That depends on how you use the board. If you use it as a network storage I recommend RockPro64 because there is a NAS closure and a PCIe to SATA adapter available in the store while the NanoPC-T4 does not have such thing.
It's quite interesting that you're making the statements that you are about the distributions and support. My team has been working was the rock Pro 64 Borden now for the last few weeks and we are finding that actually working on trying to get different functionality up and running has been a night and day difference compared to dealing with anything at all from NanoPi. All of our experience less far on NanoPi boards has been extremely buggy and there is really no support from either the developer or Community standpoint that we have seen it all. Either way both organizations definitely need more robust support all the way around. They do offer good products.
that's weird cause, pine64 forums are great! but there developers tend to not answer my emails. as per nanopi, i get reply's from my emails right away. but the community in friendlyarm is lacking
Both boards will be/are supported on the same level by Armbian (LTS by default), which 2nd build is already in a better shape than stock. It runs faster, mainly on I/O (NvMe 2x) www.armbian.com/nanopc-t4 and userspace is more polished than any other. Try it. That gives solo some boost. RockPRO first batch was out of stock very fast and the second batch was made earlier this month according to my info from their HQ. That is the reason for the delay you experienced. I also got RockPRO this week and that is the reason Armbian preliminary support is late for this board. We only manage to add numbers github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md New boards usually come with not so good support ... because end users want to use them "now" and they expect/demand bug-free experience :) Board makers are happy and stop their R&D initiative not long after when they can show: "Look!, it runs Linux/Android". In any case they can not afford to deal with the kernel development. I haven't seen dev board that would run perfectly well "on the first day". Even all mighty but plan simple RPi with huge community took years ... to become more or less stable, it's fully mainlined, ... "Today", when there is so many boards on the market and so little people/time that really know something and are willing to do the hard lifting or provide support for free is harder. Many people are also not satisfied with fairly old 4.4.y kernel and are interested in a full-blown mainline/modern kernel experience. That brings more R&D costs/work which somebody has to do/pay and can not be done over the night ...
The Soc's may be the same but the two boards use different RAM chips. The NanoPC-T4 uses LPDDR3-1866, while the RockPro64 appears to use LPDDR4-3200. That would explain the small speed difference between the two.
Very informative. Thank you. In the future, if you could include an examination of accelerated graphics to include media playback and Chromium web browsing, I would appreciate it. Again, this was quite informative and I learned a lot.
I love in Cairns, in tropical Far North Queensland, Australia. It's winter here and also 30°C. I only took off my sweatpants about an hour ago. Such different perspectives 😀
When you do temperature testing, try explaining it with deltaT, like the Gamers Nexus channel does. I think it removes the confusion with the high temperature testing with already high ambient temperature.
I'm looking into that. It's giving me kernal panics when I install anything on the rockpro64 and for the nanopc-t4 I will need to recompile the kernel for gpu support
SteamOS doesn't exist on ARM. A discrete GPU should (in theory) be able to work, since it's an ordinary PCI-E device from the OS perspective. Getting drivers to work is a whole different story. There are ARM drivers available (either in binary or source-code form) for both Nvidia and AMD cards. For NVIDIA, there are proprietary ARM drivers available but only for 32-bit ARM. Nouveau would probably do for older cards. For AMD, there's AMDGPU. I guess the key problem will be to initialize the GPU. In a normal x86 PC, this is usually done by a BIOS extension module in the card which I bet is x86 only. I bet it can be done by GPU drivers, but I don't think that any GPU drivers are capable of this.
What about using those guys for retro gaming based on retropie or similar software? I guess there is nearly no support like a version of recalbox or something like that.
Hi! Could you please briefly share your steps of install linux to SD of nanopi m4? I can boot from emmc with its own android but no luck with any linux on sd. I tried all steps in their wiki in both windows and linux host environment. I also tried various linux version, no luck. I can see the red light is flashing but no green light and no boot at all. I also tried a few difference micro sd card. Could you please give some suggestions? Thank you so much!
I would say RockPro64 is much better for NAS because it has a PCI x4 connector and their shop is a PCI to 2 SATA ports card and a special NAS casing for the RockPro64 too
you don't really need the emmc -> usb adapter. if you want to write to emmc just plug it into your rockpro64, boot from sd, download the img, and dd to emmc.
Hi. Did you use the same kernel version to do these tests? That makes a big difference in benchmarks too. TKaiser from Armbian has done a lot of benchmarks with different kernel versions and it always came out different. Here are the results of those tests. github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md I still haven't decided which one to buy. I wanted the Odroid N1, but that's not comming. Greetings
These boards appear to run exactly the same SoC. I wonder if they are also compatible with each other's software... Running a discrete GPU would be interesting, too bad there aren't many games which are (or can be) compiled for ARM, except some rather old FOSS titles, like DOOM 3 BFG. Would be good for stuff like transcoding video though, I bet even a cheap discrete GPU could handle hardware encoding way better than the built-in GPU. PCI-E support is also good for NAS usage, you could put in say a 4 port SATA card in there and make yourself a half-decent NAS.
Brent Geery Impressive find indeed. Not only these are cheap but they have way more ports than those SATA expansion cards which cost more. And judging by the large heatsink and extra RAM chips on many of these cards, they seem to be true RAID controllers as well. Too bad I didn't know about these when I was building my home server. Would have definitely bought one of these instead of a cheap 2 port card.
You should take a look at FriendlyARM's FriendlyElec NanoPi Fire3-LTS. Only 1GB of DDR3 RAM, but 8-core 1.4 GHz CPU. It's $35 like the Pi, but only just a bit larger than a Pi0. I think it's worth taking a look. Might be good for a portable entertainment system (KODI, video games, emulators, etc.), especially since it can run android!
You quote the power brick at 13 dollars, when comparing value, and then refer to it as costing "a couple of bucks", when suggesting it might not be needed. That is not really fair. The Pine64 guys take a lot of criticism for a lack of documentation and user friendliness, because it is a self help community of hackers, but they are the best in the business for price and performance value. Seriously, Pine64 sell a fully operational cluster with 7 independent 64 bit CPUs for USD$302. That is 28 cores and 14 gig of ram in an mini ITX form, for 300 bucks. Nobody does value like Pine64, and I say that with no affiliation to those guys.
can you review the cubietruck plus? its an octacore 2ghz with 2 SATA connections and bluetooth/wifi. Doesn't seem to have much reviews but on paper seems nice. cubieboard.org/2016/03/15/cubietruck-pluscubieboard5-released-now/
The Rock Chip pro is better! Why you didn't mention about the well ground of RC pro 64, which is very Pro, or the OS support center, the pod sensors, or ...... so on. Btw where you live 5 weeks ...maaan Can you believe I've received for 5 days and I'm from Canada (with most worst delivery in the world ...go back to the artists' school!)
Thank you very much for choosing our product！We would suggest you try our latest image file which we just released today. drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gaLKSlIHvqhJ5cASTFGSjJ9XvtgosZFQ
Rockpro64 is better then nano, that distro has its cores underclocked just fyi, if you will be giving opinions you should do your part and do some investigation show what you picked up and let ppl decide or keep it vanilla, Rockpro64 is all round a better board, status on what works and not should have been related info even on a preview, modularity of makes just better if you just want a media box still rock64pro makes more sense since you will be able to spend less depending on youre build
That depends on how you use the board. If you use it as a network storage I recommend RockPro64 because there is a NAS closure and a PCIe to SATA adapter available in the store while the NanoPC-T4 does not have such thing.
Ken Ken Amazon sells an M.2 SATA controller board with ASM1061 chipset
By now, the NanoPC-T4 seems to be even more competitive. Now, Friendlyarm/Friendlyelec sell it for $109.99 on their website.
The third pin on the fan header isn't a control pin...it's Hall sensor RPM monitor pin. You need a fourth pin if you want to control a fan's speed.
It's quite interesting that you're making the statements that you are about the distributions and support. My team has been working was the rock Pro 64 Borden now for the last few weeks and we are finding that actually working on trying to get different functionality up and running has been a night and day difference compared to dealing with anything at all from NanoPi. All of our experience less far on NanoPi boards has been extremely buggy and there is really no support from either the developer or Community standpoint that we have seen it all. Either way both organizations definitely need more robust support all the way around. They do offer good products.
that's weird cause, pine64 forums are great! but there developers tend to not answer my emails. as per nanopi, i get reply's from my emails right away. but the community in friendlyarm is lacking
Both boards will be/are supported on the same level by Armbian (LTS by default), which 2nd build is already in a better shape than stock. It runs faster, mainly on I/O (NvMe 2x) www.armbian.com/nanopc-t4 and userspace is more polished than any other. Try it. That gives solo some boost. RockPRO first batch was out of stock very fast and the second batch was made earlier this month according to my info from their HQ. That is the reason for the delay you experienced. I also got RockPRO this week and that is the reason Armbian preliminary support is late for this board. We only manage to add numbers github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md New boards usually come with not so good support ... because end users want to use them "now" and they expect/demand bug-free experience :) Board makers are happy and stop their R&D initiative not long after when they can show: "Look!, it runs Linux/Android". In any case they can not afford to deal with the kernel development. I haven't seen dev board that would run perfectly well "on the first day". Even all mighty but plan simple RPi with huge community took years ... to become more or less stable, it's fully mainlined, ... "Today", when there is so many boards on the market and so little people/time that really know something and are willing to do the hard lifting or provide support for free is harder. Many people are also not satisfied with fairly old 4.4.y kernel and are interested in a full-blown mainline/modern kernel experience. That brings more R&D costs/work which somebody has to do/pay and can not be done over the night ...
The Soc's may be the same but the two boards use different RAM chips. The NanoPC-T4 uses LPDDR3-1866, while the RockPro64 appears to use LPDDR4-3200. That would explain the small speed difference between the two.
But still the rock pro coating 1/3 less the price, I’m impressed. It would be a pretty beefy NAS to back up a network of SBCs.
I really like your videos. By all means please keep the content coming. I like your views and opinions.
Very informative. Thank you. In the future, if you could include an examination of accelerated graphics to include media playback and Chromium web browsing, I would appreciate it.
Again, this was quite informative and I learned a lot.
I really like your channel it was one of the first I subscribed too when I started becoming addicted to RUclips maker videos
Waiting for the Full Review of both !!
I love in Cairns, in tropical Far North Queensland, Australia. It's winter here and also 30°C. I only took off my sweatpants about an hour ago. Such different perspectives 😀
When you do temperature testing, try explaining it with deltaT, like the Gamers Nexus channel does. I think it removes the confusion with the high temperature testing with already high ambient temperature.
that's a really good idea
Where did you find the adapter for M2 to PCIe?? i cannot find anything similar.
could you install a GPU in the pci-e slot? with a external video card like Radeon rx580
I'm looking into that. It's giving me kernal panics when I install anything on the rockpro64 and for the nanopc-t4 I will need to recompile the kernel for gpu support
look into steamos also store.steampowered.com/steamos/download/?ver=custom
Curious as well. Show us how if so! :)
SteamOS doesn't exist on ARM.
A discrete GPU should (in theory) be able to work, since it's an ordinary PCI-E device from the OS perspective. Getting drivers to work is a whole different story. There are ARM drivers available (either in binary or source-code form) for both Nvidia and AMD cards. For NVIDIA, there are proprietary ARM drivers available but only for 32-bit ARM. Nouveau would probably do for older cards. For AMD, there's AMDGPU.
I guess the key problem will be to initialize the GPU. In a normal x86 PC, this is usually done by a BIOS extension module in the card which I bet is x86 only. I bet it can be done by GPU drivers, but I don't think that any GPU drivers are capable of this.
I agree with the Slot power draw problem.
I wouldnt test that slot direct with more than 30w cards... maybe try a 25w 1030 .
Thanks Don looks like that nano is the more cost effective rk3399 sbc
Cool and useful video, Thanks. BTW, You seriously need to invest in some lighting on Your set.
What about using those guys for retro gaming based on retropie or similar software? I guess there is nearly no support like a version of recalbox or something like that.
Where can you get a fan for the nanopc-t4? I don’t see that on their site?
Would make for a nice firewall with a dual pcie lan card. Tbis run pfsense arm?
5:55 I think that is 12 volt power out to their SATA power cable for NAS use on the RockPro64
Uh you guys know that the Nano Pi T4 has lpddr3 ram and the Rock pro 64 has lpdrr4 ram
Hello! Do this devices have the standard RK3399 or the RK3399Pro SoC? (The difference is that the pro version have a NPU, neural processing unit.)
For now both of them are using RK3399. Rockpro64-AI(RK3399PRO) is going to release at the end of this year($99)
Thanks, I will buy at least one :)
i see potential to make a crazy router by using pci network cards or a nas which can take 2 to 4 drives using pci sata card any thoughts ?
Hi! Could you please briefly share your steps of install linux to SD of nanopi m4? I can boot from emmc with its own android but no luck with any linux on sd. I tried all steps in their wiki in both windows and linux host environment. I also tried various linux version, no luck. I can see the red light is flashing but no green light and no boot at all. I also tried a few difference micro sd card. Could you please give some suggestions? Thank you so much!
+Novaspirit Tech Which one is best for a NAS using OMV?
I would say RockPro64 is much better for NAS because it has a PCI x4 connector and their shop is a PCI to 2 SATA ports card and a special NAS casing for the RockPro64 too
Did you have any problems installing the OS for the NanoPC T4?
nope didn't run into any problems and i was able to swtch the OS a few times. i used both sdcard to emmc and usb-c method both works great
Novaspirit Tech What I mean is does everything work with the OS like Wi-Fi, graphics, apps and program s.
If I had a scif I would want the RockPro64.
you don't really need the emmc -> usb adapter. if you want to write to emmc just plug it into your rockpro64, boot from sd, download the img, and dd to emmc.
NanoPC is closer to $160 on Amazon +$8 shipping, which at that point puts it above the Rock64 in terms of cost.
Can't they both run the same SD card images?
yes they can but one comes with emmc so i had to get the emmc for rockpro64 to compair for detailed review coming
That makes sense, awesome video!
Are you able to have either board run at 2k or 4k on the linux os or is 1080p the max?
4k both
Hoping to connect an eDP lcd panel to one or the other. Not really sure what to expect.
Hi. Did you use the same kernel version to do these tests? That makes a big difference in benchmarks too. TKaiser from Armbian has done a lot of benchmarks with different kernel versions and it always came out different. Here are the results of those tests.
github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md
I still haven't decided which one to buy. I wanted the Odroid N1, but that's not comming.
Greetings
me toooo!! i wanted the odroid n1 but they cancelled it... but yes.. same kernel version
Would be nice if you can do an sbc award for the year.
Hello...can you do a pros and cons and a comparison...of the lattepanda 8gb ram...sbc ...thanks
Improve light in your room 😁
Agreed I didn't have my lights setup. Was doing a remodel of the space
He may be running on Solar. Mine looks the same. Saving power to charge batteries..
the pine rockpro64 supports opengl 3.2 ???
what camera are you using for your videos?
A Canon m50 will a very slow lens
does the nanopc t4 use c and c+ language (like on the arduino)?
What about the 2GB version?
These boards appear to run exactly the same SoC. I wonder if they are also compatible with each other's software...
Running a discrete GPU would be interesting, too bad there aren't many games which are (or can be) compiled for ARM, except some rather old FOSS titles, like DOOM 3 BFG. Would be good for stuff like transcoding video though, I bet even a cheap discrete GPU could handle hardware encoding way better than the built-in GPU.
PCI-E support is also good for NAS usage, you could put in say a 4 port SATA card in there and make yourself a half-decent NAS.
Brent Geery Impressive find indeed. Not only these are cheap but they have way more ports than those SATA expansion cards which cost more.
And judging by the large heatsink and extra RAM chips on many of these cards, they seem to be true RAID controllers as well.
Too bad I didn't know about these when I was building my home server. Would have definitely bought one of these instead of a cheap 2 port card.
No PoE for either?
The problem with these SBCs is that they are both 12V input instead of 5V (Raspberry Pi 3, etc), so they are too power hungry
Please help, how to install Ubuntu on raspberry pi1 ?
Is is possible to boot from the m2 slot ?
Great review, but please use a screenrecording software instead of filming the monitor.
It was picture in picture supported via the monitor. I had two HDMI plugged into the monitor
Novaspirit Tech aha 😊. Keep up the great work!
question?
is posoble install blender.org 2.80
You should take a look at FriendlyARM's FriendlyElec NanoPi Fire3-LTS.
Only 1GB of DDR3 RAM, but 8-core 1.4 GHz CPU. It's $35 like the Pi, but only just a bit larger than a Pi0. I think it's worth taking a look. Might be good for a portable entertainment system (KODI, video games, emulators, etc.), especially since it can run android!
Yup I got a review on them. One of my favorite nanopi
Its a very cheap board with high XMR hash rate.
hahahhaahahah yes the nanopi fire are soo good for mining
You quote the power brick at 13 dollars, when comparing value, and then refer to it as costing "a couple of bucks", when suggesting it might not be needed. That is not really fair.
The Pine64 guys take a lot of criticism for a lack of documentation and user friendliness, because it is a self help community of hackers, but they are the best in the business for price and performance value.
Seriously, Pine64 sell a fully operational cluster with 7 independent 64 bit CPUs for USD$302. That is 28 cores and 14 gig of ram in an mini ITX form, for 300 bucks.
Nobody does value like Pine64, and I say that with no affiliation to those guys.
can you review the cubietruck plus? its an octacore 2ghz with 2 SATA connections and bluetooth/wifi. Doesn't seem to have much reviews but on paper seems nice.
cubieboard.org/2016/03/15/cubietruck-pluscubieboard5-released-now/
Nanopi m4 might be interesting same form factor as raspberry pi.
If you have children that you don't want accessing wifi, or the internet, the RockPro64 may work better for you.
Or you could just not tell them the password, but I'm pretty sure any kid capable of getting one of these up and running can handle the internet...
The Rock Chip pro is better! Why you didn't mention about the well ground of RC pro 64, which is very Pro, or the OS support center, the pod sensors, or ...... so on. Btw where you live 5 weeks ...maaan Can you believe I've received for 5 days and I'm from Canada (with most worst delivery in the world ...go back to the artists' school!)
I like the nano pi m4 almost the same as t4.
hi, great technical inview. please do not use the word -guy- anymore
nice
Thank you very much for choosing our product！We would suggest you try our latest image file which we just released today. drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gaLKSlIHvqhJ5cASTFGSjJ9XvtgosZFQ
Rockpro64 is better then nano, that distro has its cores underclocked just fyi, if you will be giving opinions you should do your part and do some investigation show what you picked up and let ppl decide or keep it vanilla, Rockpro64 is all round a better board, status on what works and not should have been related info even on a preview, modularity of makes just better if you just want a media box still rock64pro makes more sense since you will be able to spend less depending on youre build
Noice
I bought khadas vim2
194€ amazon.de 🤦♂️