There's no such thing as overkill, only extra overhead to do more things with. Hell, if you found yourself with a ton of excess resources and good cooling, you could run a distributed computing project like BOINC on some of the spare cores and help out some scientists.

You wouldn't see much of a bump in CPU performance, 6cores to 8 cores with a 200mhz clock speed improvement isn't ground breaking.

Going to 8gb of memory will give caching benefits.

But... That's all well and good. However. What I found the most beneficial on a OPi 5, and the entire reason I bought it over other boards, is the onboard NVME m.2 slot. Yes, the orange pi 5 can support 2230 and 2242 M.2 NVME drives at PCIe3.0x1 speeds, and it makes a WORLD of difference in performance. Like you would not even believe how fast compiling and installing software becomes when it's not bottlenecked by the ~500 iops an SD card can struggle through. SD cards are ungodly slow, and OS level writes tend to kill them every few months (they're not designed to handle that kind of work). Even the cheapest aliexpress M.2 drives, which I bought a 512gb KingSpec one for like $16, blow SD cards out of the water, and will last for YEARS with a typical pi's workload compared to the few-months of an SD card. Plus they're big enough to even do a bit of file hosting on.

Have you considered buying a used thin client / mini PC?

Since the Orange Pi 5 sounded interesting, I checked it out and it's rather expensive. Well at least for me.

I found it from 180 to 200 Euro for the 8GB version. An used thin client or mini PC can be bought for half the price and most of the time it comes with 256gb storage included.

The extra cost for energy should be less than what you might be paying extra for the Orange Pi plus storage.

Are you definitely tied to the form factor? Because for $20 more you can get a much more capable mini PC.

For Pihole or any other firewall applications two ethernet ports are nice and not many SBCs have that.

For Conduit or any other Matrix server, fast storage connection, ideally a NVMe drive is also very useful and again not many SBCs have that.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

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