats instead.

I don't have much experience with the mini PCs but as far as I know it's not really customisable in terms of hardware so we can only make changes via software tweaks. The price of custom build decent PC can be around $200 with most recent processor which is positive than going with an outdated gen processor. Fan comes with processor itself enough for this very particular purpose but indeed a little more space along with fans comes along cabinet can reduce heat dissipation a lot.

[LoyceV]

Minimalist life is understandable what about this new trend, power saver?

Using less power doesn't mean you have a minimalist lifestyle. I don't mind using a lot of power, but if I can do the same thing with less, I do it.

Mini PCs are not really suitable for 24/7 operations

I don't have much experience with the mini PCs

Any PC can run 24/7. If it doesn't have enough cooling, it won't last an hour. If it has enough cooling, there's no upper limit. Just clean dust from the fan once in a while.

[dkbit98]

I wouldn't compare my fridge with a node though: I can't really go without a fridge. But if I were to buy a new one, it would be an energy efficient one. Now that I check it: you're wrong on the power consumption. This one (260l fridge, 103l freezer) consumes 11.9W on average. That's a lot less than my current laptop. That's really impressive!

Don't trust, verify (with power meter).
You are assuming that everyone is using brand new fridge with class A energy classification, but I don't think they do.
I could probably give better example with electric heater or air conditioner that are biggest power consumers but I wanted to have something that is working 24/7.
Only other thing I could think off is light bulbs, but there are old style incandescent and new led lights, so it is wide range of consumption.

Here is what AI told me about average fridge power consumption:

A typical American-style fridge freezer uses between 40W and 80W (minimum) to 150W and 400W (maximum) of electricity.
A fridge uses around 100W to 250W of electricity, with an average daily energy usage of 1 to 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or about $150 per year.
A large fridge uses around 180W or 1575 kWh annually.
Some fridges may use as little as 10W to 15W for table top models.

This is what AI is saying for average laptops:

Laptops typically use between 30-70 watts of power when in use.
The average power consumption of a laptop is around 50-60 watts.

Power Consumption by Activity:

Web browsing: 20-40 watts
Office work: 30-50 watts
Video streaming: 40-60 watts
Gaming: 60-120 watts
Video editing: 80-150 watts

[DaveF]

Same here.
I even purchased totally silent analogue wall clock.

You need one of these then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmos_clock

https://www.jaeger-lecoultre.com/us-en/clocks/atmos

...
This is what AI is saying for average laptops:

Laptops typically use between 30-70 watts of power when in use.
The average power consumption of a laptop is around 50-60 watts.

Power Consumption by Activity:

Web browsing: 20-40 watts
Office work: 30-50 watts
Video streaming: 40-60 watts
Gaming: 60-120 watts
Video editing: 80-150 watts

At least with the mid range Dells and HPs that I deal with, I see a high variation of power pull from the wall when using cheap generic AC adapters vs. using the OEM ones.
Better build quality and better components probably saves you 3 to 5 watts at a minimum. Over years and years of 24/7 use that does add up to a real number.

-Dave

[RickDeckard]

~
My own DIY Mini-ITX rackmount build with an N100 that I slapped together last night would use:

• Inter-Tech 1U-K-126L rackmount chassis
• 2 * Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM fans
• ASRock N100DC-ITX
• 19V 120W DC power supply

for a total of approx. €250 w/out shipping for a barebones build w/out memory and storage. More than an old refurbished Mini-PC of course, but not much more than e.g. an N100 Beelink.

Which route did you end up taking? Did you actually build that node or are you waiting for some results regarding ODROID-H4 Plus performance? (Hardkernel already has a case available in their website bt the way)

[JossBrown]

I'm still on my Dell Optiplex 9020M, and it's doing a great job, so I'm in no rush. But at some point I'll want to upgrade to newer hardware, and I'll probably go the DIY rackmount route. Looking at the Odroid H4+, that's actually the best option currently. I'd choose the Mini-ITX kit and use my own rackmount chassis. But the board seems to have everything you need: up to 48 GB of RAM, eMMC for Ubuntu Server boot volume, x4 gen3 M.2 SSD for the data volume (timechain etc.), and a SATA SSD as backup volume. Compared to the Odroid, the ASRock N100DC-ITX, while surely a nice efficient board, would probably be overkill.

As for the Odroid cases, I could see myself using one of them with a second Odroid board as a remote Lightning watchtower node. But that would be stage 3. 

[Jet Cash]

I'm thinking of using a Raspberry Pi5 with 8Gb of ram and a 2Tb Crucial P3 NVME disk. It's very quiet, well cooled, well supported and has lots of connectivity options. You can use a laptop as a terminal to control it, so you don't need a screen keyboard or mouse. Power is provided through an USB-C port. I want to use this to research my old hard drives with wallets on them, but it would be great to run a full node. The ssd is extremely fast, and that helps in handling blockchain files.

[dkbit98]

You need one of these then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmos_clock

I like the design, but I don't like the price  
Quartz mechanism is good enough for  me as a silent wall clock.

At least with the mid range Dells and HPs that I deal with, I see a high variation of power pull from the wall when using cheap generic AC adapters vs. using the OEM ones.
Better build quality and better components probably saves you 3 to 5 watts at a minimum. Over years and years of 24/7 use that does add up to a real number.

Every watt counts, and gold rated power supply makes a huge difference compared to regular ones  

I'm thinking of using a Raspberry Pi5 with 8Gb of ram and a 2Tb Crucial P3 NVME disk. It's very quiet, well cooled, well supported and has lots of connectivity options. You can use a laptop as a terminal to control it, so you don't need a screen keyboard or mouse.

Does Raspberry have any plans to Pi500 version with integrated keyboard, similar like Pi400 that was released few years ago?