I'm with you on the forums vs discord thing. Moving to discord not only makes it harder to find things, but all the information is going to be completely gone once the discord server shuts down.
Discord would be good if certain channels could be publicly searchable. They both have their benefits Are there any discord archive bots? Seems like it could help with post discord longevity. Otherwise maybe technical communities should enforce rules to use their forum for technical questions and use discord as a helper to link forum pages and other offtopic discussion.
If all these "Pi Killers" would focus more on software and community instead of trying to one-up each other in hardware there might be an actual rival to the Pi. And all these Rock 5 boards are neat, but they're being compared to a Pi 4, which is rapidly approaching four years old. I'm glad you're out there showing what does, and mostly doesn't, work.
And if the guy literally known for making a deeply technical RPi channel is having trouble figuring out your board's software / storage / interfaces, that's kinda all that needs to be said about how that front is going.
sure, but a lot of the Pi's success is community driven documentation/support and knowledge. By funneling everyone away from these boards they'll never get a chance to grow a community and become as good as the Pi.
Correct, the sorftware part is often a deal breaker and it already starts with the OS/Kernel plus driver issues. I've got the Radxa Rock Pi 4c (which were hard to get ~2 years ago) and ran into issues with the HDMI/mDP output and it seems to be an issue on the software side (some reported to be able to get it working with another cable). It wasn't a deal breaker for me as it runs headless but this is also something that should not happen. This might be fixed by now but I have not checked it again. Beside that it's working great. At the same time I also bought the NanoPi M4V2 which is pretty similar. Both the Rock Pi 4c as well as the NanoPi M4V2 have been upgraded to be able to attach an m.2 NVMe SSD so I have enough storage for all my database related stuff. Many thanks to the folks at armbian.com to provide images for all these SBCs. If we only had the manufacturer we would be completely lost (I don't have the time to build the entire system from scratch).
@@ivolol There's really no problem figuring out how it works. It works just about the same as any other SBC, and all you need is some basic Linux knowledge and problem solving skills to figure it out. I'm 17 and had no trouble flashing the SPI ROM and booting off of NVMe. Also, the kernel likely didn't work because there was a missed build step. Maybe it required a custom compiler toolchain, or maybe it was just missing some config options. This is something you should be able to find out either in the documentation of their kernel, or in the configuration of whatever tool they use to build it.
It depends on what you're after. I love these boards (Rock 5B, Rock 3A, RockPro64, Pine H64, etc.) far more than my RPis. You just need some Linux knowledge and problem solving skills to figure out how to set them up. This means they're not good beginner boards, but if you have some experience, they're amazing.
Oh man, I really feel your Discord pain. For me, it also runs slows / seems to hog memory on my older laptop, so I've just gotten into the habit of popping in, asking my question, and then immediately singing out
especially after how the fine pi folk stanned for their recently hired unrepentant ex-cop (likely voyeuristic) surveillance-bro on their official Mastodon... the idea of continuing the support them after that stunt leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I say it's worth suffering the software and config headaches where possible just because of that.
@@TrevorV it seems like pi foundation posted something on their mastadon about an ex cop they hired? (atm UK is purging massive corruption from police force). I'm curious about the source too
@@ivolol Looking at their GitLab, the patched linux-pinebookpro kernel was last updated 2 years ago and the pbpro device profile switched to mainline kernel 3 years ago.
This SBC has the same issue as every one of them which is not a Raspberry Pi that is a mixture of all the things you mentioned. Great performance on paper for a much higher price with way less support. I still wait to see anything that can seriously compete with their RPi.
The Orange Pi 5 is a serious competitor. It’s an S edition of the Same CPU. This reduces I/O a bit, but 400MB/s on NVMe still crushes a Raspberry PI. And the most expensive board with 16GB of RAM is less than where the Rock 5b _starts_ in price. Software support is fantastic out of the box and the community is jumping on the board very quickly. I believe Jeff is obtaining a board and will review it soon. It’s fantastic. Best experience I’ve had with an SBC in a long time.
@@JeffGeerling I saw that right after I wrote my comment. 😅 I’m still hoping you’ll do a full video on the Orange PI 5. I haven’t had this much fun with an SBC board since the Raspberry Pi was a new thing. I really need to get the thing properly setup for my server-based testing, but I keep poking around with getting WebGL up and going (works great in Chromium snap with the right command line flags!), seeing how my Java IDE runs, testing 4K UA-cam, seeing what I can plug into USB and have it recognize… you know. Fun stuff!
@@thewiirocks I agree that the OPi 5 is a great alternative to the bigger brother Rock 5B but its only PCIe 2.0 so well below 400MB/s with averages around 250-280 MB/s which is quite poor but still a great alternative to the dated RPi 4B and the custom support has steadily progressed since its release in late 2022.
If a chip doesn't have open hardware information then it's a waste to try.. Every one that interested me is now junk becsue they can't do simple things like use most of the graphics chipset etc..
This may not be the Pi Killer I'm looking for, but Jeff Geerling is definitely the channel I'm looking for! That's why I subbed and stayed subbed after he told us to unsubscribe!
This is literally the board I was waiting for! So terrible to hear, that you had issues with compiling a kernel. Waiting to see you make some progress with it. If so, I will consider to use it for a multi media side project. Great video, as always! Thanks!
The hardware is still quite impressive. I am hoping to get bifurcation sorted out, it would be great to get a couple devices running at PCIe Gen 3 speeds.
@@JeffGeerling It probably requires a custom toolchain for kernel compilation to actually work. I'd be surprised if it's not on GitHub somewhere. It's pretty standard for SBCs to need one. The simplicity with a Pi where kernel compilation is as simple as with a desktop is because they collabed w the kernel dec team to allow support w/o a custom toolchain IIRC.
@@sophiophile you only need to modify the device tree. They have a thread about this on their forum, search for optane H10 in the Rock 5 section (near the beginning).
@@r0galik Thanks for the info. I was considering this device for an edge router for a larger property (with access points in different locations), but if I'm gonna need a breakout board to install a gig ethernet card, and the wifi card I'm starting to think it'll be too expensive.
@@sophiophile The ethernet port on the Rock 5B board is 2.5G download, 1G upload, so you won't need any extra board for ethernet unless you want 10G. For WiFi, yes, you'll need some kind of M.2 card. They are pretty cheap though. You can get an AX210 for less than $20 easily, and lower-end cards for even cheaper.
Being an SRE engineer, I am torn between being mad about the software support for this board and being happy that it has forced me to learn some core Linux concepts I have been avoiding for years.
You'll get similar software support for any SBC that isn't a Raspberry Pi. I have 5 non-RPi SBCs and all of them have similar issues. You just need some basic Linux knowledge to understand what the wiki says and how to do it. It's not too difficult, evidenced by the fact that I'm 17 years old and had no problem flashing the SPI ROM, copying my SD card contents, resizing the partitions and FS, and then booting off of the NVMe I salvaged from my laptop when I upgraded it. I also did the same thing for my RockPro64 and unfortunately, my first flash failed, and I had to recover from a failed SPI ROM flash, which is annoying on this board, because it uses the RK3399 SoC, which will stop booting if the SPI ROM has an unusable firmware on it. Since I was too lazy to mess with a serial adapter, although I do have one, I just shorted the SPI clock to ground, pressed the power button, and then removed the short just after it started booting but just before control was handed off to the Linux kernel, so that the RK3399's bootrom didn't detect the SPI ROM but Linux did, and that allowed me to reflash the SPI ROM, this time successfully. Now, my RockPro64 boots from NVMe as well. If you have a bit of Linux knowledge, and a bit of problem solving ability, you should be perfectly happy with these boards.
The old/recycled/used USFF PC option really needs to be pushed more often. It's often a much more viable option in many cases, and usually easier to find.
Yeah after giving up trying to get a Pi4 that's the route i went and got a refurbished Optiplex tiny instead. 150 Euro and it has a case, power supply, 256GB SSD, Gigabit ethernet, 8GB RAM, a (socketed!) desktop class CPU (i5 6600), and a free M.2 slot. Not a bad deal in my opinion.
@@AlejandroRodolfoMendez Yeah was going to say the same thing. In NZ I can easily get most of the SBCs from AliExpress paying something very similar to what you'd pay in the US. Getting an old small power efficient PC is generally a much more expensive proposition. You can get the new stuff out of AliExpress e.g. with the Celeron N5105 but while these have much better compatibility and somewhat better upgradability, price-performance they aren't so attractive.
Yeah, and leave the Raspberry Pis for the people who need to build things, too many including one I have, can end up as just an alternative desktop; which is not really what they are intended for.
It's funny, really... used to be, grabbing an old PC was the way to go. Need firewall? Grab an old 386, throw in a network card and a modem, and now you've got Internet for your home LAN! Once cable modems came out, grab and old Pentium or Pentium II and throw a couple PCI network cards in it. Then manufacturers started focusing on efficiency and the benefits using old machines started to drop. Sure, that old computer might be cheap or free, but you'd end up paying more just in electricity usage. Best to just buy a $150 booksize computer and use that instead. Now, given that SSDs and efficient processors have been around a while, we've hit a plateau where used machines are useful again.
Please keep covering the other boards though Jeff. Hopefully you can drum up more community support for these other boards. Then we would rally see the SBC market start to flourish. With people being more and more privacy and tech savvy these days. We could really use newer products for Homelabs and networks everywhere. As always great content brotha!
Ever since I switched to armbian on this board it runs very smooth and stable. I run it from nvme. Going to use it for different containers and object detection using the npu. Those thin client like devices all lack that kind of capabilities having no npu.
Glad to be not the only person who misses forums, I don't think I do anywhere near as much "online socialising", as it were, since Discord etc. started taking over from forums. Live chat is to... well, in the moment to be able to post a good question and get a good variety of answers from different people using different methods. I always like to weigh up my options before doing something. As for the thin client PCs, if you're willing to go with less powerful hardware, but still technically more power than an SBC, you can find Celeron based thin clients by HP on Ebay for as little as £25. I used one to make a smart TV box for my dad, as he was getting frustrated with how slow and laggy his TVs smart functions were. I just installed Kodi and gave him one of my spare game controllers for a remote.
It's really hard to justify getting one of these when you figure in the cost of the power supply, a 500 gb. NVME drive, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.. when you can go out and buy an actual Windows laptop for the same price, that you can pull out of the box, boot it up, and go to work. Thanks for the review Jeff!😉 I have a RPi 4B and use it daily as a monitor for my security cams, but I have like $150 total in it, a metal case, and power supply, and it's hooked to an existing spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I think the impetus behind cheap SBC's is fading fast.😐
I was looking at these with skepticism. Very well laid out pros and cons on your part. I don't mind having to work a bit, but frankly, that looks like a person would put more work in to making it work just right than working WITH it. I am keeping watch, but not ready to jump in just yet. You gave me a better sense of the real current state of the rock ecosystem. Many thanks.
I don't think these are going to outshine the N5105 intel x86 mobiles now that the prices are coming down. But I guess it what you plan to use these for is why people buy them..
Hey man! Glad to see these videos again on your channel! Because of you i started using again my Raspberry PI the first model, interesting ride with it :))) ... How are you feeling ? Is this clip shot before you did the surgery or after ? Get healthy and keep up the good work! Greetings from Romania!
I would love to see a comparison of the various OS offerings, since I had a ton of issues with Radxa's Debian image, but as soon as I switched to DietPi or Armbian, the issues went away. DietPi in particular has proven stable in a week-long stress test, and Armbian support came out pretty much the day my Rock5B was delivered, which was nice. They both have offerings for Raspberry Pi and Generic x86, and their documentation and support are pretty good.
The Edge2 board costs so much because of the TPU cores - its main purpose is to push neural nets, tensorflow lite, etc. incomparably faster than RPi or any other board that does not have TPU and consumes relatively low power. I'm planing to buy Edge 2 board for my hobby ANN projects, even though it's expensive, it's irreplaceable - TPU cores are really hard to come by these days.
Brilliant review, as yours always are. You got right to the heart of the issue - software support and docs. If Radxa (or any of the other sbc builders) really want to challenge the Pi Foundation’s market then they have to press the SoC vendors like rockchip to get their platforms supported in the mainline kernels much faster. Also spot on with the comparison to small used TMM boxes. From a cost, performance and ease of use perspective there is no comparison - the TMM systems win hands down. It’s not even close. The ARM SBCs only really compete on perf per watt (and maybe size).
Can't say I agree on the TMM point. It really depends where you live. Sure in the US and parts of Europe maybe. Elsewhere the price-performance comparison is often far more complicated since the Orange Pi is at a very good price and as Jeff acknowledged even for an i7, CPU performance isn't necessarily that much better depending on what you're doing with it. (Compatibility/ease of use is obviously still a major win where ever but it may come at a reasonable cost especially when aiming for something relatively low power.)
I feel like ARM licensees and integrators just don't "get" open source. They all depend on Linux support, but they insist on third party patches and black box firmwares all over the place. I know there are people in the community that have been working to change things, but it seems crazy I can find videos from Greg Kroah-Hartman from like 15 years ago telling the ARM guys to get their crap in order.
It seems like the Arm CPU not the problem but all the closed extras that mess everything else up. Random licenced graphics that need documentation that is not allowed except for large companies using them for a closed system..
Been using a FriendlyElec NanoPi R6s with the same SoC. Personally, the Rockchip and Mali driver situation and accompaning hacks, it feels quite difficult really getting into it. I haven't gotten PhotoPrism to recognize the NPU, let alone the GPU - and often I can't tell if Jellyfin is using the integrated Mali GPU for transcoding. And, I see not one but two /dev/dri/renderDxxx devices as well as card0 and card1. I love the amazing performance of this thing though; raw computing on these just rules. It sure is a neat SoC! But Rockchip's open source software situation is a mess. Four Github repos, all seemingly for GPU access, and none have a very clear README imo. And, their Wiki links to a forked ffmpeg repo that no longer exists...bummer. Still love to see those chips pop up in more products, because it sure is absurdly powerful! Almost at 10 docker containers - Jellyfin, Shoko, tvheadend, tubesync, photoprism, and more - and none of them are slow. Its awesome. :D
I'm still hopeful with the RK3588 being such a great chip, that maybe Rockchip will come around to seeing the Linux / OSS potential and devoting more resources to getting things supported in Linux directly.
@@JeffGeerling Would love that too! The last commit on their rockchip-linux/kernel repo is somewhere in 2022... But, this sure isn't a job done overnight. So lets wait and see! =) I am very hopeful for it.
The rk3588(s) is certainly a Pi 4 killer when it comes to video transcoding. I write code for jellyfin-ffmpeg and have verified its FPS on rock 5b so you can expect it to be available in jellyfin in the future.
If Radxa at least provides the kernel headers, it might be possible to just build the missing drivers without building the whole kernel. This won't be an option if anything in the kernel would have to be modified for the drivers to work, but it would be a starting point.
You need an pcie 3.0 x4 riser for the m2 nvme slot! The thing you used in this video will probably only transfer 1 lane. You could put an adapter like that in the wifi m2 slot to use it's pci-e lane. There can be 2 lanes on this but not that often. There are 5 port SATA adapters for the nvme m2 slot that could make this board a good solution for Nas usage. Except from the bad kernel support.
A pi killer would be a device that can truly give up control of one core to user code, preventing Linux from running interrupts on it, programmable io/dma for the gpio headers, better dac/adc etc. It always seems the rivals try to compete on compute power, instead of the GPIO, the thing the pi was originally built for.
yeah the original pi was really an arduino killer for all but serious realtime applications as it could run linux. I've always thought pi clusters were a bit silly for anything but educational reasons or arm based continuous integration. picking up a few of those mini pcs Jeff showed makes a much better and more reliable cluster
@@justincarter7954 Could you really compare an Arduino to a Raspberry Pi though? Arduino uses a MIPS MCU, Raspberry Pi uses an ARM Cortex-A... completely different applications. I'm not really a fan of Arduino because the IDE oversimplifies C programming, Raspberry Pi was really pushing for python programming, rather than C++ → Embedded Linux Sad to say, I've been stuck in the middle with ARM Cortex-Ms
@@cpK054L I think that's the point, by making things available through Python sdks it made hardware hacking accessible to way more people. For people who's goal was to just get a project working it was way better than what Arduino did which was trying to simplify C programming. Arduino was actually my first dive into programming back in like 2009, and I also got sick of the sketch program really quickly and taught myself enough C skills to be dangerous. It helped me learn, but my main goal was to get my projects working. Raspberry pi would have saved me a lot of time back then.
@@cpK054L You can certainly use the avr-gcc toolchain in your own way with CMake or makefiles, and have all the C++ template code you want, as long as it fits in memory. You don't have to use the IDE. It's just when you want to share your code with others who expect it to work in the IDE, the way it packages libraries is really weird. Just stuff all source and headers together in a single directory, which might affect include paths. It also helps to update the C++ standard in the compiler options if you don't want to be stuck on 11. There's a gui interface in the ide for that somewhere.
I don't own this particular board but I have 2 different Rockchip boards by different manufacturers. After 4 years for 1 and 3 years on the other, there is still no fully functional operating system for either. Add to that the fact that there is extremely limited software available on the respective repositories makes not much more than playthings. The manufacturers flood the market continuously with new boards causing the "community" software designers to refocus while previous boards have little to no support. It's a win win for them. They sell boards and don't pay software developers. If you need a board to be productive in any way, you need to a fully supported system. But if you want to spend all your time trying to make a board work as well as a supported system, have at it.
I'm loving my Orange Pi 5. The Armbian build handles all video streaming like a champ and can even do 120 hz at 1080, and the android build runs Dolphin, AetherSX2, and Clone Hero really well
Do you have it running on a ssd or sd card? I'm going to switch to Armbian too on my Orange Pi 5, the supplied 'Ubuntu' gets its updates from huaweicloud at very low speeds. I'm planning to run Collabora office on it for my Nextcloud.
Hey ho, I am that guy who started the PowerSupply issue thread on the forums. Radxa made a "mistake" by not having a microcontroller handle the USB-PD protocol. So USB-PD can offer you different power levels and all, which is great, but for safety it needs to be "pampered" all the time and since the main CPU does it on the Rock5B the pause between handoff from the bootloader and the kernel taking over might be too long for most power supplies, so they just turn off again and a vicious reboot cycle begins. When booting from NVME that is not an issue for most cases since the kernel loads so quick, that almost all power supplies I have are still happy and the board boots just fine, but on SD_card it might take longer and it becomes and issue. On the NanoPi R6S e.g. there is a dedicated MCU that (aside from an IR receiver) does nothing but managing USB-PD to prevent such issues from happening (It uses the RK3588S too and offers 2x2.5 GBit/s and 1x1GBit/s).
@@JeffGeerling well they also made it a lot simpler. In case of the NanoPi USB-C does only power. The RockPi does a lot more on that port... I guess they wanted too much. Powering the board via DC only solves a lot of the issues, but even there they somehow decided to go for a weird connection... 😖
12:35 I agree with you there. I hate Discord. Solutions should be written in forums, which a search engine can also index. Discord is not a solution, it's a problem.
100% with you on the Discord thing. I love Discord for the kinds of chat you would have had a decade ago on Skype, IRC, Mumble, or Ventrilo. As a replacement for forums and wikis though, it makes no sense. I've given up on using things because the devs and community were only reachable through Discord. I'd be slightly less averse to joining servers if I could have a fully distinct identity on each one, just like I could if I was posting on forums, but the best Discord has is per-server profiles.
Always glad to see some other sbc boards out there but you summed it up well with the cost being too high. The Raspberry Pi shortage is getting ridiculous at this point and would like to see someone else enter the space and have good software support at a reasonable price. For me I typically want low power use in a sbc and let my Epyc 24 core based server handle any major number crunching anyways. I plan to eventually run several zero w setups on solar to monitor various things around our acreage, so main thing I need is to actually be able to get the board and tweak it for minimum power usage.
Hi Jeff. I just made a comparison video of RK3588 boards I've got. Khadas Edge2 included. And too bad but Rock5B came in last in my favorites list. On paper it should be great, but in reality it's not ready. I'm waiting for mainline support before I'll make my Rock5B review. Khadas is more expensive, but the support team is a lot more active. Every question is answered on the forum. They adapt images when something isn't working. So until mainline is there, this is the better way to go if you are not a developer yourself. Rock5B runs best with Armbian and GPU and Multimedia repo's installed. You can install to NVMe with it with armbian-config. Your pc is much more mass production. So cheaper to make, less cost to create software and support. Greetings, NicoD
1. I totally agree with you about the Radxa documentation and getting started / setting up. I have not started with my RP5 yet, but I also have a Rock pi 4B and a Rock 3a and I feel your pain EDIT: I feel like the ability to boot an ISO installer image from USB would solve at least some of these difficulties 2. That m.2 adapter you showed is only pcie x1 I think - I'd use an m.2 adapter board with a pcie x4 slot directly on it and a pcie extension ribbon cable
Jeff, the M.2 to PCIe x16 converter you used only allows PCIe x1 bandwidth, as the USB cable doesn't have enough conductors to transmit more than x1. There are much better M.2 to PCIe x16 adapters on Ebay and Amazon that use the FULL x4 lanes of the M.2 slot for the GPU. Try looking into those, you will be better bandwidth
As always Jeff, I very much appreciate how thurough your reviews are. It's been 4 months since you posted this and I'm testing out an Orange Pi 5B, which I believe has some of the updates you mentioned when comparing with the radxa. Most notably the upgrade to the Rockchip RK3588S. Technology.... isn't it great! :) Also thought I would mention, I do have a Khadas Edge 2 (I bought in to the marketing hype) and I had problems with it rebooting constantly. I'm super glad you pointed out the power supply issues with usb power as that seems to be exactly the problem with that device. I may test it out further once I have a proper power supply.
Man Jeff, I can't bring myself to buy a Khadas board either. The Rock 5B was expensive enough at least for me. The Edge 2 is almost twice as expensive. Why? No idea. I have never even heard of someone really using one. If you've never touched one either I legitimately have no idea who is using these or why they would overpay so much for something like this. I really like that you mentioned the parallels between the Rock 5B's issues and some of the Raspberry Pi's issues. Both of them shipped with terrible / non-existent boot loaders that needed firmware updates. That's so dumb that the user manual recommends using the USB to TTY serial console. I cannot stand when boards tell you to use this. Fortunately you can use a mouse and keyboard with the Rock 5B but there's a lot of other boards that you actually do have to use the USB to serial console. It's an automatic disqualification to be a Pi replacement if you have to use a USB to TTY serial adapter at any point. Fantastic coverage Jeff. The Rock 5B is definitely not a Pi killer or at least I wouldn't call it that. It's definitely a higher performing board but it also costs more. Some people would do really well building a NAS or server off of this. It's not going to be as easy as a Pi for beginners though. I had to do the firmware update as well on mine to get NVMe boot working and I've found that with almost every board I've touched in the past year which is really disappointing. It's only a question of how hard it is to do it. I would rate Radxa a "Medium". It's not as easy as it should be. They have a lot of work to do on support still before we could call this a Pi killer or a Pi replacement. It's not quite there yet. It's a great high performance option though in this crazy market for those who may be looking for something like this.
I agree with everything here! And I think if Raspberry Pi were to introduce the same board, but with their more robust software support and features like updating the firmware over normal OS updates, it would be easier to pay the top-dollar SBC price. Radxa is doing better, but still has room for improvement. Sadly, some of that improvement probably can't be made entirely on their own-they're at the mercy of Rockchip, too.
@@JeffGeerling Absolutely. There's a market for premium SBCs but to compete in that market they need to offer a premium experience. Maybe Khadas is offering that but I doubt it. I think you are right about describing them at being at the mercy of RockChip. We saw a little bit of that in the Radxa kernel thread where upstream changes just happened to disable a security feature that can raise performance by around 20% on some benchmarks. Radxa had no idea they even made that change. While I understand that as a developer these things can happen coming from upstream I can tell you for a fact that would have *never* happened on Raspberry Pi. They have complete control over their own kernel and aren't quite as downstream as Radxa is from RockChip. They also have processes in place that even if changes like this from upstream got in they wouldn't hit a consumer device without going through a very lengthy testing and beta period. We saw with our own eyes that the RockChip changes went right into both the Rock 5B and Orange Pi 5 and neither company caught it!
First thing, Love your vids, Jeff... Second: 8 mins and 14 secs "...flashing a chip on the board over an SPI interface..." a Serial Port Interface Interface...? We gonna talk about ATM Machines next?😅 Sorry Jeff, couldn't resist calling it out. I really do love your content and watch it regularly when I need to touch up on what I know.
I quit Discord after the TOS update and deleted my servers, i took a dozen users with me. Steam has more than enough features for voice chatting, Discord was the "better" chat software but it has gone so overboard with censorship and out-of-platform tracking that NOBODY should use it anymore. IRC & Teamspeka FTW!
The Pi5 will be interesting, will it be this powerful or better? The Rockchip parts are looking good and from the comments, software support is still evolving.
Will Pi5 be available, or will it be forever not in stock? A faster, better Pi that I can’t actually order doesn’t interest me much. That’s why it’s so useful to see these independent reviews of potential “Pi killers.”
I feel your pain with the RockChip support in general. A mate came to me with a Banana Pi and wants it to boot from SSD. Usually I can sort these type of things out quickly but thanks to RockChip I'm almost bald now. As for using Discord as a support medium, that took the last bit of hair I had.
That blotchy issue was the same that I had on the orange pi 3 lts armbian with the cinnamon desktop! I found that the xcfe actually had a lack of those issues, I do not know if the same would apply for this sbc, though it could be a good shot!
You're not an old man yelling at the cloud! I feel your pain! I was redirected to a Discord server that no longer exists to download a file just yesterday and it's not like they leave signposts to where to go... Web servers ftw!
Very cool board. To me passive cooling and efficiency is important and I will pay more for a bit lower spec compared to used mini PCs. However, compatibility is no. 1 which is why I am still on the pi. When this board catches up, I might be interested (if at also has a cool heatsink case) Completely agree about the discord point!!!!!!!!!
I've exclusively used RPis over the years for many projects, with also heavy graphical (Qt) application and the use of the GPIOs. Last month I got my first RockPi 4 SE and it was really a mixed experience. Support (searches on the internet) as well as installation and the general setup felt way harder than on the RPi, and I work with Linux systems quite often. Also, other "maker" capabilities are IMHO not that good than on the Pi. So I will probably fall back mostly on the RPi for my "maker" things and may use other, faster boards for stuff like small home servers.
*sigh* they never are. The only pi killer for me has been the udoox86, and that's because not only is it more powerful, but it also runs full x86 so I can use ubuntu with all the struggles and support that comes with. Its like easy mode compared to these other sbcs that are basically for developers
I've been running this thing with Archlinux ARM (see forum posts) as my new homeserver for a month. It's been really great, but the lack of available cases/coolers is a bit annoying. Can't wait for full mainline support, feels like it's just around the corner. Nice to see you cover this nice board! I had troubles with USB-C PD at first, but flashing _all_ the firmware updates essentially resolved it for me. I now only have one charger that it doesn't want to boot with, but other than that everything I have available works just fine. Even the Raspberry Pi USB-C power supply works shockingly well, even though the power requirements are cutting it very, very close.
@@ezramiller8296 Not necessarily - in theory you can just grab most old cpu chipset coolers. You have to gamble a bit on the mounting-hole offsets though. The SoC just barely clears the surrounding components, so using a bit of kapton tape on the contact sourface that is not touching the SoC, but "hovering" over the surrounding components is probably a good idea. For now, I'm running my Rock 5 without any heatsink as it's not getting too hot with the lightweight loads that I'm putting on it for now.
Great video! What I take away from this and most reviews on Explaining Computers is that ARM sbcs have poor software and buggy operation and you have to be a computer engineer to get much out of them. Maybe RPis are different, but they seem so under powered as to have limited use by anyone not a CE. I admire your patience, and your clever determination to get these things even minimally useful. It’s obvious such boards spend money on great hardware but do little on software. Hope you are healing quickly!
Jeff, you should look at the lattepanda delta 3 sbc, its a very powerful computer, housing an intel chip and decent IO, also it can run windows 11 and ubuntu by default, its worth checking it out.
It’s also really expensive. I have the original LattePanda and the first gen LattePanda Delta. Delta is top of the line, but you seriously pay for it. To be honest, it gets pretty close to NUC territory.
@@thewiirocks well yeah it is, but if you are willing to pay for it, I would consider lattepanda a very serious competitor to raspberry pi, it is superior both, software and hardware wise and has lots of IO, just like razda rock5 b.
I went all in and got a Radxa Rock 5B with 16GB RAM. Thanks to this video, I discovered some things I did not know, including how to activate the fan. This is a hardware rich board but it needs great software to support it as you know. I really hope Radxa is up to supporting this board the way it deserves to be supported. I have mine booting from a 1TB Seagate Fire Cuda SSD which makes booting up extremely fast. It is a very ease procedure to get everything set up. Just follow the instructions.
Great video, Jeff. We have to have some Linux ARM support at my job, so I've really been searching for a decent ARM SBC I could have at home to tinker with. We have access to ARM VM's on Azure so this would really be for fun. The extra price vs a RPi 4 isn't a huge deal given the better capabilities. But the poor software/community support is a huge detractor. Things would be SO MUCH better if these SBCs "just worked". I'm amazed none of them standardize on UEFI support.
I've taken to using intel Celeron (like the J1900), tiny form factor PC's. I don't have numbers for comparison but they open my software WAY faster than a Pi (prob because of better IO). They are always reasonably priced on ebay, so getting one is simple. For my needs, the USB 3.1 and normal SATA support is enough for my needs. Hell a 10th or 11th gen celeron with the cheapest ITX motherboard you can find is also a great option. Then there's the best part, 100% compatibility with Windows and Linux with no limitations or driver quirks. I totally appreciate different architectures but I won't buy any of them without at least superb Linux compatibility. I am quite happy to watch them mature and I am glad people like yourself do these types of reviews, it helps tons.
It should not be forgotten what a mess the Pi 4 was when it was first released. It had 2 4K capable HDMI ports, neither of which could actually be made to play 4K video in software. The supposed cheap price was also a misnomer to some degree because it very quickly became apparent that you had to have additional cooling and a new HDMI cable too. Then we had the hardware fault with the initial batch. All indications were that Upton didn't actually put the Pi 4 through any decent form of quality control testing. It took a year before decent software support came along, with pretty much zero support from Upton and Co. There is no doubt that it currently has a wide amount of community support but this should not be taken for granted going forward because technology moves forward at lightning pace and with no Pi 5 coming out this year, the competition has a huge opportunity to kill off the Pi. These RK3588/S boards are quite new (the Orange Pi 5 only a month or so into the market) and community support has already advanced very quickly. I get the thoughts about the Rock 5B's price, although in the current climate, purchasing a Pi 4 at the prices often demanded makes others models look far more attractive. The I/O on the Rock 5 is quite amazing really and whilst the Orange Pi 5 I/O is not as good, it still offers some decent enough storage and ports for the price being paid. And of course the SOC completely blows the Pi 4 away in spectacular fashion. Time will tell of course but there is opportunity to either kill off the Raspberry Pi or make a large dent in it's market. Only the board manufacturers and Rockchip will know what kind of effort they intend to put into supporting these new products. If there is one area that Rockchip are failing at right now, it is the outdated kernel that that they have provided, which will make development a slower process hen it should be.
I have the same opinion when communities move to Reddit rather than maintain their own forums. Reddit and Discord are not meant to be searched like a forum, so a lot of info just gets lost in waves and waves of trash with no filter for the noise. However, Discord *is* rolling out their own forum system. It still isn't good as traditional forum websites, but it's a massive improvement over standard Discord when it comes to consolidating information. Ideally they'll adopt the functionality of traditional forums with this system, including a better search system.
The lack of software support is pretty much the only reason I haven't bought something other than the pi. I know with the Pi just about anything I want to try someone already has so when i have an issue I'll be able to find the answer with the other boards good luck finding the forum half the time LOL
I'm really glad you made this video talking seriously about a pi competitor that is waaay better than rpi in everything maybe except newbie usability. As you showed rpi 4 now costs the same as this board and it is insane. I'm a bit annoyed by all the people complaining in comments "but it lacks good software support". Well, you can go and pay $150 bucks for a 5 year old pi then made by an organisation with £30 million annual budget and tens of thousands of volunteers or we can put our collective efforts into improving those new boards. At least we have fully opened hardware docs (unlike pi).
Cool review. I’ve been watching your videos covering the magnificent Rpi4 for years. Great work. I received my Rock5b in the beginning of November. I recently got Reborn Os booted via SD card but I want android os installed on my 1tb nvme ssd but unfortunately I haven’t been successful with that endeavor: The Rock5b is easily the best looking single board computer I’ve seen so far. Sad that the software implementation side of things are utterly messy in my humble opinion. This board is not for the casual tinkerer of buyer like myself lol. Anyway thanks for this video it’s very helpful.
For information, my main Desktop died a month ago. Since I was working on some Orange Pi 5 8Go RAM, I dedicated one as my new desktop computer and I am working on it every day since one month. Dual screen, extra low cost nvme (12€ / 256Go) and Visual Studio Code, Docker, Chromium, video conference with a webcam etc... Everything is ok, except no graphic acceleration for the moment (I don't play games), and I am very impressed for 100€. The Debian provided by Orange Pi is Ok and the Orange Pi OS (Arch based) is on the starting blocks AFAIK. This CPU RK3588 or 3588S is very competent!
With the Discord issue, I’m someone who uses it as my primary source of messaging; and that’s what it should stay as. Using Discord as a forum replacement, help centre, etc, is annoying, mainly because that’s not what it was designed for. Its only purpose was to send messages, have conversations, and that was it. Help posts should stay on forums, because they’re normally easier to navigate (like you said, imo Discord search is a nightmare) and at least the info will be archived on the Internet Archive when/if the forums ever disappear.
Bought a rock pi 4 (something) and regretted it with how difficult it was to set it up to do anything. Eventually I did get it set up properly and successfully used it as a passable minecraft server for my friends during lockdown and then wrote a sockets server for it for a side project and it definitely gets the job done. But it would be a hard ask for me to update the image anytime soon, it was an absolute nightmare.
Glad to finally see someone else ranting about Discord, the whole thing about tech people preferring a chat app over good old forum always make me feel like some Twilight Zone thing. To be fair I'm definitely an old man yelling at a cloud, but I'm glad when I find someone else to yell at clouds together
When raspi started getting stupid expensive, I just moved on to second-hand x86 systems. Much cheaper, great performance, no software bs, plenty of connectivity, everything comes included (case, fan, heatsink, psu). I'm running a HPE Microserver gen10 right now with 32gb ECC memory. The system was second-hand and I got it for around €200. The OS is on an SSD and it has 48 TB spinning rust in raidz1. SBCs were cool when they were 25$ but if you're paying 200-300$ to get an SBC running, might as well just get a full system. To blur the lines between SBC and full system, take a look at those Celeron N6005 boards. They seem quite interesting, and that cpu is wicked fast for its power budget. + lots of connectivity.
If you plan on rolling this thing out for commercial applications, Emteria makes a commercially supported version of Android with this on their hardware support list. Emteria provides comprehensive fleet management. Their distro is google-free and has "kiosk mode" and features. I'll be using it for my next project (I'm not affiliated).
If only these types of manufacturers would spend as much time on their software and documentation as they did on the hardware (besides that stupid microSD card slot), they'd actually have a half-decent product. If this was the first SBC I bought, I'd be sorely disappointed in how difficult it was to get a basic operating system running. It also makes no sense to me that the board doesn't just support booting from an NVME drive right out of the box.
I use the Rock 5b as a development pc and I'm mostly happy with it. Had no problems flashing the ssd, first boot went smooth, flashing SPI as documented went with no problems... I dont think I am an advanced linux geek but surely the board does what was promised. The GUI Problems where due to an alpha driver, and are fixed now. I used Armbian in the mean time with no hardware acceleration. I still use my rasPi4 with 4GB as my PiHole and other server stuff, and I got my Windows Workstation with 1500W for Gaming and other stuff, but I really enjoy to do my programming stuff on the Rock 5b. Combined with a 4k monitor and 2TB SSD it really ROCKs :D
These boards are the perfect combo of PoE capable, 2.5G Ethernet, enough ram, and the pcie bandwidth, nothing else can touch it while being as insanely efficient. I have 4 so far from my pre-order that I'm hacking on, and another 4 on the way. Running similar loads as I had the khadas vim4s, my poe switch reports quite a power savings as well as being faster. Agreed on the Discord support though. Absolutely dreadful experience, but luckily I've been able to solo most of this adventure.
Mine went back. I spent hours upon hours trying to get it to work doing the simplest of things you take for granted on a raspberry pi. In the end I had to admit defeat. I tried every image going and advice from forums and discord. Even booting without it crashing with a HDMI cable connected was a challenge in itself. The list of issues I had is as long as my arm. My advice to anyone considering it is don't.
12:25 I feel ya. If anything, that's backwards. The Discord group for in the moment support should link you to a forum page, or article that guides you through it... A guide or forum past shouldn't be telling you to check out the guide on Discord... At best, it's telling you to look for a pinned post, which I find difficult to try and sift through. Also, I like how the next post says "I'm not using this Discord crap"
Another excellent video - the other SBCs out there promise much but are often disappointing in their execution. Reminder to upcycle old thin clients is on point!
Discord is good for closed communities with issues that most people don't run into or very specific things that needs a lot of technical information in the moment. i miss the days where a website how ever broken it was or how little information it might contain. I recently uncluttered my discord servers to be like 14 or so, because having more servers just distracts me. i even been thinking to create a crawler to those servers to extract information to try to extract the useful information that i need but i couldn't find on a public forum post. and i stopped joining servers who have this "anti raid" thing on to their servers or require me to give permissions to some app.
Until my 10 month old Odroid M1 runs mainline Linux kernel from an M.2 drive reliably I refuse to buy an another new Arm based SBC just to be disappointed by lack of support. and I agree with you Jeff, an AMD64 based NUC sized mini would make more sense for the money!
I heartily second the recommendation to look at those Lenvo USFF boxes. A couple months ago I picked up another batch of slightly earlier machines for $55 each delivered. Including power supplies and new HDD caddies, all in pristine condition. I have used them for years, solid and reliable, a great solution if you just need a functional computer. Of course, without all the fun, challenge, frustration, aggravation and occasional triumph of tinkering with a new buggy, inadequately supported SBC.
Thanks for accurate infos. I own this board and now understand why kernel version is completely outdated as contrary to what is displayed `5.10` is NOT current version. Urgently need to get upstreamed
Discord added a forums feature recently which has made using it for support a whole lot easier. The being in a pile of servers thing though is eternally annoying. I'm in 70+, the vast majority muted and stuck in folders. But that's kind of what Discord wants, since they limit how many you can join unless you sub to nitro.
I'm with you on the forums vs discord thing. Moving to discord not only makes it harder to find things, but all the information is going to be completely gone once the discord server shuts down.
I'm also with you on this subject. ^^
yea, i dont get it either. why so many technical hobbies thingy went for discord as their main community building/discussion platform.
This X 500000000000000
Forums are great. Ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Discord and Telegram are the worst things to happen to hobbyist communities in the past decade.
Discord would be good if certain channels could be publicly searchable. They both have their benefits
Are there any discord archive bots? Seems like it could help with post discord longevity.
Otherwise maybe technical communities should enforce rules to use their forum for technical questions and use discord as a helper to link forum pages and other offtopic discussion.
If all these "Pi Killers" would focus more on software and community instead of trying to one-up each other in hardware there might be an actual rival to the Pi. And all these Rock 5 boards are neat, but they're being compared to a Pi 4, which is rapidly approaching four years old. I'm glad you're out there showing what does, and mostly doesn't, work.
And if the guy literally known for making a deeply technical RPi channel is having trouble figuring out your board's software / storage / interfaces, that's kinda all that needs to be said about how that front is going.
sure, but a lot of the Pi's success is community driven documentation/support and knowledge. By funneling everyone away from these boards they'll never get a chance to grow a community and become as good as the Pi.
Correct, the sorftware part is often a deal breaker and it already starts with the OS/Kernel plus driver issues.
I've got the Radxa Rock Pi 4c (which were hard to get ~2 years ago) and ran into issues with the HDMI/mDP output and it seems to be an issue on the software side (some reported to be able to get it working with another cable). It wasn't a deal breaker for me as it runs headless but this is also something that should not happen. This might be fixed by now but I have not checked it again.
Beside that it's working great.
At the same time I also bought the NanoPi M4V2 which is pretty similar. Both the Rock Pi 4c as well as the NanoPi M4V2 have been upgraded to be able to attach an m.2 NVMe SSD so I have enough storage for all my database related stuff.
Many thanks to the folks at armbian.com to provide images for all these SBCs. If we only had the manufacturer we would be completely lost (I don't have the time to build the entire system from scratch).
@@ivolol There's really no problem figuring out how it works. It works just about the same as any other SBC, and all you need is some basic Linux knowledge and problem solving skills to figure it out. I'm 17 and had no trouble flashing the SPI ROM and booting off of NVMe. Also, the kernel likely didn't work because there was a missed build step. Maybe it required a custom compiler toolchain, or maybe it was just missing some config options. This is something you should be able to find out either in the documentation of their kernel, or in the configuration of whatever tool they use to build it.
It depends on what you're after. I love these boards (Rock 5B, Rock 3A, RockPro64, Pine H64, etc.) far more than my RPis. You just need some Linux knowledge and problem solving skills to figure out how to set them up. This means they're not good beginner boards, but if you have some experience, they're amazing.
Oh man, I really feel your Discord pain. For me, it also runs slows / seems to hog memory on my older laptop, so I've just gotten into the habit of popping in, asking my question, and then immediately singing out
I'm just really freaking glad to see other non-pi boards (raspberry specifically) get some competent UA-cam coverage.
especially after how the fine pi folk stanned for their recently hired unrepentant ex-cop (likely voyeuristic) surveillance-bro on their official Mastodon... the idea of continuing the support them after that stunt leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I say it's worth suffering the software and config headaches where possible just because of that.
@@QUINTIX256 if I could high-five you so hard our arms exploded, I would.
@@QUINTIX256 Source? I don't think that I understood who/what you are talking about.
@@TrevorV I need to preface this with, I'm not trying to be smug or an ass, because that's how people that say this often sound, but google it.
@@TrevorV it seems like pi foundation posted something on their mastadon about an ex cop they hired? (atm UK is purging massive corruption from police force). I'm curious about the source too
If Radsa/Pine64 could get the RK3399 and RK3588 truly mainline, then RPi would truly have a competitor in a lot of good boards. Until then...
I thought RK3399 can run with a fully mainline kernel. My Pinebook Pro runs a Manjaro Linux 6.1.8 kernel.
@@LivingLinux still a patched kernel, manjaro work with them
@@ivolol Which patches? The Manjaro team even removed the HDMI output from the USB-C port, as they no longer wanted to wait until it was mainlined.
@@ivolol Looking at their GitLab, the patched linux-pinebookpro kernel was last updated 2 years ago and the pbpro device profile switched to mainline kernel 3 years ago.
I think the 3588 is set to merge for 6.3?
This SBC has the same issue as every one of them which is not a Raspberry Pi that is a mixture of all the things you mentioned.
Great performance on paper for a much higher price with way less support.
I still wait to see anything that can seriously compete with their RPi.
The Orange Pi 5 is a serious competitor. It’s an S edition of the Same CPU. This reduces I/O a bit, but 400MB/s on NVMe still crushes a Raspberry PI. And the most expensive board with 16GB of RAM is less than where the Rock 5b _starts_ in price. Software support is fantastic out of the box and the community is jumping on the board very quickly. I believe Jeff is obtaining a board and will review it soon. It’s fantastic. Best experience I’ve had with an SBC in a long time.
Check later in this video-I compare the Rock 5 model B to the Orange Pi 5 directly ;)
@@JeffGeerling I saw that right after I wrote my comment. 😅
I’m still hoping you’ll do a full video on the Orange PI 5. I haven’t had this much fun with an SBC board since the Raspberry Pi was a new thing. I really need to get the thing properly setup for my server-based testing, but I keep poking around with getting WebGL up and going (works great in Chromium snap with the right command line flags!), seeing how my Java IDE runs, testing 4K UA-cam, seeing what I can plug into USB and have it recognize… you know. Fun stuff!
@@thewiirocks I agree that the OPi 5 is a great alternative to the bigger brother Rock 5B but its only PCIe 2.0 so well below 400MB/s with averages around 250-280 MB/s which is quite poor but still a great alternative to the dated RPi 4B and the custom support has steadily progressed since its release in late 2022.
If a chip doesn't have open hardware information then it's a waste to try..
Every one that interested me is now junk becsue they can't do simple things like use most of the graphics chipset etc..
This may not be the Pi Killer I'm looking for, but Jeff Geerling is definitely the channel I'm looking for!
That's why I subbed and stayed subbed after he told us to unsubscribe!
No not unsubscribing that way!! :P
@@JeffGeerling lmao
This is literally the board I was waiting for! So terrible to hear, that you had issues with compiling a kernel. Waiting to see you make some progress with it. If so, I will consider to use it for a multi media side project. Great video, as always! Thanks!
The hardware is still quite impressive. I am hoping to get bifurcation sorted out, it would be great to get a couple devices running at PCIe Gen 3 speeds.
@@JeffGeerling It probably requires a custom toolchain for kernel compilation to actually work. I'd be surprised if it's not on GitHub somewhere. It's pretty standard for SBCs to need one. The simplicity with a Pi where kernel compilation is as simple as with a desktop is because they collabed w the kernel dec team to allow support w/o a custom toolchain IIRC.
@@sophiophile you only need to modify the device tree. They have a thread about this on their forum, search for optane H10 in the Rock 5 section (near the beginning).
@@r0galik Thanks for the info. I was considering this device for an edge router for a larger property (with access points in different locations), but if I'm gonna need a breakout board to install a gig ethernet card, and the wifi card I'm starting to think it'll be too expensive.
@@sophiophile The ethernet port on the Rock 5B board is 2.5G download, 1G upload, so you won't need any extra board for ethernet unless you want 10G. For WiFi, yes, you'll need some kind of M.2 card. They are pretty cheap though. You can get an AX210 for less than $20 easily, and lower-end cards for even cheaper.
Being an SRE engineer, I am torn between being mad about the software support for this board and being happy that it has forced me to learn some core Linux concepts I have been avoiding for years.
You'll get similar software support for any SBC that isn't a Raspberry Pi. I have 5 non-RPi SBCs and all of them have similar issues. You just need some basic Linux knowledge to understand what the wiki says and how to do it. It's not too difficult, evidenced by the fact that I'm 17 years old and had no problem flashing the SPI ROM, copying my SD card contents, resizing the partitions and FS, and then booting off of the NVMe I salvaged from my laptop when I upgraded it.
I also did the same thing for my RockPro64 and unfortunately, my first flash failed, and I had to recover from a failed SPI ROM flash, which is annoying on this board, because it uses the RK3399 SoC, which will stop booting if the SPI ROM has an unusable firmware on it. Since I was too lazy to mess with a serial adapter, although I do have one, I just shorted the SPI clock to ground, pressed the power button, and then removed the short just after it started booting but just before control was handed off to the Linux kernel, so that the RK3399's bootrom didn't detect the SPI ROM but Linux did, and that allowed me to reflash the SPI ROM, this time successfully. Now, my RockPro64 boots from NVMe as well.
If you have a bit of Linux knowledge, and a bit of problem solving ability, you should be perfectly happy with these boards.
So does it have decent header files? Annotated in Chinese? That let you sensibly allocate tasks to efficiency cores? Using NPUs?
Contend with the sort of shenanigans that only a paid embedded Linux engineer would put up with on a regular basis
@@johnsimon8457 I enjoy tinkering with my servers. My enjoyment is payment enough.
@@ArsenGaming I want to spend my valuable time doing useful and interesting things with my SBC, not fighting to make the wretched thing work.
The old/recycled/used USFF PC option really needs to be pushed more often. It's often a much more viable option in many cases, and usually easier to find.
Yeah after giving up trying to get a Pi4 that's the route i went and got a refurbished Optiplex tiny instead.
150 Euro and it has a case, power supply, 256GB SSD, Gigabit ethernet, 8GB RAM, a (socketed!) desktop class CPU (i5 6600), and a free M.2 slot.
Not a bad deal in my opinion.
Sadly you can't get those old optiplex by cheap around the world, some Places even charge more.
@@AlejandroRodolfoMendez Yeah was going to say the same thing. In NZ I can easily get most of the SBCs from AliExpress paying something very similar to what you'd pay in the US. Getting an old small power efficient PC is generally a much more expensive proposition. You can get the new stuff out of AliExpress e.g. with the Celeron N5105 but while these have much better compatibility and somewhat better upgradability, price-performance they aren't so attractive.
Yeah, and leave the Raspberry Pis for the people who need to build things, too many including one I have, can end up as just an alternative desktop; which is not really what they are intended for.
It's funny, really... used to be, grabbing an old PC was the way to go. Need firewall? Grab an old 386, throw in a network card and a modem, and now you've got Internet for your home LAN! Once cable modems came out, grab and old Pentium or Pentium II and throw a couple PCI network cards in it.
Then manufacturers started focusing on efficiency and the benefits using old machines started to drop. Sure, that old computer might be cheap or free, but you'd end up paying more just in electricity usage. Best to just buy a $150 booksize computer and use that instead.
Now, given that SSDs and efficient processors have been around a while, we've hit a plateau where used machines are useful again.
So glad your back into this engineering. Great content, very appreciated! More please!
Please keep covering the other boards though Jeff. Hopefully you can drum up more community support for these other boards. Then we would rally see the SBC market start to flourish. With people being more and more privacy and tech savvy these days. We could really use newer products for Homelabs and networks everywhere. As always great content brotha!
Ever since I switched to armbian on this board it runs very smooth and stable. I run it from nvme. Going to use it for different containers and object detection using the npu. Those thin client like devices all lack that kind of capabilities having no npu.
Which image are you using?
@@RyanFranklinWilliams "Welcome to Armbian 22.11.2 Jammy with Linux 5.10.110-rockchip-rk3588"
@@misteragony thanks!
The most complete video on a Rock Pi 5 / Orange Pi 5 on UA-cam! Glad you are feeling better
If they offered that 10GB/s NIC in an SFP+ variant, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
It would be awesome with dual 2.5 and an sfp+ for a router
Glad to be not the only person who misses forums, I don't think I do anywhere near as much "online socialising", as it were, since Discord etc. started taking over from forums. Live chat is to... well, in the moment to be able to post a good question and get a good variety of answers from different people using different methods. I always like to weigh up my options before doing something.
As for the thin client PCs, if you're willing to go with less powerful hardware, but still technically more power than an SBC, you can find Celeron based thin clients by HP on Ebay for as little as £25. I used one to make a smart TV box for my dad, as he was getting frustrated with how slow and laggy his TVs smart functions were. I just installed Kodi and gave him one of my spare game controllers for a remote.
It's really hard to justify getting one of these when you figure in the cost of the power supply, a 500 gb. NVME drive, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.. when you can go out and buy an actual Windows laptop for the same price, that you can pull out of the box, boot it up, and go to work. Thanks for the review Jeff!😉 I have a RPi 4B and use it daily as a monitor for my security cams, but I have like $150 total in it, a metal case, and power supply, and it's hooked to an existing spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I think the impetus behind cheap SBC's is fading fast.😐
The SW support is the sole reason RPi matters. The move to focus on linux and support from RPi foundation was genius move.
yeah but can it play Crysis?
@@raven4k998 it is not made for that
I was looking at these with skepticism. Very well laid out pros and cons on your part. I don't mind having to work a bit, but frankly, that looks like a person would put more work in to making it work just right than working WITH it. I am keeping watch, but not ready to jump in just yet. You gave me a better sense of the real current state of the rock ecosystem. Many thanks.
I don't think these are going to outshine the N5105 intel x86 mobiles now that the prices are coming down. But I guess it what you plan to use these for is why people buy them..
Hey man!
Glad to see these videos again on your channel!
Because of you i started using again my Raspberry PI the first model, interesting ride with it :))) ...
How are you feeling ?
Is this clip shot before you did the surgery or after ?
Get healthy and keep up the good work!
Greetings from Romania!
This was shot last week-I am almost fully recovered now, thanks!
@@JeffGeerling Good to hear.
Great to hear that you're feeling better Jeff!
I would love to see a comparison of the various OS offerings, since I had a ton of issues with Radxa's Debian image, but as soon as I switched to DietPi or Armbian, the issues went away. DietPi in particular has proven stable in a week-long stress test, and Armbian support came out pretty much the day my Rock5B was delivered, which was nice. They both have offerings for Raspberry Pi and Generic x86, and their documentation and support are pretty good.
The Edge2 board costs so much because of the TPU cores - its main purpose is to push neural nets, tensorflow lite, etc. incomparably faster than RPi or any other board that does not have TPU and consumes relatively low power.
I'm planing to buy Edge 2 board for my hobby ANN projects, even though it's expensive, it's irreplaceable - TPU cores are really hard to come by these days.
I don't see a mention of TPUs on their website. Anything with a rk3588 or rk3588s will have a 6tops NPU though because it's part of the SoC.
Brilliant review, as yours always are. You got right to the heart of the issue - software support and docs. If Radxa (or any of the other sbc builders) really want to challenge the Pi Foundation’s market then they have to press the SoC vendors like rockchip to get their platforms supported in the mainline kernels much faster.
Also spot on with the comparison to small used TMM boxes. From a cost, performance and ease of use perspective there is no comparison - the TMM systems win hands down. It’s not even close. The ARM SBCs only really compete on perf per watt (and maybe size).
Can't say I agree on the TMM point. It really depends where you live. Sure in the US and parts of Europe maybe. Elsewhere the price-performance comparison is often far more complicated since the Orange Pi is at a very good price and as Jeff acknowledged even for an i7, CPU performance isn't necessarily that much better depending on what you're doing with it. (Compatibility/ease of use is obviously still a major win where ever but it may come at a reasonable cost especially when aiming for something relatively low power.)
I feel like ARM licensees and integrators just don't "get" open source. They all depend on Linux support, but they insist on third party patches and black box firmwares all over the place.
I know there are people in the community that have been working to change things, but it seems crazy I can find videos from Greg Kroah-Hartman from like 15 years ago telling the ARM guys to get their crap in order.
It seems like the Arm CPU not the problem but all the closed extras that mess everything else up.
Random licenced graphics that need documentation that is not allowed except for large companies using them for a closed system..
Been using a FriendlyElec NanoPi R6s with the same SoC. Personally, the Rockchip and Mali driver situation and accompaning hacks, it feels quite difficult really getting into it. I haven't gotten PhotoPrism to recognize the NPU, let alone the GPU - and often I can't tell if Jellyfin is using the integrated Mali GPU for transcoding. And, I see not one but two /dev/dri/renderDxxx devices as well as card0 and card1. I love the amazing performance of this thing though; raw computing on these just rules. It sure is a neat SoC! But Rockchip's open source software situation is a mess. Four Github repos, all seemingly for GPU access, and none have a very clear README imo. And, their Wiki links to a forked ffmpeg repo that no longer exists...bummer. Still love to see those chips pop up in more products, because it sure is absurdly powerful! Almost at 10 docker containers - Jellyfin, Shoko, tvheadend, tubesync, photoprism, and more - and none of them are slow. Its awesome. :D
I'm still hopeful with the RK3588 being such a great chip, that maybe Rockchip will come around to seeing the Linux / OSS potential and devoting more resources to getting things supported in Linux directly.
on the Armbian webpage there are PPAs for enabling HW 3D acceleration in Ubuntu, but even this is not very straightforward
@@JeffGeerling Would love that too! The last commit on their rockchip-linux/kernel repo is somewhere in 2022... But, this sure isn't a job done overnight. So lets wait and see! =) I am very hopeful for it.
@@kirle5455 Apparently, Mesa seems to have Roickchip/Mali drivers. But I don't know which one eventually ended up working - I have a couple installed...
# apk list -I | grep mesa
mesa-gl-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-va-gallium-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-vdpau-gallium-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-gles-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-dev-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-vulkan-swrast-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-utils-8.5.0-r0 aarch64 {mesa-demos} (custom) [installed]
mesa-osmesa-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-gbm-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-dri-gallium-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-egl-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-glapi-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-xatracker-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
mesa-vulkan-layers-22.3.4-r1 aarch64 {mesa} (MIT SGI-B-2.0 BSL-1.0) [installed]
The rk3588(s) is certainly a Pi 4 killer when it comes to video transcoding. I write code for jellyfin-ffmpeg and have verified its FPS on rock 5b so you can expect it to be available in jellyfin in the future.
If Radxa at least provides the kernel headers, it might be possible to just build the missing drivers without building the whole kernel. This won't be an option if anything in the kernel would have to be modified for the drivers to work, but it would be a starting point.
You need an pcie 3.0 x4 riser for the m2 nvme slot! The thing you used in this video will probably only transfer 1 lane.
You could put an adapter like that in the wifi m2 slot to use it's pci-e lane. There can be 2 lanes on this but not that often. There are 5 port SATA adapters for the nvme m2 slot that could make this board a good solution for Nas usage. Except from the bad kernel support.
RTC battery - tie an overhand knot in it to change the drection of "lay" by 90 degrees. to get 180 desgrees, use 2 overhand knots.
A pi killer would be a device that can truly give up control of one core to user code, preventing Linux from running interrupts on it, programmable io/dma for the gpio headers, better dac/adc etc. It always seems the rivals try to compete on compute power, instead of the GPIO, the thing the pi was originally built for.
yeah the original pi was really an arduino killer for all but serious realtime applications as it could run linux. I've always thought pi clusters were a bit silly for anything but educational reasons or arm based continuous integration. picking up a few of those mini pcs Jeff showed makes a much better and more reliable cluster
@@justincarter7954 Could you really compare an Arduino to a Raspberry Pi though?
Arduino uses a MIPS MCU, Raspberry Pi uses an ARM Cortex-A... completely different applications.
I'm not really a fan of Arduino because the IDE oversimplifies C programming,
Raspberry Pi was really pushing for python programming, rather than C++ → Embedded Linux
Sad to say, I've been stuck in the middle with ARM Cortex-Ms
@@cpK054L I think that's the point, by making things available through Python sdks it made hardware hacking accessible to way more people. For people who's goal was to just get a project working it was way better than what Arduino did which was trying to simplify C programming. Arduino was actually my first dive into programming back in like 2009, and I also got sick of the sketch program really quickly and taught myself enough C skills to be dangerous. It helped me learn, but my main goal was to get my projects working. Raspberry pi would have saved me a lot of time back then.
@@cpK054L You can certainly use the avr-gcc toolchain in your own way with CMake or makefiles, and have all the C++ template code you want, as long as it fits in memory. You don't have to use the IDE. It's just when you want to share your code with others who expect it to work in the IDE, the way it packages libraries is really weird. Just stuff all source and headers together in a single directory, which might affect include paths. It also helps to update the C++ standard in the compiler options if you don't want to be stuck on 11. There's a gui interface in the ide for that somewhere.
I don't own this particular board but I have 2 different Rockchip boards by different manufacturers. After 4 years for 1 and 3 years on the other, there is still no fully functional operating system for either. Add to that the fact that there is extremely limited software available on the respective repositories makes not much more than playthings. The manufacturers flood the market continuously with new boards causing the "community" software designers to refocus while previous boards have little to no support. It's a win win for them. They sell boards and don't pay software developers. If you need a board to be productive in any way, you need to a fully supported system. But if you want to spend all your time trying to make a board work as well as a supported system, have at it.
I'm loving my Orange Pi 5. The Armbian build handles all video streaming like a champ and can even do 120 hz at 1080, and the android build runs Dolphin, AetherSX2, and Clone Hero really well
Do you have it running on a ssd or sd card? I'm going to switch to Armbian too on my Orange Pi 5, the supplied 'Ubuntu' gets its updates from huaweicloud at very low speeds. I'm planning to run Collabora office on it for my Nextcloud.
@@basw4406 SD card. I haven't had any luck booting armbian or stock Linux builds from nvme
Hey ho, I am that guy who started the PowerSupply issue thread on the forums.
Radxa made a "mistake" by not having a microcontroller handle the USB-PD protocol.
So USB-PD can offer you different power levels and all, which is great, but for safety it needs to be "pampered" all the time and since the main CPU does it on the Rock5B the pause between handoff from the bootloader and the kernel taking over might be too long for most power supplies, so they just turn off again and a vicious reboot cycle begins.
When booting from NVME that is not an issue for most cases since the kernel loads so quick, that almost all power supplies I have are still happy and the board boots just fine, but on SD_card it might take longer and it becomes and issue.
On the NanoPi R6S e.g. there is a dedicated MCU that (aside from an IR receiver) does nothing but managing USB-PD to prevent such issues from happening (It uses the RK3588S too and offers 2x2.5 GBit/s and 1x1GBit/s).
Thanks for adding that info! Good to know it's something other manufacturers solved a little better...
@@JeffGeerling well they also made it a lot simpler.
In case of the NanoPi USB-C does only power.
The RockPi does a lot more on that port... I guess they wanted too much.
Powering the board via DC only solves a lot of the issues, but even there they somehow decided to go for a weird connection... 😖
12:35 I agree with you there. I hate Discord. Solutions should be written in forums, which a search engine can also index. Discord is not a solution, it's a problem.
Exactly, it's just creating more problems.
I HAVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR THIS VIDEO! Thank you for covering this amazing SBC.
100% with you on the Discord thing. I love Discord for the kinds of chat you would have had a decade ago on Skype, IRC, Mumble, or Ventrilo. As a replacement for forums and wikis though, it makes no sense. I've given up on using things because the devs and community were only reachable through Discord. I'd be slightly less averse to joining servers if I could have a fully distinct identity on each one, just like I could if I was posting on forums, but the best Discord has is per-server profiles.
Always glad to see some other sbc boards out there but you summed it up well with the cost being too high. The Raspberry Pi shortage is getting ridiculous at this point and would like to see someone else enter the space and have good software support at a reasonable price.
For me I typically want low power use in a sbc and let my Epyc 24 core based server handle any major number crunching anyways. I plan to eventually run several zero w setups on solar to monitor various things around our acreage, so main thing I need is to actually be able to get the board and tweak it for minimum power usage.
Hi Jeff. I just made a comparison video of RK3588 boards I've got. Khadas Edge2 included. And too bad but Rock5B came in last in my favorites list. On paper it should be great, but in reality it's not ready.
I'm waiting for mainline support before I'll make my Rock5B review.
Khadas is more expensive, but the support team is a lot more active. Every question is answered on the forum. They adapt images when something isn't working. So until mainline is there, this is the better way to go if you are not a developer yourself.
Rock5B runs best with Armbian and GPU and Multimedia repo's installed. You can install to NVMe with it with armbian-config.
Your pc is much more mass production. So cheaper to make, less cost to create software and support. Greetings, NicoD
Great comment @NicoD's SBCs
1. I totally agree with you about the Radxa documentation and getting started / setting up. I have not started with my RP5 yet, but I also have a Rock pi 4B and a Rock 3a and I feel your pain
EDIT: I feel like the ability to boot an ISO installer image from USB would solve at least some of these difficulties
2. That m.2 adapter you showed is only pcie x1 I think - I'd use an m.2 adapter board with a pcie x4 slot directly on it and a pcie extension ribbon cable
9:37 that adapter is only PCIe 1x so it won't make use of all 4 lanes!
This is quite true-good enough for debugging work though. If I can get some larger devices working, I'll try to find a better physical adapter.
Jeff, the M.2 to PCIe x16 converter you used only allows PCIe x1 bandwidth, as the USB cable doesn't have enough conductors to transmit more than x1. There are much better M.2 to PCIe x16 adapters on Ebay and Amazon that use the FULL x4 lanes of the M.2 slot for the GPU. Try looking into those, you will be better bandwidth
Early comments are great because none of us have watched yet and we’re just reacting to the title and first ten seconds
You mean you don't watch the video at 10x speed? 🤣
@@JeffGeerling unfortunately, no. But it was very informative at 1x.
As always Jeff, I very much appreciate how thurough your reviews are. It's been 4 months since you posted this and I'm testing out an Orange Pi 5B, which I believe has some of the updates you mentioned when comparing with the radxa. Most notably the upgrade to the Rockchip RK3588S.
Technology.... isn't it great! :)
Also thought I would mention, I do have a Khadas Edge 2 (I bought in to the marketing hype) and I had problems with it rebooting constantly. I'm super glad you pointed out the power supply issues with usb power as that seems to be exactly the problem with that device. I may test it out further once I have a proper power supply.
Please, do you share your thoughts/experiences about orange pi 5B? I'd love to hear. Thanks.
Man Jeff, I can't bring myself to buy a Khadas board either. The Rock 5B was expensive enough at least for me. The Edge 2 is almost twice as expensive. Why? No idea. I have never even heard of someone really using one. If you've never touched one either I legitimately have no idea who is using these or why they would overpay so much for something like this.
I really like that you mentioned the parallels between the Rock 5B's issues and some of the Raspberry Pi's issues. Both of them shipped with terrible / non-existent boot loaders that needed firmware updates.
That's so dumb that the user manual recommends using the USB to TTY serial console. I cannot stand when boards tell you to use this. Fortunately you can use a mouse and keyboard with the Rock 5B but there's a lot of other boards that you actually do have to use the USB to serial console. It's an automatic disqualification to be a Pi replacement if you have to use a USB to TTY serial adapter at any point.
Fantastic coverage Jeff. The Rock 5B is definitely not a Pi killer or at least I wouldn't call it that. It's definitely a higher performing board but it also costs more. Some people would do really well building a NAS or server off of this.
It's not going to be as easy as a Pi for beginners though. I had to do the firmware update as well on mine to get NVMe boot working and I've found that with almost every board I've touched in the past year which is really disappointing. It's only a question of how hard it is to do it. I would rate Radxa a "Medium". It's not as easy as it should be. They have a lot of work to do on support still before we could call this a Pi killer or a Pi replacement. It's not quite there yet. It's a great high performance option though in this crazy market for those who may be looking for something like this.
I agree with everything here! And I think if Raspberry Pi were to introduce the same board, but with their more robust software support and features like updating the firmware over normal OS updates, it would be easier to pay the top-dollar SBC price.
Radxa is doing better, but still has room for improvement. Sadly, some of that improvement probably can't be made entirely on their own-they're at the mercy of Rockchip, too.
@@JeffGeerling Absolutely. There's a market for premium SBCs but to compete in that market they need to offer a premium experience.
Maybe Khadas is offering that but I doubt it. I think you are right about describing them at being at the mercy of RockChip.
We saw a little bit of that in the Radxa kernel thread where upstream changes just happened to disable a security feature that can raise performance by around 20% on some benchmarks. Radxa had no idea they even made that change.
While I understand that as a developer these things can happen coming from upstream I can tell you for a fact that would have *never* happened on Raspberry Pi. They have complete control over their own kernel and aren't quite as downstream as Radxa is from RockChip.
They also have processes in place that even if changes like this from upstream got in they wouldn't hit a consumer device without going through a very lengthy testing and beta period. We saw with our own eyes that the RockChip changes went right into both the Rock 5B and Orange Pi 5 and neither company caught it!
First thing, Love your vids, Jeff...
Second: 8 mins and 14 secs
"...flashing a chip on the board over an SPI interface..."
a Serial Port Interface Interface...?
We gonna talk about ATM Machines next?😅
Sorry Jeff, couldn't resist calling it out. I really do love your content and watch it regularly when I need to touch up on what I know.
I'm with you on Discord. Any time I need a separate app is annoying (even if I have it installed already).
Great job on the video Jeff! Thanks for making it.
Everyone uses discord servers for everything nowadays. I hate it too.
I quit Discord after the TOS update and deleted my servers, i took a dozen users with me. Steam has more than enough features for voice chatting,
Discord was the "better" chat software but it has gone so overboard with censorship and out-of-platform tracking that NOBODY should use it anymore.
IRC & Teamspeka FTW!
I also hate that i have to click Reddit links when im troublehooting my SteamOS/HoloIso install, you get really shitty memes if you scroll down.
Hi Jeff. Your channel is amazing :) Thank you for making these great videos!
The Pi5 will be interesting, will it be this powerful or better? The Rockchip parts are looking good and from the comments, software support is still evolving.
Will Pi5 be available, or will it be forever not in stock? A faster, better Pi that I can’t actually order doesn’t interest me much. That’s why it’s so useful to see these independent reviews of potential “Pi killers.”
@@gdutfulkbhh7537 I agree but I program baremetal on Pi's, no Linux or Android. An Open GPU is important if I want to port my code.
I feel your pain with the RockChip support in general. A mate came to me with a Banana Pi and wants it to boot from SSD. Usually I can sort these type of things out quickly but thanks to RockChip I'm almost bald now. As for using Discord as a support medium, that took the last bit of hair I had.
That blotchy issue was the same that I had on the orange pi 3 lts armbian with the cinnamon desktop! I found that the xcfe actually had a lack of those issues, I do not know if the same would apply for this sbc, though it could be a good shot!
You're not an old man yelling at the cloud! I feel your pain! I was redirected to a Discord server that no longer exists to download a file just yesterday and it's not like they leave signposts to where to go... Web servers ftw!
Very cool board. To me passive cooling and efficiency is important and I will pay more for a bit lower spec compared to used mini PCs. However, compatibility is no. 1 which is why I am still on the pi.
When this board catches up, I might be interested (if at also has a cool heatsink case)
Completely agree about the discord point!!!!!!!!!
@Jeff, re:discord vs forums: YESSS! I miss that too.
Thank you for this! I have been wondering if it is time to try new non-RPi boards. Not yet! :D
12:30 I like how Zulip is used in Rust language discussions, where you can link to the specific real-time comment for future reference by others.
I've exclusively used RPis over the years for many projects, with also heavy graphical (Qt) application and the use of the GPIOs. Last month I got my first RockPi 4 SE and it was really a mixed experience. Support (searches on the internet) as well as installation and the general setup felt way harder than on the RPi, and I work with Linux systems quite often. Also, other "maker" capabilities are IMHO not that good than on the Pi. So I will probably fall back mostly on the RPi for my "maker" things and may use other, faster boards for stuff like small home servers.
Great to see you back, my friend.
*sigh* they never are.
The only pi killer for me has been the udoox86, and that's because not only is it more powerful, but it also runs full x86 so I can use ubuntu with all the struggles and support that comes with. Its like easy mode compared to these other sbcs that are basically for developers
Yeah, I'd have a hard buying this over an Odroid H3. It's also intel. Intel is just the easy way.
I've been running this thing with Archlinux ARM (see forum posts) as my new homeserver for a month. It's been really great, but the lack of available cases/coolers is a bit annoying. Can't wait for full mainline support, feels like it's just around the corner. Nice to see you cover this nice board!
I had troubles with USB-C PD at first, but flashing _all_ the firmware updates essentially resolved it for me. I now only have one charger that it doesn't want to boot with, but other than that everything I have available works just fine. Even the Raspberry Pi USB-C power supply works shockingly well, even though the power requirements are cutting it very, very close.
I wonder…do they have to be Pi-specific or could you just grab a cooler off eBay or Newegg for cheap?
@@ezramiller8296 Not necessarily - in theory you can just grab most old cpu chipset coolers. You have to gamble a bit on the mounting-hole offsets though. The SoC just barely clears the surrounding components, so using a bit of kapton tape on the contact sourface that is not touching the SoC, but "hovering" over the surrounding components is probably a good idea. For now, I'm running my Rock 5 without any heatsink as it's not getting too hot with the lightweight loads that I'm putting on it for now.
Great video!
What I take away from this and most reviews on Explaining Computers is that ARM sbcs have poor software and buggy operation and you have to be a computer engineer to get much out of them. Maybe RPis are different, but they seem so under powered as to have limited use by anyone not a CE.
I admire your patience, and your clever determination to get these things even minimally useful. It’s obvious such boards spend money on great hardware but do little on software.
Hope you are healing quickly!
Raspberry Pis generally have great documentation and software support. They're popular for a reason.
Great info, thank you. I can see where this would be useful in certain cases, but not for me.
Jeff, you should look at the lattepanda delta 3 sbc, its a very powerful computer, housing an intel chip and decent IO, also it can run windows 11 and ubuntu by default, its worth checking it out.
It’s also really expensive. I have the original LattePanda and the first gen LattePanda Delta. Delta is top of the line, but you seriously pay for it. To be honest, it gets pretty close to NUC territory.
@@thewiirocks well yeah it is, but if you are willing to pay for it, I would consider lattepanda a very serious competitor to raspberry pi, it is superior both, software and hardware wise and has lots of IO, just like razda rock5 b.
Very nice preview card for this video. Good video too. But preview card deserves some props.
I went all in and got a Radxa Rock 5B with 16GB RAM. Thanks to this video, I discovered some things I did not know, including how to activate the fan. This is a hardware rich board but it needs great software to support it as you know. I really hope Radxa is up to supporting this board the way it deserves to be supported. I have mine booting from a 1TB Seagate Fire Cuda SSD which makes booting up extremely fast. It is a very ease procedure to get everything set up. Just follow the instructions.
Great video, Jeff. We have to have some Linux ARM support at my job, so I've really been searching for a decent ARM SBC I could have at home to tinker with. We have access to ARM VM's on Azure so this would really be for fun.
The extra price vs a RPi 4 isn't a huge deal given the better capabilities. But the poor software/community support is a huge detractor. Things would be SO MUCH better if these SBCs "just worked". I'm amazed none of them standardize on UEFI support.
I've taken to using intel Celeron (like the J1900), tiny form factor PC's. I don't have numbers for comparison but they open my software WAY faster than a Pi (prob because of better IO). They are always reasonably priced on ebay, so getting one is simple. For my needs, the USB 3.1 and normal SATA support is enough for my needs. Hell a 10th or 11th gen celeron with the cheapest ITX motherboard you can find is also a great option.
Then there's the best part, 100% compatibility with Windows and Linux with no limitations or driver quirks. I totally appreciate different architectures but I won't buy any of them without at least superb Linux compatibility. I am quite happy to watch them mature and I am glad people like yourself do these types of reviews, it helps tons.
It should not be forgotten what a mess the Pi 4 was when it was first released. It had 2 4K capable HDMI ports, neither of which could actually be made to play 4K video in software. The supposed cheap price was also a misnomer to some degree because it very quickly became apparent that you had to have additional cooling and a new HDMI cable too. Then we had the hardware fault with the initial batch. All indications were that Upton didn't actually put the Pi 4 through any decent form of quality control testing. It took a year before decent software support came along, with pretty much zero support from Upton and Co. There is no doubt that it currently has a wide amount of community support but this should not be taken for granted going forward because technology moves forward at lightning pace and with no Pi 5 coming out this year, the competition has a huge opportunity to kill off the Pi. These RK3588/S boards are quite new (the Orange Pi 5 only a month or so into the market) and community support has already advanced very quickly. I get the thoughts about the Rock 5B's price, although in the current climate, purchasing a Pi 4 at the prices often demanded makes others models look far more attractive. The I/O on the Rock 5 is quite amazing really and whilst the Orange Pi 5 I/O is not as good, it still offers some decent enough storage and ports for the price being paid. And of course the SOC completely blows the Pi 4 away in spectacular fashion. Time will tell of course but there is opportunity to either kill off the Raspberry Pi or make a large dent in it's market. Only the board manufacturers and Rockchip will know what kind of effort they intend to put into supporting these new products. If there is one area that Rockchip are failing at right now, it is the outdated kernel that that they have provided, which will make development a slower process hen it should be.
I have the same opinion when communities move to Reddit rather than maintain their own forums. Reddit and Discord are not meant to be searched like a forum, so a lot of info just gets lost in waves and waves of trash with no filter for the noise. However, Discord *is* rolling out their own forum system. It still isn't good as traditional forum websites, but it's a massive improvement over standard Discord when it comes to consolidating information. Ideally they'll adopt the functionality of traditional forums with this system, including a better search system.
I had to smile when I saw the 2nd hand Lenovo described as a "mini computer." The last mini computer I used was a PDP-11.
The lack of software support is pretty much the only reason I haven't bought something other than the pi. I know with the Pi just about anything I want to try someone already has so when i have an issue I'll be able to find the answer with the other boards good luck finding the forum half the time LOL
I'm really glad you made this video talking seriously about a pi competitor that is waaay better than rpi in everything maybe except newbie usability. As you showed rpi 4 now costs the same as this board and it is insane. I'm a bit annoyed by all the people complaining in comments "but it lacks good software support". Well, you can go and pay $150 bucks for a 5 year old pi then made by an organisation with £30 million annual budget and tens of thousands of volunteers or we can put our collective efforts into improving those new boards. At least we have fully opened hardware docs (unlike pi).
Cool review. I’ve been watching your videos covering the magnificent Rpi4 for years. Great work. I received my Rock5b in the beginning of November. I recently got Reborn Os booted via SD card but I want android os installed on my 1tb nvme ssd but unfortunately I haven’t been successful with that endeavor: The Rock5b is easily the best looking single board computer I’ve seen so far. Sad that the software implementation side of things are utterly messy in my humble opinion. This board is not for the casual tinkerer of buyer like myself lol. Anyway thanks for this video it’s very helpful.
For information, my main Desktop died a month ago. Since I was working on some Orange Pi 5 8Go RAM, I dedicated one as my new desktop computer and I am working on it every day since one month. Dual screen, extra low cost nvme (12€ / 256Go) and Visual Studio Code, Docker, Chromium, video conference with a webcam etc... Everything is ok, except no graphic acceleration for the moment (I don't play games), and I am very impressed for 100€. The Debian provided by Orange Pi is Ok and the Orange Pi OS (Arch based) is on the starting blocks AFAIK. This CPU RK3588 or 3588S is very competent!
With the Discord issue, I’m someone who uses it as my primary source of messaging; and that’s what it should stay as. Using Discord as a forum replacement, help centre, etc, is annoying, mainly because that’s not what it was designed for. Its only purpose was to send messages, have conversations, and that was it. Help posts should stay on forums, because they’re normally easier to navigate (like you said, imo Discord search is a nightmare) and at least the info will be archived on the Internet Archive when/if the forums ever disappear.
Bought a rock pi 4 (something) and regretted it with how difficult it was to set it up to do anything. Eventually I did get it set up properly and successfully used it as a passable minecraft server for my friends during lockdown and then wrote a sockets server for it for a side project and it definitely gets the job done. But it would be a hard ask for me to update the image anytime soon, it was an absolute nightmare.
Thanks for adding the power consumption.
Glad to finally see someone else ranting about Discord, the whole thing about tech people preferring a chat app over good old forum always make me feel like some Twilight Zone thing.
To be fair I'm definitely an old man yelling at a cloud, but I'm glad when I find someone else to yell at clouds together
When raspi started getting stupid expensive, I just moved on to second-hand x86 systems. Much cheaper, great performance, no software bs, plenty of connectivity, everything comes included (case, fan, heatsink, psu). I'm running a HPE Microserver gen10 right now with 32gb ECC memory. The system was second-hand and I got it for around €200. The OS is on an SSD and it has 48 TB spinning rust in raidz1. SBCs were cool when they were 25$ but if you're paying 200-300$ to get an SBC running, might as well just get a full system.
To blur the lines between SBC and full system, take a look at those Celeron N6005 boards. They seem quite interesting, and that cpu is wicked fast for its power budget. + lots of connectivity.
If you plan on rolling this thing out for commercial applications, Emteria makes a commercially supported version of Android with this on their hardware support list. Emteria provides comprehensive fleet management. Their distro is google-free and has "kiosk mode" and features. I'll be using it for my next project (I'm not affiliated).
If only these types of manufacturers would spend as much time on their software and documentation as they did on the hardware (besides that stupid microSD card slot), they'd actually have a half-decent product. If this was the first SBC I bought, I'd be sorely disappointed in how difficult it was to get a basic operating system running. It also makes no sense to me that the board doesn't just support booting from an NVME drive right out of the box.
I use the Rock 5b as a development pc and I'm mostly happy with it. Had no problems flashing the ssd, first boot went smooth, flashing SPI as documented went with no problems... I dont think I am an advanced linux geek but surely the board does what was promised. The GUI Problems where due to an alpha driver, and are fixed now. I used Armbian in the mean time with no hardware acceleration.
I still use my rasPi4 with 4GB as my PiHole and other server stuff, and I got my Windows Workstation with 1500W for Gaming and other stuff, but I really enjoy to do my programming stuff on the Rock 5b. Combined with a 4k monitor and 2TB SSD it really ROCKs :D
These boards are the perfect combo of PoE capable, 2.5G Ethernet, enough ram, and the pcie bandwidth, nothing else can touch it while being as insanely efficient. I have 4 so far from my pre-order that I'm hacking on, and another 4 on the way. Running similar loads as I had the khadas vim4s, my poe switch reports quite a power savings as well as being faster.
Agreed on the Discord support though. Absolutely dreadful experience, but luckily I've been able to solo most of this adventure.
Mine went back. I spent hours upon hours trying to get it to work doing the simplest of things you take for granted on a raspberry pi. In the end I had to admit defeat. I tried every image going and advice from forums and discord. Even booting without it crashing with a HDMI cable connected was a challenge in itself. The list of issues I had is as long as my arm. My advice to anyone considering it is don't.
12:25 I feel ya.
If anything, that's backwards. The Discord group for in the moment support should link you to a forum page, or article that guides you through it... A guide or forum past shouldn't be telling you to check out the guide on Discord... At best, it's telling you to look for a pinned post, which I find difficult to try and sift through.
Also, I like how the next post says "I'm not using this Discord crap"
Thanks so much for the review, I was going to buy one of these.
Glad you're back. Hey, do you have a discord channel?
Great review and great board. Thanks Jeff
Was looking at this board, glad I watched this video first. Not many great boards out there with great support...
Another excellent video - the other SBCs out there promise much but are often disappointing in their execution. Reminder to upcycle old thin clients is on point!
Discord is good for closed communities with issues that most people don't run into or very specific things that needs a lot of technical information in the moment. i miss the days where a website how ever broken it was or how little information it might contain. I recently uncluttered my discord servers to be like 14 or so, because having more servers just distracts me. i even been thinking to create a crawler to those servers to extract information to try to extract the useful information that i need but i couldn't find on a public forum post.
and i stopped joining servers who have this "anti raid" thing on to their servers or require me to give permissions to some app.
Until my 10 month old Odroid M1 runs mainline Linux kernel from an M.2 drive reliably I refuse to buy an another new Arm based SBC just to be disappointed by lack of support.
and I agree with you Jeff, an AMD64 based NUC sized mini would make more sense for the money!
We need more mainline-first SBC manufacturers.
(and Tow-Boot flashed by default!)
Can relate to the Discord support vs Forums/FAQ/HOWTO support.
I heartily second the recommendation to look at those Lenvo USFF boxes. A couple months ago I picked up another batch of slightly earlier machines for $55 each delivered. Including power supplies and new HDD caddies, all in pristine condition. I have used them for years, solid and reliable, a great solution if you just need a functional computer. Of course, without all the fun, challenge, frustration, aggravation and occasional triumph of tinkering with a new buggy, inadequately supported SBC.
Thanks for accurate infos. I own this board and now understand why kernel version is completely outdated as contrary to what is displayed `5.10` is NOT current version. Urgently need to get upstreamed
Did you try with Armbian?
I’m with you on forums and search engines. Search engines only find trash AI articles/sites. This change happened a year or two ago.
I always thought the same with that much of money you can get mini PC with great performance. Pi is great because of it's price.
Discord added a forums feature recently which has made using it for support a whole lot easier. The being in a pile of servers thing though is eternally annoying. I'm in 70+, the vast majority muted and stuck in folders. But that's kind of what Discord wants, since they limit how many you can join unless you sub to nitro.