As soon as you put bluetooth or wifi on a product it needs additional FCC compliance testing and authorization. It could cause radio interference according to US gov. The rock64 makers probably didn't want to pay for that
It's great that standardization of form factors, and such, is happening right out of the gate with these inexpensive, small single board computers. That's a big plus on the user end of things.
I'm not surprised by your benchmark results. This guy had similar results for CPU performance when he tested it last year - ruclips.net/video/FjbzKfeHB_8/видео.html So you haven't made a mistake. He put it down to CPU optimisation. I was so impressed that I was looking to get a Rock64 back then.
Mark Warbington Right. Depending on where you can find an Ethernet cable (especially with gigabyte capability), it would be smart to connect to workstations that already have wireless capability and use that. Basically a parasite that uses another computer’s stuff. Hmm, that would be cool, a parasite computer. I remember a hacker once used millions of computers through a virus to hack government servers. That was an epic example of brute force, but here it would apply to a single computer just to run hard core applications like Autodesk Inventor.
@@topsecret1837 Ethernet is becoming increasingly less common as more people dump cable. These devices are primarily marketed toward Americans, who often have one choice for a cable provider which will offer speeds a tenth of the rate of 4G/5G mobile internet with a thousandth of the reliability but ten times the price. Mobile internet is wireless.
Explaining Computers is one of those RUclips which feels like a ‘Time capsule’ Technology blog channel of archived technology videos from the 70s and 80s. I love this format!!!
It is simply amazing how Raspberry Pi has opened up this sector, the performance is astonishing and for general desktop duties it seems unbeatable. I’m going to get one of these with the emmc storage option and connect it to our tv with a wireless keyboard/ touchpad. BTW the amazon link only ships within the US. Great video as usual.
I'd also suggest you look at the odroid c2. With eMMC. Love mine. Use it as media tv PC. And tried it as a debian VPN and DNS worked amazing. And specifically the odroid c2 has direct libreelec Kodi support.
Please show me how as I now have new, big monitor to play with plus a large flat screen T V with 2 HDMI plugs..Any help will be appreciated Arthur Moore
Got a 4GB model. Loaded armbuntu. And WHOA! This thing actually supports standby mode. Note it takes 80mA in standby (1Ah from 12V battery per day - for those who need this for car project).
I migrated my corporate site from a Dell Poweredge server, which consumed a lot of power for a Rock 64 with a SSD hard drive. It was very good performance with 40 simultaneous users, and to gift has greatly reduced the power consumption. Very good apresentation!
Honestly I'm surprised that in 2018 we haven't seen any SBCs with USB 3.1, wifi, Bluetooth 4.0+, and much more. To this day, my favorite SBC is my smartphone.
Stephen Hill much more. But that wasn't the point. I already ordered one of these, I was responding to Chris' statement about it being 2018 and there was no excuse for not having wireless on a tinker board. The 3.0 is a nice addition for this price point, but with USB-C and 3.1 everywhere, I wish it was more common.
In the SBC market, cost matters most. There are SBCs with more features, but they cost a lot more. Sub-$100 SBCs tend to have SoCs you'd see in Android boxes. The Rock64 is interesting because it is the first board I can think of that brings USB 3 to a board similar in price to the Raspberry Pi. I suspect that will become standard soon enough. It won't make sense for future SoCs to not support USB 3.
Thank you very much for your videos! Very informative and to the point. You have educated me more on SBC's than anyone else and I've been in IT since the Commodore / XT times.
I just purchase and setup a Rock64 4gb SMB using OMV and mDLNA with a 8tb usb3.0 WD mybook as a NAS. I did so for the 64 bit CPU in this. Anyhow, after formatting the USB 3.0 drive to EXT4, I am getting 100-114 MBps ethernet file transfers VIA SMB aka windows file transfer.. Pegging gigabit.. More than happy with this 220$ 8TB NAS I've built using a Rock64 SMB that I can just keep adding USB 3.0 drives to expand my NAS. Again, many thanks to you for your help!
the "lack" of wifi is a bonus if you ask me, if I want it connected I use LAN. So I will definetly look into this one for a little fun webserver testing ground.
I have to say that I tried to go through the OMV setup on a Rock64 with an attached external WD USB hard drive, and it was a complete mess. I spent hours trying different options on the OMV configuration screens but was thwarted at various stages in the process. Eventually I threw in the towel and decided to use the Rock64 for another purpose (loaded it with Android). Then I bought an Odroid HC2 and attached a Seagate 10TB Ironwolf NAS SATA drive. This time the OMV and subsequent Windows share setup processes went absolutely seamlessly with no trouble whatsoever! Thanks to Hardkernel for building a robust product at a very economical price.
The support for Yocto is a HUGE benefit overlooked here. My understanding is that this allows you to build a distro from scratch from driver binary blobs meaning future OS upgrades are possible on your own. I own many SBCs, and the biggest issue for me using them years later is that they’re stuck with a particular Linux distro’s version and the company no longer supports it (Cubieboard A10). In theory, yocto should solve this.
Hi Chris, I own both the Odroid XU4 and the Rock64, and ran the same test while watching your video. Guess what? I got the very same results as you did! Diving a little deeper, the Rock64 CPU model is RK3328 which is based on ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit core. Rpi3 uses BCM2837 which is based on the same Cortex-A53 64-bit cores. Tinker Board CPU model is RK3288 which is an ARM Cortex-A17 32-bit CPU, and finally the Odroid XU4 CPU model is Exynos5422 with 4 ARM Cortex-A15 and 4 ARM Cortex-A7 cores. As far as I could gather, Cortex-A53 is the best out of all (and not only because of the higher number in the name!) which also uses a newer armv8-a instruction set (compared to armv7 on the older ones), so it basically should come down to the fact that it's a 64-bit system with the latest instruction set from ARM. Further comparing the Rpi3's BCM2837 and Rock64's RK3328 I found that the CPU L1 cache is the same (32Kb) but interestingly enough Rpi3 got 512Kb of L2 cache compared to Rock64 which got only 265Kb. So the only conclusion should be that either Rockchip added some special circuits for prime number calculations (which is very unlikely), or that the memory of the Rock64 is just so much faster.
Thank you for the review I can honestly say that I shall be testing one myself now so yet again Chris Thank you, especially for the information regarding the necessary jumpers for this SBCs emmc card take care and keep up the great work =)
This is almost what I figured a Raspberry Pi 4 would be, if there ever would be one. But it is missing WiFi and a second USB 3 port. Although I am very impressed with this board, using a dongle for WiFi and another for a keyboard with a mouse pad only leaves one open USB. Which is fine using a TV, but plugged in to a monitor, i prefer using keyboard with a separate mouse. In that situation I would find myself one USB port short, since I still prefer having an extra empty USB port available. This board is almost close to SBC perfection, especially the 4 gb version. For now I will stick with my Raspberry Pi 3B.
rupe1986 You are very correct that a usb hub can be used on this impressive board. One of my main attractions to this board is its compact size. It’s amazing what it and the other SBCs its size can do. My preference is to have one more USB port then to plug in an usb hub adding to its bulk or footprint. Let me just say, this board is to me near perfection for a SBC. Personally I can’t believe they put as much on that little board as they did. I am truly impressed!
You are the second reviewer I have heard whining about the lack of onboard WiFi, which, unlike the Pi 3's IO Bottlenecks, lack of RAM, and underpowered CPU, is easily fixable for a few dollars with an external USB WiFi dongle, which would offer much better range, bandwidth, and security (better security since it can be disconnected to 'air gap' the system, which could be critical in secure environments). Cost of the 4G Rock64 board including an add-on WiFi and SD card would still be less than an ASUS Tinker Board S, with the Rock64 offering 2x the RAM (4x the RAM of the Pi3). Cutting out onboard WiFi, saved them from dealing with MUCH more complex (expensive) compliance issues in the U.S. UK and Europe, letting them provide a more powerful CPU , TWICE the RAM (or 4 times for another 10 dollars), USB3, and REAL 1G Ethernet (with no BS Pi 3b+ bottlenecks). Pixel makes it clear that Pi Foundation intends Pi to be suitable as a lightweight desktop, but lack of RAM really kills the experence - so I would think folks would be overjoyed to see a nice low cost 4G RAM 4K Video SBC instead of nitpicking.
Steve B. I think you forget that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity organization. One with a very specific aim. They are not making desktop PC replacements, they make educational tools... combined hardware, software, literature and resources to encourage learning and experimentation. It's a long term project, which is something you can't necessarily say about 'competing' products. Many are here one minute, gone the next. No updates, no support, no future.
Nice little board, and as usual, well covered. The omission of Bluetooth and Wifi is a glaring error though... SBCs are fun to tinker around with and this one has a lovely Linux distro... Thanks!
This is the computer I have been waiting for RapPi Org. to put out. I don't need the WiFi so it covers everything I need including speed and memory. Same price point for more and for $10 more, a lot more memory. Finally, a machine able to run Firefox without paging or crashing. Thanks for this review.
Chris, update and since your review of top Distros a few weeks ago (Feb 2022), I have renewed life in this board with Manjaro. With no updates since 18.04 on the sight, it was mothballed. I saw the board listed when you were getting Manjaro for the Pi4 and tried it out. Thanks again for your reviews and insight. PS: I have another Rock64 using OpenmediaVault inspired from your channel.
Thanks for the great videos, Christopher. I've decided on the Rock64 (or RockPro64) and the Raspberry Pi3B+ to handle some of the heavy lifting to my latest project, and I have an Arduino to handle one of the lightweight tasks. I bought the Rasp Pi3B+ to start out - the first problem I ran into was the HDMI video - I have no such monitors. I ended up buying a converter cable (two of them - one for each of the Rock and the Rasp). I'm up in the air about whether to use the Rock64 or the RockPro64. The RockPro has two MiPi-CSI camera interfaces, which are crucial to its function in this project, but the Rock64 has no such camera port. On the other hand, the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ does have the MiPi port, but I have another use in mind for it. Although, the Raspberry has only a Gig of RAM, so it may have difficulty handling video. I like the large (4GB) internal memory capacity for the RockPro, which will be very handy for heavy video processing that will become a major part of that task. I bought the RockPro64 13 Megapixel Camera Module, which plugs into a MiPi-CSI port, which, I assume, will also work on the Rasp Pi3B+ MiPi port. I'm not sure if there's software to support that module. This will be a crucial part of the telescope imaging system. I thought I had spare everything. Now I need keyboards, cables, converters, mice, and so on.
Great Review as always, Chris! - Thanks! I have to say, albeit USB3, emmc, 1Ghz Ethernet and the faster GPU and CPU alongside the larger memory are compelling, i find the lack of WiFi and Bluetooth and the Barrel-jack (instead of micro USB) to be a bit of a dealbreaker. The onboard IR is a nice touch, though.
The first thing I did with my Orange Pi Win Plus after getting Debian 8 on the SD card was to upgrade to Debian 9. Everything seemed to be much more responsive after that. So maybe you will also get better performance out of the device after upgrading. I see these devices as a work in progress and excellent development machines for lack of other affordable systems better suited to development.
I use my RPi3 also for mobile tasks. I do need bluetooth and wifi as well. I could also live with only one of those, though. But if both are missing onboard this is a no go.
well adding those can be done with a dongle, i have a few for some pi2 I have got, although for me, I like my gear wired, my computer, their keyboards, my TVs, my Roku and my PS4. If I could do my tablets that way I would. Biggest issue I have seen with wi-fi is bandwidth, i got the wy-fy analyzer quite a few years back and found my router was on same channels as 3 of my neighbors, I changed it's channel and WOW
The biggest attraction for me is the USB 3.0, however, after watching another Channel Review (Don on Novaspirit Tech) I'm now in two minds about the whole thing! He had lots of issues trying to get it to work properly and it seems he's not the only one; It's not without it's assets as you point out, and the Price is great, but like all fairly new Boards it has a lot of teething to get through.
Thanks for your video reviewing the Rock64 SBC. It is very interesting and informative; however, Rock64 is not available on Amazon for the UK. You need to pay an additional $11.99 shipping plus 20% VAT plus £8 customs processing fee if imported to the UK from Pine64 in the US, which makes it considerably more expensive than a RPi.
Built in hardware decoders, 1G Ethernet and USB 3.0 port along with 4K video output makes it a good candidate for a media player setup. On the other hand 4G version could be a nice processing hub for network management and smart home stuff. I like this board and its price point. Can you measure idle power consumption?
With all those barrels universal charger may come in handy ! As far as I know the 3.5 mm barrel were used in Nokia cell phones, but those were too weak to power up a SBC. In case of Orange Pi (which I own) the 4.0 mm barrel may seem even less standart, but fortunately the original charger for Sony PSP console fits perfectly, and has just the right parameters (5V and 2A). I believe one of the SBC you covered on your channel had a standart 5.5 mm one. Dont get me wrong, Im not a big fan of micro USB. All phones with micro USB socket I used to own, and attaching/reattaching the charger always made the socket loose, and caused troubles with charging the device, while the old fashioned DC sockets are in good shape even after many years of usage. Im just not sure why it varies so much
RPI3 is still the king of the hill when it comes to community support. Its not the fastest, but its the best seller for a reason. I wouldn't mind playing around with the tinker board though...
I really like the extra bank of GPIO pins. That's the hold-up I have with the Pi series as opposed to devices like the Beagle Bone Black. I did a quick scan of the specs and don't see if there are any microcontrollers available. (possibly tied up with the built-in devices?) PS - I just read a thread that stated pins 17-22 of the 2nd GPIO can be used as a second Fast Ethernet device!!! Very nice router potential if it's true...
To test the GPU capabilities, once I had Android up and running and the Play Store installed, I would have downloaded Happy Chick and some roms for PSP and N64 to see how the Mali responded. Conker's Bad Fur Day and God Of War Chains of Olympus come to mind. They're really hard to emulate on most SBCs. Of course, you have to own those games :) (But that's really the best test I know of - that's what matters in my world... SBC-wise).
I prefer the Rpi3 because of its large following/support and I find it a little 'scary' that there are so many competitors out now that could prevent/delay a release of newer Rpi models
I hope this would be the first real competitor in this game. I'd be astonished if 4K really works as well as normal full HD desktop. And also that you could have some in-between resolutions available (like 2560x1440, 1900x1200, etc). Usually these 4K SBCs limit the resolutions strictly to 2160p, 1080p and the usual 720p, 480p, etc. I have got many disappointments on this aspect with other 4K SBCs and the benchmarks are only a small portion of the real usability of an SBC, in my opinion; lots of features were not finished in linux side, only working in android ports and stability issues on the linux in general. But I like the video and the channel in general!
USB 3 is very nice, but no on-board radio means it's a no-no for me. ps they missed a trick with that nice presentation box, stamp in some knockouts and it would have made a simple case for the unit.
I decided to read the CPU suite of sysbench, and found that the prime number bench is a very naive one. It is very well possible that recent compilers and optimizers have recognized this and optimized this.
Like many here, I don't have a problem with no wifi - I won't be using it and removing it means the platform will be cheaper. Despite the age of this, I ended up buying this now because even today, there isn't much competition of something that has the same level of performance-per-watt, PoE, a USB 3.0 port with its own host controller, all for a reasonable price point. The ODROID-C4 is overall a better choice but once you factor in shipping costs, it's a worse value.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the raspberry pi foundation announces a new raspberry pi soon with a lot of features that the community has been asking for - better processor, increased ram and so on.
The standard form factors is something that's just awesome to see, I hope more SBC's follow suit. How ever The Rpi 4 has to be coming out soon. The Pine64 looks like a nice toy to play with, however it seems like its a bit late to the party, and will be over shadowed by the 4 when it comes out, most likely next march. I for one won't be investing in this one. I tried out the Beagle, Banana Pi Pro, and the Tinker board. I find the Raspberry Pi the easiest to play with as well as MUCH easier to get help when I get stuck than any of those boards, and I feel the Rock 64 will be more of the same.
Chris, I have solved my issue with the power supply purchased with this board. If moved just a slight bit, many times it would lose connection ad reboot. My solution was purchasing a USB-A x 3.5 mm/1.35 mm Barrel cable. I wonder if anyone else has had this problem with their Pine64 power supply. Writing post from Rock64-4, Ubuntu 18.04 LXDE.
I wonder why they went with the ‘barrel’ power connector instead of micro USB? Maybe micro USB is a fine choice for lower power devices like RPi because it’s ubiquitous but I guess they’re having trouble getting enough power. A barrel connector means this device plugs into the wall, like some of the larger single board computers.
This is very nice Nas solution. Work wery well with Open Media Vault. This channel is WERY GOOD, subscribed and waiting for next wery good Video materials. ( Sorry for bad english, it's not my native leanguage. Good work Explaining Computers!
I have the 4G one of these boards and it has worked well for a lot of projects. Would be interested to see a video on this using an eMMC Card (apparently ODROID ones work on it). Also a mention/test that the extra GPIO pins are already configured (with the Debian OS) to host a second Ethernet port (albeit at 10/100).
Checking this Rock64 out at your behest... Thanks for the tip. I'll also look into the Tinker board and the ODROID-XU4. For the 4GB of DDR3 Ram, it's $45. Not bad. I think I've become spoiled with dual monitors. Every single computer I own, even my very old ones, is running with dual monitors. One of the things Windows is good about, and Ubuntu isn't, is drivers for multiple monitors. I think, so far, I've only seen one SBC with multiple video ports (I think, one HDMI and one standard Video jack), but I don't know if it would have supported two monitors. Booting... I have a whole bag of jumpers. And if I sweep the floors, I might find a few more. I think the Rasp Pi 3 B+ is a 64-bit, also. I think of both WiFi and Bluetooth as security issues, so those two missing is a non-issue for me.
RE: sysbench bug. I suspect that there is a bug in the system libs on these. It fails to wait for the threads it spins up for the calculations to finish their work. The usual candidate is the 'pthread_join' method not waiting for the thread to exit. This is my educated guess. :) What can happen is the thread has taken too long to spin up and when 'pthread_join' is called it thinks it has already ended. Semaphores should be used to ensure pthread_join is not called too early. c++11 has some nice tools to help with this.
I have had two of these for about 6 months now, one is being used for playing about with, and the other is now my home server. I can confirm the sysbench results on different linux distros, and would ask if you using a 64 bit distro on the other boards, and what speed of memory do they have. Mind you, sysbench is not really such a great benchmark. Putting an eMMC card in is well worth it, about £30 for a 64GB card, speeds the system up over an sd card by a small margin, also means you can have a distro on all the time, and still boot other OSs from sdcard, or use it for storage. I also find the power and reset buttons useful, much easier, and safer than yanking the power lead on other SBCs. A power barrel is a great improvement over a micro USB connector, much more secure.
Hi Mister Barnatt. I enjoyed the review. Like you, I suspect a little tweaking going on behind the scenes at the Pine studios. I would like to know two things: 1- When can we expect to see the Pi4, and 2- I would have liked to see a demonstration of the USB 3 to see if it actually works in this distro, or is it a feature-of-the-future. Good job. 73
I think we will get the Pi 4 in early 2019. The Raspberry Pi Foundation have said that they see the Pi 3 as a three-year product. I must test the USB 3.0 port as you say. :)
Hi Mister Barnatt. Thanks for responding so quickly. I wish I could get a Pi to work with USB 3 ( or better ) now. I was trying to get my laptop to run Mint and DOSBOX and I simply could not get it to recognize the 3.0 thumb drive. Darn. Well, I guess that we still have to thank Microsoft for something. Cheers.
Thank you for another great video. I always look forward to new SBC videos. I'm always interested in reasonably priced ones like this one and I was excited to find this one was in the same range as a raspberry pi. I would like to try the distributions for this on raspberry pi. Suppose the Android and others would work?
Based on your reviews I went ahead and purchased a rock64. To date, I have been unable to get it to boot to a GUI desktop as your review of it shows. Perhaps you could demonstrate the burning of the Debian OS you used in your video, as it doesn’t work for me or retry it yourself as I’ve tried many times to get it to boot but all I get is the terminal command.
Sorry to hear this. If you get a terminal command the board is clearly working OK, so that is good. And also you must have gone through a successful imaging process to boot to a terminal, which again is positive. What this suggests is that you have installed an OS without a desktop. I did my installs on the Rock64 some time ago, so the images may have changed -- although looking at the page on wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCK64_Main_Page#ROCK64_2 they appear identical. My advice would be to try some different images -- eg Bionic Desktop LXDE, or Armbian Stretch Desktop (both on the above page) and see if you can boot to a desktop using one of those. Good luck, and do report back. :)
Regarding the sysbench test, you should use the exact same operating system when comparing different boards. Otherwise, your results won't be valid. I mentioned this in your ODROID-Tinker-Pi review. Other than that, I really enjoy your reviews. Extremely informative!
Yes, I saw that. Thank you. My old Gentoo background gives me a different perspective than typical end users. I'm so tired of using "power sucking" computers and am having trouble deciding which ARM device to get.
Ian Ide - I agree 100%. In a commercial application some customers may frown on built-in wireless access for security reasons. I known you could disable it in the kernel but you have to make them happy or you won't get paid.
Even before your product sees a customer, it needs to be certified, and the certification process for an intentional radiator (product with a radio) is incredibly more expensive. No wifi is a big advantage for small volume OEMs who might use these boards in their products.
GPIO support was there but predominately through via sysfs file system access. There has been some work in the last week or so on a python gpio library like the RpiGPIO one though.
I think it may be important to mention that you are using SD Card rather than EMMC. Since EMMC is faster. That goes with much of your benchmark videos.
By measuring the load times of applications, you are measuring the performance of the interface that handles the IO for the memorycard, and the performance of the memorycard itself. Well done. No wonder your numbers are rather equal. The RockChip Chip outperforms the CPU of the RaspberryPI by 12 times at least, because the CPU-Part of the Raspberry Pi is just a small accessory to the GPU of the broadcom chip. And thats what you see in your prime-performance-test. The RockChip is a fullfledged CPU with focus on IO perfomance and thus suitable for building web servers and/or NAS-Systems. Hence the missing Wifi- and Bluetooth interfaces.
I am well aware of what my tests here measure -- but they reflect real-world use for many people. I have done many more detailed benchmark videos, including the Rock64.
Sorry it wasn't my intention to offend you. But I think THIS video is a bit misleading for unexperienced viewers in regards to what this sbc is actualy capable of. Especialy from a IO-perfomance perspective when directly compared to the raspberry pi, which is a merly sluggish...
Thanks a lot, very well done as usual! I only missed a 4K test preferably within Android 7.1 ... there was even an app for that ... but seeing if RUclips can do 4K at 60Hz without stuttering that would be a fantastic promo for the device, since the others still seem to be not quite up to it yet. It is still very surprising that the Odroid is performing so badly, maybe due to some poorly programmed driver, when it has a total advantage in hardware with its higher core count, CPU- and memory speed. On the other hand what is happening in your first benchmark test of the Rock64? Would love to know what causes this "extremely good looking"/fake? result.
Maybe evaluating all these boards for 4K video capability with different media types, players, OS's could be an entire video by itself that a lot of viewers will be interested in.
Now single card computers became very usable as secondary computers.... or even as first if you don't need more than basics task. That is awesome. It will not only be a toy for geeks! I would love a laptop version of this one, in a 11,6" form factor. Like the pinebook. This would be AWESOME.
hey EC! great video! .... I'm new to SBC, and I just really need to know if this would support a large touchscreen monitor? I have a Dell 2240T and I want to connect the monitor to some sort of cheap SBC solution, to use my 22" touchscreen to control my SoundCraft Ui16 audio mixer, which operates over HTML5
Thanks for this. Potentially your touchscreen will work if it connects via USB and does mouse emulation. So it will depend on available drivers. But touchscreen support may well exist, eg in an Android install. Try the Pine64 forums for those with direct experience of this.
Nice video but I wasn't impressed with the OSs available. Debian and xenial desktop would break following an upgrade and reboot. Only bionic is stable for me
Hello, Is there any chance that you can start adding compile times of Linux Kernel or other Phoronix Tests that are in the Test Suite? Maybe it can’t be done on ARM, but if it can it would be very interesting.
Well cool! I just got the Libre Computer Trinium, so I'll see how that goes. That Android image seems to be RUclips TV, so that's why it comes with RUclips TV, the worst edition of RUclips, so that's nice.
I have an old 4 bay RAID box. I'd like to use one of the bays to install something like this board to run a music/video server, using other three bays for drives. Where can I go to get more info on doing this? I use PLEX at the moment.
when it comes to SBCs it all depends on community support and what it is you really want to do with it. the raspberry pi 3 is tough to beat, but for example if you are into retrogaming the XU4 blows it away quite handily.
7:20 With all the features and functions this board provides, to not have wireless connectivity is most certianly the best option for this boards market. I believe this product shaved $10 cost to the consumer to be more of an upgrade at a much more appropriate cost - lots of people who used rapi2b for instance used two seperate usb 2.0 ports for soley 2.4ghz wifi and soley bluetooth to also save money and enable lower power operating states i.e turn off power to all but one port entirely. While it is quite right to give them critique for removing what we see as a now basis of technology, the ability to communicate wirelessly, I think the point of this product is to introduce a slightly more premium experince to people who already own or are already familar with pre-armv8 raspis. While it does give me a feeling of "pretender" syndrome I have to say it is great for tinkerers and software guys to have a cheap platform with emmc.
Charlie Croker - More like $5. The RPi 0 V1.3 doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth but the RPi 0W does and it is only a $5 difference with just one chip added onto the board.
I am thankful for continuing series on single-board computers. Your head-to-head comparisons are a great service to the community.
As soon as you put bluetooth or wifi on a product it needs additional FCC compliance testing and authorization. It could cause radio interference according to US gov. The rock64 makers probably didn't want to pay for that
It's great that standardization of form factors, and such, is happening right out of the gate with these inexpensive, small single board computers. That's a big plus on the user end of things.
I agree totally. I love that this seems to be the way this community is going.
It's a smart move. Makes it easier for existing Pi users to adopt the new board.
It is and it's really neat what these things can do these days for the cost. Hook it up to your 4K tv and use it as a media center!
You will get no argument from me.
What a time to be alive. :D
I'm not surprised by your benchmark results. This guy had similar results for CPU performance when he tested it last year - ruclips.net/video/FjbzKfeHB_8/видео.html
So you haven't made a mistake.
He put it down to CPU optimisation.
I was so impressed that I was looking to get a Rock64 back then.
Very interesting, thanks.
Depending on the application, an SBC without wireless connectivity may be preferred for security reasons.
Mark Warbington
Right. Depending on where you can find an Ethernet cable (especially with gigabyte capability), it would be smart to connect to workstations that already have wireless capability and use that. Basically a parasite that uses another computer’s stuff.
Hmm, that would be cool, a parasite computer. I remember a hacker once used millions of computers through a virus to hack government servers. That was an epic example of brute force, but here it would apply to a single computer just to run hard core applications like Autodesk Inventor.
Personally I’d prefer gigabit ethernet over integrated bluetooth and wifi.
Would be nice to have it all tho.
@@topsecret1837 Ethernet is becoming increasingly less common as more people dump cable. These devices are primarily marketed toward Americans, who often have one choice for a cable provider which will offer speeds a tenth of the rate of 4G/5G mobile internet with a thousandth of the reliability but ten times the price. Mobile internet is wireless.
Explaining Computers is one of those RUclips which feels like a ‘Time capsule’ Technology blog channel of archived technology videos from the 70s and 80s. I love this format!!!
It is simply amazing how Raspberry Pi has opened up this sector, the performance is astonishing and for general desktop duties it seems unbeatable. I’m going to get one of these with the emmc storage option and connect it to our tv with a wireless keyboard/ touchpad. BTW the amazon link only ships within the US. Great video as usual.
This is indeed a great TV PC. :)
I'd also suggest you look at the odroid c2. With eMMC. Love mine. Use it as media tv PC. And tried it as a debian VPN and DNS worked amazing. And specifically the odroid c2 has direct libreelec Kodi support.
Thanks. I've tried the XU4 here, but not the C2. I must look at that.
Please show me how as I now have new, big monitor to play with plus a large flat screen T V with 2 HDMI plugs..Any help will be appreciated Arthur Moore
Got a 4GB model. Loaded armbuntu. And WHOA! This thing actually supports standby mode. Note it takes 80mA in standby (1Ah from 12V battery per day - for those who need this for car project).
Hey, does 4k video streaming actually work? At least 1080 60fps?
I migrated my corporate site from a Dell Poweredge server, which consumed a lot of power for a Rock 64 with a SSD hard drive. It was very good performance with 40 simultaneous users, and to gift has greatly reduced the power consumption. Very good apresentation!
Honestly I'm surprised that in 2018 we haven't seen any SBCs with USB 3.1, wifi, Bluetooth 4.0+, and much more. To this day, my favorite SBC is my smartphone.
We do have board with USB 3.0, WiFi and Bluetooth -- like the LattePanda and UDOO boards . . .
Panda,oops missed EC answer. However I agree about phone 100% but for tinkering this is the way to go
Stephen Hill much more. But that wasn't the point. I already ordered one of these, I was responding to Chris' statement about it being 2018 and there was no excuse for not having wireless on a tinker board. The 3.0 is a nice addition for this price point, but with USB-C and 3.1 everywhere, I wish it was more common.
In the SBC market, cost matters most. There are SBCs with more features, but they cost a lot more. Sub-$100 SBCs tend to have SoCs you'd see in Android boxes. The Rock64 is interesting because it is the first board I can think of that brings USB 3 to a board similar in price to the Raspberry Pi. I suspect that will become standard soon enough. It won't make sense for future SoCs to not support USB 3.
not to mention SATA.
Great video, the only thing I miss is USB 3.0 bandwidth test. I think this SBC will be great for cheap small NAS with GbE and USB3.
Thank you very much for your videos! Very informative and to the point. You have educated me more on SBC's than anyone else and I've been in IT since the Commodore / XT times.
Thanks.
I just purchase and setup a Rock64 4gb SMB using OMV and mDLNA with a 8tb usb3.0 WD mybook as a NAS. I did so for the 64 bit CPU in this. Anyhow, after formatting the USB 3.0 drive to EXT4, I am getting 100-114 MBps ethernet file transfers VIA SMB aka windows file transfer.. Pegging gigabit.. More than happy with this 220$ 8TB NAS I've built using a Rock64 SMB that I can just keep adding USB 3.0 drives to expand my NAS. Again, many thanks to you for your help!
IT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER .
LOVE THIS TECHNOLOGY STUFF AND THE WAY YOU EXPLAIN IT.
KEITH KUHN
the "lack" of wifi is a bonus if you ask me, if I want it connected I use LAN. So I will definetly look into this one for a little fun webserver testing ground.
I have to say that I tried to go through the OMV setup on a Rock64 with an attached external WD USB hard drive, and it was a complete mess. I spent hours trying different options on the OMV configuration screens but was thwarted at various stages in the process. Eventually I threw in the towel and decided to use the Rock64 for another purpose (loaded it with Android). Then I bought an Odroid HC2 and attached a Seagate 10TB Ironwolf NAS SATA drive. This time the OMV and subsequent Windows share setup processes went absolutely seamlessly with no trouble whatsoever! Thanks to Hardkernel for building a robust product at a very economical price.
The support for Yocto is a HUGE benefit overlooked here. My understanding is that this allows you to build a distro from scratch from driver binary blobs meaning future OS upgrades are possible on your own.
I own many SBCs, and the biggest issue for me using them years later is that they’re stuck with a particular Linux distro’s version and the company no longer supports it (Cubieboard A10).
In theory, yocto should solve this.
Hi Chris,
I own both the Odroid XU4 and the Rock64, and ran the same test while watching your video. Guess what? I got the very same results as you did!
Diving a little deeper, the Rock64 CPU model is RK3328 which is based on ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit core. Rpi3 uses BCM2837 which is based on the same Cortex-A53 64-bit cores. Tinker Board CPU model is RK3288 which is an ARM Cortex-A17 32-bit CPU, and finally the Odroid XU4 CPU model is Exynos5422 with 4 ARM Cortex-A15 and 4 ARM Cortex-A7 cores.
As far as I could gather, Cortex-A53 is the best out of all (and not only because of the higher number in the name!) which also uses a newer armv8-a instruction set (compared to armv7 on the older ones), so it basically should come down to the fact that it's a 64-bit system with the latest instruction set from ARM.
Further comparing the Rpi3's BCM2837 and Rock64's RK3328 I found that the CPU L1 cache is the same (32Kb) but interestingly enough Rpi3 got 512Kb of L2 cache compared to Rock64 which got only 265Kb. So the only conclusion should be that either Rockchip added some special circuits for prime number calculations (which is very unlikely), or that the memory of the Rock64 is just so much faster.
I REALLY enjoy your presentations and your channel! Keep up the good work mi amigo!
Thanks! :)
Thank you for the review I can honestly say that I shall be testing one myself now so yet again Chris Thank you, especially for the information regarding the necessary jumpers for this SBCs emmc card take care and keep up the great work =)
This is almost what I figured a Raspberry Pi 4 would be, if there ever would be one. But it is missing WiFi and a second USB 3 port. Although I am very impressed with this board, using a dongle for WiFi and another for a keyboard with a mouse pad only leaves one open USB. Which is fine using a TV, but plugged in to a monitor, i prefer using keyboard with a separate mouse. In that situation I would find myself one USB port short, since I still prefer having an extra empty USB port available. This board is almost close to SBC perfection, especially the 4 gb version. For now I will stick with my Raspberry Pi 3B.
Perry McClusky this is the same issue I have with this sbc. However, a usb hub could probably be connected to this.
rupe1986 You are very correct that a usb hub can be used on this impressive board. One of my main attractions to this board is its compact size. It’s amazing what it and the other SBCs its size can do. My preference is to have one more USB port then to plug in an usb hub adding to its bulk or footprint. Let me just say, this board is to me near perfection for a SBC. Personally I can’t believe they put as much on that little board as they did. I am truly impressed!
Absolutely love watching your videos, it's like listening to Ian McNaught-Davis on Micro Live all over again.
You are the second reviewer I have heard whining about the lack of onboard WiFi, which, unlike the Pi 3's IO Bottlenecks, lack of RAM, and underpowered CPU, is easily fixable for a few dollars with an external USB WiFi dongle, which would offer much better range, bandwidth, and security (better security since it can be disconnected to 'air gap' the system, which could be critical in secure environments). Cost of the 4G Rock64 board including an add-on WiFi and SD card would still be less than an ASUS Tinker Board S, with the Rock64 offering 2x the RAM (4x the RAM of the Pi3).
Cutting out onboard WiFi, saved them from dealing with MUCH more complex (expensive) compliance issues in the U.S. UK and Europe, letting them provide a more powerful CPU , TWICE the RAM (or 4 times for another 10 dollars), USB3, and REAL 1G Ethernet (with no BS Pi 3b+ bottlenecks).
Pixel makes it clear that Pi Foundation intends Pi to be suitable as a lightweight desktop, but lack of RAM really kills the experence - so I would think folks would be overjoyed to see a nice low cost 4G RAM 4K Video SBC instead of nitpicking.
Steve B. I think you forget that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity organization. One with a very specific aim. They are not making desktop PC replacements, they make educational tools... combined hardware, software, literature and resources to encourage learning and experimentation. It's a long term project, which is something you can't necessarily say about 'competing' products. Many are here one minute, gone the next. No updates, no support, no future.
Nice little board, and as usual, well covered. The omission of Bluetooth and Wifi is a glaring error though... SBCs are fun to tinker around with and this one has a lovely Linux distro... Thanks!
Watching this on my Pine64 Pinebook laptop running Android 7.1 was kind of fun. This age of multi-core ARM systems is interesting for the tinkerer.
This is the computer I have been waiting for RapPi Org. to put out. I don't need the WiFi so it covers everything I need including speed and memory. Same price point for more and for $10 more, a lot more memory. Finally, a machine able to run Firefox without paging or crashing. Thanks for this review.
Yes, indeed -- the extra RAM makes a real difference. And it has a USB 3.0 port!
Mr. Scissors is always my favorite part. No idea why.
Chris, update and since your review of top Distros a few weeks ago (Feb 2022), I have renewed life in this board with Manjaro. With no updates since 18.04 on the sight, it was mothballed.
I saw the board listed when you were getting Manjaro for the Pi4 and tried it out. Thanks again for your reviews and insight.
PS: I have another Rock64 using OpenmediaVault inspired from your channel.
This is great news -- I'm glad to hear that Manjaro works on the Rock64. I must try it out! :)
Thanks for the great videos, Christopher. I've decided on the Rock64 (or RockPro64) and the Raspberry Pi3B+ to handle some of the heavy lifting to my latest project, and I have an Arduino to handle one of the lightweight tasks.
I bought the Rasp Pi3B+ to start out - the first problem I ran into was the HDMI video - I have no such monitors. I ended up buying a converter cable (two of them - one for each of the Rock and the Rasp).
I'm up in the air about whether to use the Rock64 or the RockPro64. The RockPro has two MiPi-CSI camera interfaces, which are crucial to its function in this project, but the Rock64 has no such camera port.
On the other hand, the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ does have the MiPi port, but I have another use in mind for it. Although, the Raspberry has only a Gig of RAM, so it may have difficulty handling video.
I like the large (4GB) internal memory capacity for the RockPro, which will be very handy for heavy video processing that will become a major part of that task.
I bought the RockPro64 13 Megapixel Camera Module, which plugs into a MiPi-CSI port, which, I assume, will also work on the Rasp Pi3B+ MiPi port. I'm not sure if there's software to support that module. This will be a crucial part of the telescope imaging system.
I thought I had spare everything. Now I need keyboards, cables, converters, mice, and so on.
Sounds like you are doing some interesting stuff!
Great Review as always, Chris! - Thanks!
I have to say, albeit USB3, emmc, 1Ghz Ethernet and the faster GPU and CPU alongside the larger memory are compelling, i find the lack of WiFi and Bluetooth and the Barrel-jack (instead of micro USB) to be a bit of a dealbreaker. The onboard IR is a nice touch, though.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
The first thing I did with my Orange Pi Win Plus after getting Debian 8 on the SD card was to upgrade to Debian 9. Everything seemed to be much more responsive after that. So maybe you will also get better performance out of the device after upgrading.
I see these devices as a work in progress and excellent development machines for lack of other affordable systems better suited to development.
An upgraded Rpi is well overdue!
Though I still think that we will wait until 2019.
I believe februari usually is the month of new Rpi releases so I'm still hoping for this year :)
www.alphr.com/raspberry-pi/1005103/raspberry-pi-4-release-date-rumours-specifications
They're aiming for around 2019.
I see :( well the Rpi3 must clearly have been ahead of its time
Thanks !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well great now I want it.
check out the pinebook and then say wow
He just said it didn't have wifi nor bluetooth.
Total killer for me!
not me though
I use my RPi3 also for mobile tasks. I do need bluetooth and wifi as well. I could also live with only one of those, though. But if both are missing onboard this is a no go.
well adding those can be done with a dongle, i have a few for some pi2 I have got, although for me, I like my gear wired, my computer, their keyboards, my TVs, my Roku and my PS4. If I could do my tablets that way I would. Biggest issue I have seen with wi-fi is bandwidth, i got the wy-fy analyzer quite a few years back and found my router was on same channels as 3 of my neighbors, I changed it's channel and WOW
Excelent video Mr Barnatt, may I suggest if you please consider explaining fpga basics, development boards and software options in your future videos!
Thanks for this -- suggestions noted! :)
maybe get a vampire v4 standalone or fpga mist or fpga replay 2
The biggest attraction for me is the USB 3.0, however, after watching another Channel Review (Don on Novaspirit Tech) I'm now in two minds about the whole thing! He had lots of issues trying to get it to work properly and it seems he's not the only one; It's not without it's assets as you point out, and the Price is great, but like all fairly new Boards it has a lot of teething to get through.
Thanks for your video reviewing the Rock64 SBC. It is very interesting and informative; however, Rock64 is not available on Amazon for the UK. You need to pay an additional $11.99 shipping plus 20% VAT plus £8 customs processing fee if imported to the UK from Pine64 in the US, which makes it considerably more expensive than a RPi.
Built in hardware decoders, 1G Ethernet and USB 3.0 port along with 4K video output makes it a good candidate for a media player setup. On the other hand 4G version could be a nice processing hub for network management and smart home stuff. I like this board and its price point. Can you measure idle power consumption?
I will indeed look at power consumption of this -- and other SBCs -- in a future video.
With all those barrels universal charger may come in handy !
As far as I know the 3.5 mm barrel were used in Nokia cell phones, but those were too weak to power up a SBC. In case of Orange Pi (which I own) the 4.0 mm barrel may seem even less standart, but fortunately the original charger for Sony PSP console fits perfectly, and has just the right parameters (5V and 2A). I believe one of the SBC you covered on your channel had a standart 5.5 mm one.
Dont get me wrong, Im not a big fan of micro USB. All phones with micro USB socket I used to own, and attaching/reattaching the charger always made the socket loose, and caused troubles with charging the device, while the old fashioned DC sockets are in good shape even after many years of usage. Im just not sure why it varies so much
I bought a pine64 SBC from the same company, thinking that it would be better than Raspberry Pi. And after that i bought a Raspberry Pi 3b SBC :)
RPI3 is still the king of the hill when it comes to community support. Its not the fastest, but its the best seller for a reason.
I wouldn't mind playing around with the tinker board though...
Love the power button integrated onto the board!
I really like the extra bank of GPIO pins. That's the hold-up I have with the Pi series as opposed to devices like the Beagle Bone Black. I did a quick scan of the specs and don't see if there are any microcontrollers available. (possibly tied up with the built-in devices?)
PS - I just read a thread that stated pins 17-22 of the 2nd GPIO can be used as a second Fast Ethernet device!!! Very nice router potential if it's true...
To test the GPU capabilities, once I had Android up and running and the Play Store installed, I would have downloaded Happy Chick and some roms for PSP and N64 to see how the Mali responded. Conker's Bad Fur Day and God Of War Chains of Olympus come to mind. They're really hard to emulate on most SBCs. Of course, you have to own those games :) (But that's really the best test I know of - that's what matters in my world... SBC-wise).
I prefer the Rpi3 because of its large following/support and I find it a little 'scary' that there are so many competitors out now that could prevent/delay a release of newer Rpi models
I must admit that I prefer a wired network instead of WiFi it's more reliable and faster nevertheless a nice review 🤗🤗🤗 Kim 🤗🤗🤗
I hope this would be the first real competitor in this game. I'd be astonished if 4K really works as well as normal full HD desktop. And also that you could have some in-between resolutions available (like 2560x1440, 1900x1200, etc). Usually these 4K SBCs limit the resolutions strictly to 2160p, 1080p and the usual 720p, 480p, etc. I have got many disappointments on this aspect with other 4K SBCs and the benchmarks are only a small portion of the real usability of an SBC, in my opinion; lots of features were not finished in linux side, only working in android ports and stability issues on the linux in general.
But I like the video and the channel in general!
USB 3 is very nice, but no on-board radio means it's a no-no for me.
ps they missed a trick with that nice presentation box, stamp in some knockouts and it would have made a simple case for the unit.
Same... The new Pi-3 B+ now has AC Wireless!!!
excellent video and great comparison, I was thinking about buying a rock64
I decided to read the CPU suite of sysbench, and found that the prime number bench is a very naive one. It is very well possible that recent compilers and optimizers have recognized this and optimized this.
Like many here, I don't have a problem with no wifi - I won't be using it and removing it means the platform will be cheaper.
Despite the age of this, I ended up buying this now because even today, there isn't much competition of something that has the same level of performance-per-watt, PoE, a USB 3.0 port with its own host controller, all for a reasonable price point. The ODROID-C4 is overall a better choice but once you factor in shipping costs, it's a worse value.
Great work as always Chris.
I would have loved to see the 4K tested, excellent video anyway
Yes, I should have done that! Sorry.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the raspberry pi foundation announces a new raspberry pi soon with a lot of features that the community has been asking for - better processor, increased ram and so on.
The standard form factors is something that's just awesome to see, I hope more SBC's follow suit. How ever The Rpi 4 has to be coming out soon. The Pine64 looks like a nice toy to play with, however it seems like its a bit late to the party, and will be over shadowed by the 4 when it comes out, most likely next march. I for one won't be investing in this one. I tried out the Beagle, Banana Pi Pro, and the Tinker board. I find the Raspberry Pi the easiest to play with as well as MUCH easier to get help when I get stuck than any of those boards, and I feel the Rock 64 will be more of the same.
Chris, I have solved my issue with the power supply purchased with this board. If moved just a slight bit, many times it would lose connection ad reboot. My solution was purchasing a USB-A x 3.5 mm/1.35 mm Barrel cable. I wonder if anyone else has had this problem with their Pine64 power supply. Writing post from Rock64-4, Ubuntu 18.04 LXDE.
I wonder why they went with the ‘barrel’ power connector instead of micro USB?
Maybe micro USB is a fine choice for lower power devices like RPi because it’s ubiquitous but I guess they’re having trouble getting enough power.
A barrel connector means this device plugs into the wall, like some of the larger single board computers.
Got an ODROID C2 myself, good little unit. If it had USB3 it would likely be one of the best to choose.
Would be nice to see a Video playback shootout for the various boards. Keep up the great work!
Yes, I must do these tests in a video. :)
Always impressed by your thoroughness
Thanks. :)
Great video, thank you for making it so long and detailed!
This is very nice Nas solution. Work wery well with Open Media Vault. This channel is WERY GOOD, subscribed and waiting for next wery good Video materials. ( Sorry for bad english, it's not my native leanguage.
Good work Explaining Computers!
I have the 4G one of these boards and it has worked well for a lot of projects. Would be interested to see a video on this using an eMMC Card (apparently ODROID ones work on it). Also a mention/test that the extra GPIO pins are already configured (with the Debian OS) to host a second Ethernet port (albeit at 10/100).
Nice review. The one thing I'd like to have seen would be a look at how much of hardware support has made it mainline in the Linux Kernel.
Checking this Rock64 out at your behest... Thanks for the tip. I'll also look into the Tinker board and the ODROID-XU4.
For the 4GB of DDR3 Ram, it's $45. Not bad. I think I've become spoiled with dual monitors. Every single computer I own, even my very old ones, is running with dual monitors. One of the things Windows is good about, and Ubuntu isn't, is drivers for multiple monitors. I think, so far, I've only seen one SBC with multiple video ports (I think, one HDMI and one standard Video jack), but I don't know if it would have supported two monitors.
Booting... I have a whole bag of jumpers. And if I sweep the floors, I might find a few more.
I think the Rasp Pi 3 B+ is a 64-bit, also. I think of both WiFi and Bluetooth as security issues, so those two missing is a non-issue for me.
The UDOO x86 models have one HDMI and two display port sockets, but cost far more than other SBCs. WiFi via M.2 card though, so not onboard.
RE: sysbench bug. I suspect that there is a bug in the system libs on these. It fails to wait for the threads it spins up for the calculations to finish their work. The usual candidate is the 'pthread_join' method not waiting for the thread to exit. This is my educated guess. :) What can happen is the thread has taken too long to spin up and when 'pthread_join' is called it thinks it has already ended. Semaphores should be used to ensure pthread_join is not called too early. c++11 has some nice tools to help with this.
Thanks for this. :)
I have had two of these for about 6 months now, one is being used for playing about with, and the other is now my home server. I can confirm the sysbench results on different linux distros, and would ask if you using a 64 bit distro on the other boards, and what speed of memory do they have. Mind you, sysbench is not really such a great benchmark. Putting an eMMC card in is well worth it, about £30 for a 64GB card, speeds the system up over an sd card by a small margin, also means you can have a distro on all the time, and still boot other OSs from sdcard, or use it for storage. I also find the power and reset buttons useful, much easier, and safer than yanking the power lead on other SBCs. A power barrel is a great improvement over a micro USB connector, much more secure.
Hi Mister Barnatt. I enjoyed the review. Like you, I suspect a little tweaking going on behind the scenes at the Pine studios. I would like to know two things: 1- When can we expect to see the Pi4, and 2- I would have liked to see a demonstration of the USB 3 to see if it actually works in this distro, or is it a feature-of-the-future. Good job. 73
I think we will get the Pi 4 in early 2019. The Raspberry Pi Foundation have said that they see the Pi 3 as a three-year product. I must test the USB 3.0 port as you say. :)
Hi Mister Barnatt. Thanks for responding so quickly. I wish I could get a Pi to work with USB 3 ( or better ) now. I was trying to get my laptop to run Mint and DOSBOX and I simply could not get it to recognize the 3.0 thumb drive. Darn. Well, I guess that we still have to thank Microsoft for something. Cheers.
A wifi antenna dongle on the usb 3.0 would certainly make up for its most immediate short givings. Seeing the OS work makes me very interested.
Thank you for another great video. I always look forward to new SBC videos. I'm always interested in reasonably priced ones like this one and I was excited to find this one was in the same range as a raspberry pi. I would like to try the distributions for this on raspberry pi. Suppose the Android and others would work?
Distros are board-specific, so you will not be able to run a ROCK64 image on a Pi I'm afraid.
Thank you so much for the reply :-)
Based on your reviews I went ahead and purchased a rock64. To date, I have been unable to get it to boot to a GUI desktop as your review of it shows.
Perhaps you could demonstrate the burning of the Debian OS you used in your video, as it doesn’t work for me or retry it yourself as I’ve tried many times to get it to boot but all I get is the terminal command.
Sorry to hear this. If you get a terminal command the board is clearly working OK, so that is good. And also you must have gone through a successful imaging process to boot to a terminal, which again is positive. What this suggests is that you have installed an OS without a desktop. I did my installs on the Rock64 some time ago, so the images may have changed -- although looking at the page on wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCK64_Main_Page#ROCK64_2 they appear identical. My advice would be to try some different images -- eg Bionic Desktop LXDE, or Armbian Stretch Desktop (both on the above page) and see if you can boot to a desktop using one of those. Good luck, and do report back. :)
Great video yet again. Thank you, sir.
Regarding the sysbench test, you should use the exact same operating system when comparing different boards. Otherwise, your results won't be valid. I mentioned this in your ODROID-Tinker-Pi review. Other than that, I really enjoy your reviews. Extremely informative!
I have replied on this issue on your other comment. :)
Yes, I saw that. Thank you. My old Gentoo background gives me a different perspective than typical end users. I'm so tired of using "power sucking" computers and am having trouble deciding which ARM device to get.
Very nice video Chris. What about more projects with single board computers?
I think this is one of the best boards out. No wifi or Bluetooth, but for the price and power it's great!
Agreed.
Testing the real throghput achieved on the USB3 and GBit LAN would be interesting
I like this vid also very much. Arthur here Thank you Sir so much
I prefer no WIFI, so I don't see this as a negative.
Ian Ide - I agree 100%. In a commercial application some customers may frown on built-in wireless access for security reasons. I known you could disable it in the kernel but you have to make them happy or you won't get paid.
Even before your product sees a customer, it needs to be certified, and the certification process for an intentional radiator (product with a radio) is incredibly more expensive. No wifi is a big advantage for small volume OEMs who might use these boards in their products.
I agree, im looking for this to be a home server, so usb 3 is far more important that wifi
As you said community support is nowhere near to raspberry pi. now sir it is up to you guide us how we can access GPIO's. :-D
GPIO support was there but predominately through via sysfs file system access. There has been some work in the last week or so on a python gpio library like the RpiGPIO one though.
I think it may be important to mention that you are using SD Card rather than EMMC. Since EMMC is faster. That goes with much of your benchmark videos.
Emmc is 7x faster if you need to flash it then use this tool. ameridroid.com/products/emmc-adapter
Any chance of getting hold of a RISC-V board and reviewing that ?
Another excellent video, thank you.
Hey Christopher. Great channel. Can this board hold up a plex server with 1-2 transconding streams simultaneously?
I love these reviews
Very informative
How about doing a video about interesting applications of these small boards.
Thanking for sharing your thoughts
I ma indeed thinking about this! :)
By measuring the load times of applications, you are measuring the performance of the interface that handles the IO for the memorycard, and the performance of the memorycard itself. Well done. No wonder your numbers are rather equal.
The RockChip Chip outperforms the CPU of the RaspberryPI by 12 times at least, because the CPU-Part of the Raspberry Pi is just a small accessory to the GPU of the broadcom chip. And thats
what you see in your prime-performance-test.
The RockChip is a fullfledged CPU with focus on IO perfomance and thus suitable for building web servers and/or NAS-Systems. Hence the missing Wifi- and Bluetooth interfaces.
I am well aware of what my tests here measure -- but they reflect real-world use for many people. I have done many more detailed benchmark videos, including the Rock64.
Sorry it wasn't my intention to offend you. But I think THIS video is a bit misleading for unexperienced viewers in regards to what this sbc is actualy capable of. Especialy from a IO-perfomance perspective when directly compared to the raspberry pi, which is a merly sluggish...
Great review, thanks! I just ordered one with the intention of running an iTunes server under Linux
Thanks a lot, very well done as usual!
I only missed a 4K test preferably within Android 7.1 ... there was even an app for that ... but seeing if RUclips can do 4K at 60Hz without stuttering that would be a fantastic promo for the device, since the others still seem to be not quite up to it yet.
It is still very surprising that the Odroid is performing so badly, maybe due to some poorly programmed driver, when it has a total advantage in hardware with its higher core count, CPU- and memory speed. On the other hand what is happening in your first benchmark test of the Rock64? Would love to know what causes this "extremely good looking"/fake? result.
Yes, sorry, I missed the 4K trick -- I really should have tried the app!
Maybe evaluating all these boards for 4K video capability with different media types, players, OS's could be an entire video by itself that a lot of viewers will be interested in.
Just bought it. A must have!
Now single card computers became very usable as secondary computers.... or even as first if you don't need more than basics task. That is awesome. It will not only be a toy for geeks!
I would love a laptop version of this one, in a 11,6" form factor. Like the pinebook. This would be AWESOME.
hey EC! great video! .... I'm new to SBC, and I just really need to know if this would support a large touchscreen monitor? I have a Dell 2240T and I want to connect the monitor to some sort of cheap SBC solution, to use my 22" touchscreen to control my SoundCraft Ui16 audio mixer, which operates over HTML5
Thanks for this. Potentially your touchscreen will work if it connects via USB and does mouse emulation. So it will depend on available drivers. But touchscreen support may well exist, eg in an Android install. Try the Pine64 forums for those with direct experience of this.
Nice video but I wasn't impressed with the OSs available. Debian and xenial desktop would break following an upgrade and reboot. Only bionic is stable for me
So how much faster is it to boot from eMMC versus SDCARD? What is the boot up time of this board?
Hello, Is there any chance that you can start adding compile times of Linux Kernel or other Phoronix Tests that are in the Test Suite? Maybe it can’t be done on ARM, but if it can it would be very interesting.
Thanks for this -- will look into it!
Well cool! I just got the Libre Computer Trinium, so I'll see how that goes. That Android image seems to be RUclips TV, so that's why it comes with RUclips TV, the worst edition of RUclips, so that's nice.
I have an old 4 bay RAID box. I'd like to use one of the bays to install something like this board to run a music/video server, using other three bays for drives. Where can I go to get more info on doing this? I use PLEX at the moment.
Just an idea: maybe sticking a fast usb-memoryt-stick into the boards, and measuring the speed of read/write - could be interesting too.
Energy usage would be interesting too :)
Both good ideas -- noted.
Awesome - and thanks for you mostly interesting (subs prove it I guess) content you produce :)
Great Rock-it video! Thanks. I should be getting a Rock64-4gb any day in the mail. 6*/
Enjoy your new SBC.
And? Do you like it? Have you ever tried gaming on it?
The footprint suggests that this is becoming the equivalent of the ATX Motherboard, For SBC's.
when it comes to SBCs it all depends on community support and what it is you really want to do with it. the raspberry pi 3 is tough to beat, but for example if you are into retrogaming the XU4 blows it away quite handily.
7:20
With all the features and functions this board provides, to not have wireless connectivity is most certianly the best option for this boards market. I believe this product shaved $10 cost to the consumer to be more of an upgrade at a much more appropriate cost - lots of people who used rapi2b for instance used two seperate usb 2.0 ports for soley 2.4ghz wifi and soley bluetooth to also save money and enable lower power operating states i.e turn off power to all but one port entirely. While it is quite right to give them critique for removing what we see as a now basis of technology, the ability to communicate wirelessly, I think the point of this product is to introduce a slightly more premium experince to people who already own or are already familar with pre-armv8 raspis. While it does give me a feeling of "pretender" syndrome I have to say it is great for tinkerers and software guys to have a cheap platform with emmc.
Charlie Croker - More like $5. The RPi 0 V1.3 doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth but the RPi 0W does and it is only a $5 difference with just one chip added onto the board.