| ▲ | deng an hour ago |
| Nowadays, I just get old laptops with broken screens and take the mainboard out. They are dirt cheap, often even have 16GB of RAM, you can just dump pretty much any linux on them and they are usually way faster than Pis. The boards are of course bigger, which I guess will be a non-starter for many. They'll also require active cooling unless you downclock them considerably. They often also require more power, although many mainboards can be configured down two a few watts of power consumption, depending on what peripherals and speed you need. Yeah, it's more work than just getting a Pi, but given the current prices, it makes sense for me. |
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| ▲ | madduci 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Indeed is a good idea, but Pi has a better power consumption rate. Old mobile phones or laptops are riskier because of batteries. Some laptops can work without batteries as well, but do old phones? |
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| ▲ | deng 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I've yet to find a laptop mainboard that doesn't work without a battery. As I've written below, I'm getting extremely boring old office laptops with integrated graphics. Usually phones also work fine without a battery. However, I'm not touching phones because I will not fiddle with locked bootloaders and "the Android situation". Running plain Linux is a hard requirement for me. | | |
| ▲ | raphinou a minute ago | parent [-] | | I'm just looking at an old Dell laptop refusing to boot without manual intervention because it looses its time setting since I removed its main battery. If I can fix that it'll become a very capable server for my home setup. Not sure it'll work though, as the bios can't be configured to ignore the time reset. |
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| ▲ | tetraodonpuffer 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| DIY perks has a really good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FStfdGjAwc |
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| ▲ | zodwick 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| why go the hassle of taking the mainboard out, assuming you are using it as a server kindof config |
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| ▲ | deng 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Well, this is about replacing a Pi, so I guess people want a raw board. Indeed, if you just want to run a pi-hole, take any old laptop and just wedge it someplace... |
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| ▲ | aenis an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How do you power them? Via the battery? I was thinking about turning my old mbp into a build machine, but i am a bit concerned with running it via the battery 24/7 |
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| ▲ | deng an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I usually disconnect the battery and just power them via USB-C. The battery on these old broken laptops is usually toast anyway... | | |
| ▲ | serf 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | you're lucky you're running into models that don't panic in some way without a battery. for example some alienware and XPS models rely on the battery for amperage capacitance when their big onboard GPUs get busy; allows them to run cooler/less-wattage/smaller wall-warts but it also makes for a platform that'll crash when it hits a high GPU usage without a decent way to make up the amps. 'spose you could use a bigger power supply if you get bios/uefi to play nice. hard proposition sometimes with Dell products. | | |
| ▲ | deng 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Well, of course I'm not getting old gaming/pro laptops with dedicated gpus, they would consume far too much power, require extensive cooling, and these are way too expensive anyway, even when broken. I usually get old, boring office laptops (lenovo/dell) from bulk resellers, with integrated graphics who are sufficiently used/broken so they are dirt cheap. As long as they still turn on, the mainboard is usually fine (I've yet to get a broken one). |
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| ▲ | DaSHacka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most old PC laptops have external batteries you can detach by pulling out on a springloaded tab. Even MacBooks are possible to run without the battery, but it requires some NVRAM trickery IIRC. | | |
| ▲ | grvbck 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Some older MacBook and MacBook Pro models reduce processor speed and GPU performance roughly by half when running without a battery, to avoid shutting down if the computer needs more power than the AC adapter can provide. Apple documented the behavior in a support note. I’m not sure if the Apple Silicon models do the throttling as well. I guess the situation doesn't come up as often since the batteries are no longer user-removable. | | |
| ▲ | hoppyhoppy2 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | At least on older Macbook there's a way to override BD PROCHOT MSR setting to undo the slowdown. |
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| ▲ | eternauta3k an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe put it on a timer, or have the laptop control its own outlet. | | |
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