People have commented to Michael Klements that for the price of the Raspberry Pi 5, one should just get an Intel N100 based mini PC instead. Most cite better video encoding and decoding performance, better OS support, more memory & storage options, and additional PCIe lanes as advantages over the Pi 5.

Michael compares the two to see whether an N100 Mini PC is a better option and what the limitations of each of them are.

If you don’t know what an N100 PC is. It’s a PC, often in a mini PC form factor, that is built around Intel’s Alder Lake N family, and in this case the N100 CPU. For a long time, Raspberry Pi’s were substantially cheaper than any newly available Intel hardware, but Pi’s have since crept up in price and this series of processors are now cheap and efficient enough to close that gap to the point whether they’re becoming quite comparable.

If you plan on using the computer for automation or robotics with a reliance on the GPIO pins then the Pi 5 is the better option, but for experimenting with home server projects, running anything reliant on a GPU, or getting started with Docker or Kubernetes then the N100 mini PC is a great alternative.

I think Raspberry Pi have missed the mark a little with the pricing of the Pi 5. If you are just looking for a cheap computer to get into tinkering with electronics projects then you’re probably better off going for a base version of the Pi 4. This still has plenty of CPU power to run projects locally and you’ll have access to a similar set of IO to the Pi 5 but without the additional cost. After all, a big part of the initial attraction to Raspberry Pi’s was the $35 base price.

See the video below and more on the DIY Life blog