--- title: "I Told You to Buy a Raspberry Pi, Then I Bought a Used i3 Desktop" description: "The Raspberry Pi 5 is the gateway drug of self-hosting, and a used 8th or 9th gen i3 office desktop is what I moved to. Here is the honest comparison, price, power, performance, Quick Sync transcoding and the one thing the Pi does that the i3 never will." author: "SelfHostedApp" pubDate: 2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z tags: ["opinion", "hardware", "beginners", "self-hosting"] canonical_url: "https://selfhostedapp.com/blog/raspberry-pi-vs-used-i3/" source_url: "https://selfhostedapp.com/blog/raspberry-pi-vs-used-i3.md" --- # I Told You to Buy a Raspberry Pi, Then I Bought a Used i3 Desktop import { Picture } from 'astro:assets'; import HardwareHero from '../../assets/images/heroes/raspberry-pi-vs-used-i3-hero.jpg'; Five posts on this blog, by my own count, recommend the Raspberry Pi as the cheap way in, and I stand by every one of those sentences, and then I went and moved the whole stack to a used office desktop with an eighth generation i3 inside, which deserves an explanation rather than a quiet edit, because the two machines land at nearly the same price once you build them honestly and the right answer depends on what you want the box to be. This is the comparison I wish I had read before buying either, with the numbers I measured myself and the one conclusion I did not expect when I started. The machine I am talking about is the quiet legend of the homelab world, the ex-corporate desktop, a Dell OptiPlex or Lenovo ThinkCentre or HP EliteDesk in the small micro or small form factor case, powered by an i3-8100T or 9100T, four cores at thirty-five watts that companies bought in their thousands, used for three years of spreadsheets, and sold in bulk to refurbishers who pass them on for a fraction of new. Mine cost nine thousand rupees with eight gigabytes of RAM and a two hundred and fifty six gigabyte NVMe already inside, and the used market in every city has a shelf of them, which is a supply chain the Raspberry Pi has never enjoyed, as anyone who lived through the great Pi shortage of the early twenties still remembers. The price comparison has to be done honestly, because the sticker is a trap in both directions. A Raspberry Pi 5 with eight gigabytes costs around seven thousand rupees, and it is a board, so the real build adds the official power supply, a case, an active cooler, and the storage that matters, because running a server off a microSD card in 2026 is a way to corrupt a filesystem, so an NVMe base hat and a drive add another four thousand. The used i3 arrives as a complete computer with RAM and storage and a case and a cooler and a power brick, for less than the finished Pi, and when the finished used machine beats the finished hobby board on price, the conversation changes shape entirely. The performance difference is not close, and this is where the recommendation changed for me, because the i3's four real cores out-muscle the Pi by roughly three times in the multithreaded work a server actually does, compiling, transcoding, running twenty containers at once, and the single-core speeds are in the same neighborhood. The number that matters more than benchmarks is what the box stops noticing, my Pi 5 ran the stack but it felt the stack, Immich machine learning queued patiently, Jellyfin transcodes stuttered when scans ran, and the i3 treats the same workload as a warm-up, which is the difference between a server you manage around and one you forget about. The transcoding story is where the gap becomes a canyon, and it is the reason to insist on the right i3, because the eighth and ninth generation desktop chips carry Intel's UHD 630 graphics with Quick Sync, the silicon that exists specifically to convert video, and Jellyfin speaks to it natively, so four simultaneous 4K transcodes run at single-digit CPU percentages while the fans stay asleep. Two warnings come free with this advice, avoid the F-suffixed models like the i3-9100F because they have no integrated graphics at all and you would be buying the one chip in the family without the superpower, and prefer the T-suffixed thirty-five watt models, which sip power in a way the desktop chips were not asked to. The Pi 5 can hardware-decode high efficiency video and direct playback of anything works beautifully, but the encode side of the pipeline, the part that matters when two people stream two different files at once, is where the Pi politely declines and the old office PC shrugs. Power is the Pi's genuine win and I measured it rather than quoting the marketing, the Pi 5 with NVMe idles around four watts against the little desktop's ten, which over a year is about fifty extra units of electricity, a few hundred rupees, real money in the sense that it exists and negligible next to the performance difference. Both machines run silent and both will never move your bill the way the rented VPS did, and if every watt is a moral position for you, the Pi keeps the crown, I simply stopped wearing it. Where the Pi remains undefeated is everything around the board, and I want to be precise about this because it is why the recommendation in the old posts was never wrong. The GPIO pins are a door to a physical world the desktop does not have, sensors and relays and the electronics half of Home Assistant, the camera connector plugs into a hardware ecosystem with no Intel equivalent, and the documentation and beginner community are the best in the industry, every problem you will hit has a forum thread with a solution from 2024. The used i3 is a standard x86 computer, which is a superpower of a different kind, every Docker image just works, the arm64 exceptions that occasionally break a pull request never happen, the RAM upgrades to thirty-two gigabytes with a cheap SODIMM instead of a board swap, and when this machine eventually dies, the shelf of its identical siblings costs nine thousand rupees again. So the answer I give now, when the question arrives in my inbox the way it arrives every week, is that the machines are for different people, the Pi 5 is the right first server for the tinkerer who wants the board to be the hobby, and the used i3 desktop is the right first server for someone who wants the services to be the hobby and the hardware to disappear under a desk for the price of a dinner out. I owned the Pi first and it taught me everything, and the stack outgrew it the way stacks do, and the cupboard currently holds both, the little corporate refugee running the world and the Pi blinking at me from a shelf running things only a Pi can. If your first server decision deserves a second opinion, subscribe to the newsletter.