Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
As others have pointed out, there are definitely some flaws with the logic applied here.<p>&gt; It’s faster, cheaper and still relatively small<p>Yes, the Optiplex is going to perform better at a lot of things.  The prices I&#x27;m seeing are around $60 -- the Pi is either $10 for the Zero with WiFi or $45 for the &quot;3&quot; with a reasonably sized Micro SD card.  Granted, your needs may include more storage than what&#x27;s offered by a Micro SD card, so that would set the sticker price higher, but the Optiplex that was linked to didn&#x27;t include storage, either.  But the bigger area where the Pi is going to be less expensive is in power utilization.  The Pi is <i>really</i> cheap to run.  These things don&#x27;t even need active cooling to run well.<p>But it&#x27;s also not really fair to equate these two devices.  It&#x27;s not even fair to say &#x27;for a home server&#x27; -- that all depends on <i>what</i> you&#x27;re going to use it for.  If you&#x27;re using it as a low power home server for sharing files and&#x2F;or basic web app, REST service or home automation hub and have no intention of doing processor intensive tasks like media re-encoding[0], the Pi is a good fit and economical to leave powered on all the time.  My Plex server, in fact, points to a device that&#x27;s a Pi competitor which has archived media on it.<p>Then, there&#x27;s noise and heat.  Provided spindle drives aren&#x27;t used, Pis are completely <i>silent</i> and generate substantially less heat than a full-sized PC.  I am fairly certain the Atom processor in that Dell has active cooling.  Even if it&#x27;s a heat-sink only design, those usually include ducting that feeds off one or more <i>other</i> fans in the device (which end up being more powerful&#x2F;louder to handle cooling the extra components).  Minimally, there&#x27;s at least one fan running all the time.  Yes, you can buy quiet fans (adding to the cost) and nearly eliminate this sound, but in my case, my Pi clone doesn&#x27;t even have a heat-sink on the CPU.  It shares a case with three, rather hot, drives (though I&#x27;ve designed it with ducting and separation to reduce the impact of this heat).  It has been running that way for over a year without difficulties.<p>[0] The specific mention of Plex leads me to believe the author was targeting those of us who want a Plex Media Server on an RPi.  I&#x27;m not sure how well Plex works on the Pi, but I use my Plex server with a Roku and many of my videos <i>must</i> be re-encoded to h.264&#x2F;MP4 from h.265&#x2F;MKV on the server in order to play them back -- I also have to re-encode to a lower bitrate when I&#x27;m remote.  I&#x27;m not confident the Pi could handle those tasks.<p>[1] It&#x27;s either a Banana Pro or Orange Pi; can&#x27;t remember -- I haven&#x27;t had to touch the hardware since I set it up.  It&#x27;s Ethernet attached with a 1TB SATA drive and two 2TB USB disks.  The device handles the task perfectly.  In fact, I only set it up because my i5 server case was too small to take on the storage, so I printed up a case to house the Pi clone and the drives.  It also serves up a REST service that my SmartThings uses to control my garage door and older Pioneer receiver, as well as a node service that lets my Alexa control my Roku.  I even had it set up to run Octoprint to control my 3D printer, but purchased a Pi 3 for that because I wanted to relocate the printer.