Although the speed of the Raspberry Pi5 is sufficient for many requirements, the use of an SD card is unfortunately a bottleneck. Starting applications sometimes takes quite a long time and running Jupyter notebooks is also rather slow.
I therefore bought a new mini PC from GMKtec to test its usability.
The model I bought is the Nucbox G5 with an Intel N97 processor, 12 GB DDR5 RAM and a 256 GB nvme disk.
The components installed are all “no-name”, but after a few hours of testing everything seems to be fine.
The device was delivered with Win 11 Pro pre-installed, but I’m not a fan of it, so I installed Linux Mint and it runs perfectly.
The price was 7,600 THB, which is roughly the price of a Raspberry Pi5 8GB plus a 256 GB nvme SSD.
Since I don’t plan on using any sensors or controls for the course, I would give preference to the Nucbox.
The 4 efficiency cores of the N97 are powerful and require little power. In IDLE desktop around 8 watts and under load around 15 watts.
