Hardware Best "Bang For Buck" SBC?

[gudenau]

I am looking into single board computers that can run Linux, and I would like to know what the best price to performance ratio that is out there. I am interested in trying to make a small cluster with them, maybe ten nodes or so max? I tried this with some VMs and I got a rudimentary system working with eight (on a four core machine :-P) I will continue to mess with the VMs a bit and see what I can't make them do, I am well aware that they will not perform as well as anything outside of the VMs.

TL;DR
Raspberry Pi clone that has the best performance per dollar.

 

[raystriker]

Did you just answer your question at the end?
Anyway, take a look at some of these-
https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology/diy electronics?ref=discovery_overlay

 

[J-Machine]

I find the orange pi line up offers some good specs to dollar comparisons compared to most of the others. Never tried to do what you are with them but I made a retropi for half the price of a raspberry pi 3 and it performs the same for that.

 

[gudenau]

Did you just answer your question at the end?
Anyway, take a look at some of these-
https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology/diy electronics?ref=discovery_overlay

Doing research before investing is always a good idea, figured I might ask to get some leads and try to make this take less time.

I find the orange pi line up offers some good specs to dollar comparisons compared to most of the others. Never tried to do what you are with them but I made a retropi for half the price of a raspberry pi 3 and it performs the same for that.

I'll have to look into these.

 

[raystriker]

Why not build one single cheap xeon rig? There is a whole range of used/ES (engineering sample) Xeons on ebay that are dirty cheap.

 

[gudenau]

Why not build one single cheap xeon rig? There is a whole range of used/ES (engineering sample) Xeons on ebay that are dirty cheap.

Because those things are noisy, larger and less fun? This is more for the cluster stuff than anything.