Nice write-up. Thanks for sharing the important bits.Ars had a nice write-up on this very topic.You'll also notice that "watching a ton of videos" was not on my list. YouTube videos are generally playable but drop frames, especially if you're trying to watch at 1080p and/or do any other kind of work while watching. Hardware-accelerated video decode has always been a bit of a sticking point for the Pi, and the Zoom calls I took completely maxed out the GPU and nearly maxed out the CPU and still couldn't manage anything approaching a smooth frame rate. I got by, but I couldn't do more than that. As far as I can tell, the Pi includes hardware-accelerated decoding for the H.265/HEVC codec but not for the still-common-at-HD-resolutions H.264 codec, which helps explain why things like YouTube and Zoom stress the Pi out so much.Even with the overclocks, doing anything else while playing a non-accelerated video is the fastest way to bring the Pi to its knees, and you'll still notice some jerkiness and hesitation when opening apps, opening tabs, or resizing or moving windows (at least, this was the case on a multi-monitor setup).If you’re looking for the cheapest viable everyday desktop computer, though, it’s hard to recommend the Pi over one of the many cheap Intel N100 mini PCs that can be had starting at around $150. This is more expensive than an 8GB Pi 5, but not dramatically so once you factor in the cost of a case, cooling, power supply, and enclosure. (If you’re not familiar with the N100, it’s essentially one of Intel’s 12th-generation Core chips but with only E-cores instead of a mix of P- and E-cores; compared to older N-series Celeron and Pentium processors, performance is surprisingly decent.)
Statistics: Posted by AkulaMD — Sun Jan 21, 2024 7:03 pm