I seem to be running around in circles trying to make a decision about a new SBC to add to the herd.
The job is currently being done by an OrangePi PC (H3, 1Gb), and is mostly about generating static web sites, which means rendering static HTML/json/js files and uploading them via SCP to a cheap shared hosting provider (the orange pi does not do the actual hosting).
This means daily downloading of data from the web (a few hundred MB) and crunching this data to use it for the site. Currently it downloads my country's official covid cases data and generates per-city-daily-cases-per-capita with rolling averages in HTML graphs, this allows easier comparison across time and across cities, of local covid conditions.
The Orange Pi PC does it fine. But then I have other projects and I'd prefer to have a separate "production" SBC, so that I can tinker more freely with the "dev SBC" without fear of breaking things.
And then I think: "well, I might as well get a beefier board, you know? Future-proofing!".
... Perhaps a beefier CPU? That octacore Nano Fire 3 looks interesting, although might be memory bottlenecked.
... Perhaps more durable storage. The USB Stick will die. My recent PC upgrade just freed a 250Gb Samsung 840 SSD that would likely last longer if used for this. (¿Hopefully trim will work through USB?). I don't really *need* USB3 but it'd be nice to get more juice from the SSD.
... Perhaps 2Gb of RAM will last longer, but then again those boards with 2Gb cost twice as much as the 1Gb boards, without bringing twice the cores nor double the MHz.
So I see two things:
First there's the cost: prices rise quickly for faster CPUs/USB3, and rather sharply with 2Gb.
Then, the faster chips seem to run much hotter. The NanoPi Neo 3 looks attractive at first (1 or 2 Gb, USB3) but reviews and forum posts suggest the RK3328 gets really hot even at idle, and throttles down under load/heat (perhaps failing to get the peak promised performance), with everyone adding active cooling and even huge heatsink-cases. Similar things seem to be going for the Fire 3 SBC, the H6 chip, A9.... It's like the faster SBCs gave up on passive cooling.
It can be hot here in the tropics: right now at noon it's 29°C, and the OPi is idle at 42°.
I really don't want to add active cooling. The allwinner H3 can be "slow", but they are really cool and draw so little power. Meanwhile I don't like the way my RPi3B (a home nas/minidlna) complained if anything less than 2A was fed to it. And I've seen small house Geckos warm up on the RPi, I kid you not!
So I end up going full circle and wondering if all I need is just another H3 OrangePi PC.
¿Perhaps you guys know of a "faster" SBC that draws under 1A and doesn't throttle at full load with passive cooling?
