The Sigma: The Most Powerful Single Board Windows PC 

It's crazy how powerful singleboard and micro form factors are getting. Its a really exciting time for processing power.

It's so refreshing to watch your channel, Dave. It's the most comprehensive, well research and clearly explained collection of videos that I've come across. Absolutely love it! Keep them coming 😊

Fantastically done, sir! Great review of so many facets. Only found your channel a month or two ago and am totally enjoying it.

This is an excellent opportunity for you to spin off a second channel that I would be incredibly interested in. Independant, unbiased reviews from an expert are difficult to find. Paid reviews that are more an education of a product or product tours would be perfectly fine as well as long as they are very clearly labeled and presented as such. You are my new favorite channel, keep up the amazing work!!

Just want to say that I enjoy everything you've been posting, Dave, and really appreciate the variety of videos. Keep it up 👍🏽👍🏽

I have never regretted subscribing. Very absorbing topics as always! Thank you Dave Plummer.

i really like your way to review everything! CLEAN AND STRAIGHT TO THE POINT. thanks !

You are a VERY good presenter. You keep the relevent info flowing and you're very knowledgable of computer tech, benchmarking, and of the products you are reviewing 🙂

Absolutely love the presentation here Dave … I have an ‘old’ Lattepanda Alpha from when they did the original kickstarter and it has been absolutely fantastic - I’ve used it in a 3D printed enclosure that I knocked up on TinkerCAD and can just throw it in my bag with a 12v wall wart and it’s my portable PC that I can just plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor wherever I am. I’d seen that the Sigma was out - it’s a fairly ‘robust’ price but I suspect I’ll end up getting one at some point … I am still waiting for my Hackboard2 from their Indegogo project and that will end up strapped to the back of my 27” touchscreen which I use as an oversized UI to Roon (that currently runs on an HP 800 Desktop Mini). Anyway - great review Dave, I really like the presentation. Hope you’ll do more … :-)

We need an audiobook version of that book, Dave. I know you're a busy man, and you may not have time to record it. But I would absolutely buy it if you released an audiobook version.

Impressive SBC in my opinion. Thanks for your time Dave. Cheers from OZ

I ordered one and it came in a few days ago. Everything works pretty much the same way it did in the video. Amazing little machine.

Very interesting! Glad you're having fun, and Best Wishes from Canada.

Hello Dave from Costa Rica. This amazing. truly amazing. on top of that the way you approach explained its amazines is the great way you approach.. beautiful and clear introduction, passed to hardware, the performance... great and clear explanation. each p word were putting me deeper and deeper in the curiosity. great work !!!!!

Excellent review of the LattePanda board. Many thanks for posting!

It's honestly astounding how small and portable powerful solutions are getting. It's been my dream since I was a kid playing with my GBP that I'd have something in my pocket that could watch movies, play 3D games and such. We're in the future as far as I'm concerned.

Excellent review, Dave! Your review was way better than most!

Stumbled here , great review with relevant testing. Worth my time Thanks Small dryer plug maybe Australian 😊

I found your video on this product rather interesting. Well presented and to the point.

Dave, please consider doing a follow up to the FPGA video. The subject is really really interesting and your way of explaining thing is unmatched 😊

You are the first person on YT that I fully believe the review is unbiased. 😀 Good stuff

An excellent review of the Sigma. Thank you.

subscribed because of what a straightforward and thorough review this was. thanks, Dave!

Love the review! More single board stuff!

I love this little computer and all of its stupidly overpowered customizable functionality. I would say this would make the ultimate micro home server (and probably still would) if it was not for its $700 price tag... Actually that is a cool idea for a video project, turn this thing into the ultimate home server! Just throw everything you can at it and see what it can do.

Succinct, practical, useful, no one better. Thank you

Awesome fun video, enjoyed hanging out Dave. Good times. 😊

Thanks very much Dave, very useful review indeed

This is an excellent development. I really hope they put some future development focus on the GPU. Gaming is the primary reason I have a PC, and it'd be nice to downsize from the massive ATX tower to a super compact device. And I love the low power draw of the system they have now!

Great review Dave. My Current 5U Rack mount beast is going to be replaced by something like this.

good addition for the mobile radio van or a 9 axis CNC milling machine (auto load unload, tool change and that does a visual inspection using multiple cameras and stores the raw data)..

Looks like the perfect little home server. Dual NIC, 12cores (16 Therads), dual NVME, intel GPU and low wattage Now if all the devices are recognized by linux - slap some proxmox on there and install all the "CPU intensive" stuff there...

Great info! Need to purchase this pc!

really enjoyed this one; thanks for your time-investment

Nice video, i especially like the slight off-focus camera around 5:52 , emulates what my 49yr old eyes would observe

Superb review brother! u just got a new sub.

Terrific, well-detailed review. Would be nice if you could've included fan noise (which drives my wife crazy) under the heaviest of loads, and then at normal.

The cable in your right hand at 2:49 is a power cable for UK and Ireland sockets, maybe a handful of others too. You're right about the European Schuko plug.

Thank you for this, super interesting.

2:28 I remember when the Lattepanda Alpha came out, and it too was feature rich, but then it was also HYPER expensive, so I'd expect nothing less. In fact, because these boards are so expensive, I would have felt ripped off if they didn't include enough. (IMO they still don't, basically the bare minimum to charge a premium)

this is normally a video i would see on Explaining Computers YT channel, nice to see you branching out to the SBC's Dave!

Wow, that's really cool. Will consider picking up this or a weaker model as a home server/arduino tinkering setup.

Very interesting. Thank you.

Great video! Thank you! Did you happen to make any modifications to power points in bios? We’re these modifications available? They are in the alpha 864s I have, I believe.

Wowee that's amazing so small for such a powerful machine.

These small PC's are getting more popular and more will come, like already posted it is surprising how powerful they are, reminds me of when the first transistor radios came on the scene years ago, how could a radio be that small, well now the PC's are going the same way, soon have a pocket size version lol.

@Dave's Garage Please try some FFmpeg encoding testing. That Iris Xe with 80EU's is a transcoding beast, this could make a great Proxmox node with all the ARR's in docker along Plex or Jellyfin fed from a separate NAS. I have a 1235u with the same GPU running Blue Iris/CPAI with 24/7 no substream recording on a dozen 5mp 1440P cameras @5fps and the CPU is ~40% with the GPU ~30% all while only using ~26w at the wall with a 14TB WD Purple drive. I run Frigate along with a Coral in another 1235U that is running bare metal HA using the substreams for notification's and automations and it sit's ~20w all while dealing with ~130 devices split between the Zwave, Zigbee, wifi, 433mhz, and BLE protocol's. I am very happy with the efficiency as I get everything in place but I already see some places where I can squeeze out a fare bit more. This rebuild all started as part of a desire to go solar this year and part of that was gauging usage and trimming the fat so the dual socket servers had to go.

Very cool. Shared to others.

now I want one of these for no good reason. you win this round marketing department

Oh that desk warms my heart. A scope and an Imsai? But wasn't that before your time.? I have a Sol Technology micro in my garage. It was the first micro I got to have total control over. All the other engineers fiddled with the Imsai. This was 77 or 78.

WiFi antennas are tricky. You don't realize how tiny those things are until you see them in front of you. The pictures on the internet deceivingly make them look bigger. We also need to remember that they are fragile and are not meant to be removed and reattached a lot. They are reliable enough if you only mess with them when you need to and don't do it frequently. They were made for you to set them and forget them. Some laptops come with brackets that not only hold the card down but the connectors for the antennas. I have no idea if they work well but none of my laptops ever had that and I never once had a faulty antenna connection. Of course I don't mess with the antennas unless I am installing a new WiFi card. I have the AX200NGW in my laptops and couldn't be happier with it. I am sure there may be better cards out there but I bought the AX200NGW since it is a good popular card. Is it the best? I can't tell, I never had other ones except for the mediocre ones I replaced with it. I also like that one since you can get them cheaply enough if you do some searching for prices. If your laptop has just one antenna cable buy a second one or a card that comes with them. I have a laptop that has just one antenna from the factory but what I did was just route the cable to an empty part of the case where it will not touch other electrical parts. I taped the excess cable down. Do not bend or cut the cable, it is a thin coaxial cable and you will ruin it. I just made a one loop coil of the excess cable and attached the antenna. Then I used some good electrical tape to tape the excess in place. It has been working well ever since and I now have better WiFi speed than I did with that mediocre Realtek card. Why do they even use those mediocre things? Is it cost or to make you want to upgrade? When I installed the second cable I did not mess with the screen bezel to do it. That is the key reason it is in the case itself. I just also used the already installed one that is in the screen bezel. I just don't think that we should have to tear apart the display to do these things, it seems like a lot of risk and work and a deliberate attempt to make us want a new laptop instead of upgrading it.

I wish we had computers like these when I was a kid. I remember having so many ideas for all sorts of mechanisms, gadgets or robots but didn't have a clue how to make a computer control anything in the real world. Schools would sometimes have simple control boxes that connected over serial but I never had any idea how to get such a thing, and nothing like the arduino IDE existed. I wonder what kind of hardware hacking I might be capable of now if I'd been able to play and experiment with GPIOs back then .

I found this very compelling since I own one of the first gen Latapanda SBC's and let's just say it wasn't a good purchase. Because of that experience I wouldn't even consider the Sigma when it came out. Now I'm considering it again.

"Small Drier" !! I love it. I was thinking the same!!

Thanks Dave i enjoyed the video.

I'm looking forward to the PC I can stick on the back of my monitor and use for gaming. A setup I could move about the house easily and play cross platform with my sons XBox would be perfect!

Excellent review, your a natural

Looks so perfect for my needs wish I could afford it.

This was very informative. I wonder if you have any recomendations for a single board windows PC that would be a great dedicated NDI decoder.

@2:50 The first two power cords are for IE/UK and then for EU including funny notches for FR/BE etc.

If memory serves me well enough, I seem to recall hearing that this board does have a very small 2-position COM select switch to provide users the option of RS232 vs RS485 support via the 9-pin COM header, but I might be mistaken. Didn't hear anything mentioned about it...though it isn't really a biggie for nearly all typical use cases. Can you confirm whether or not the onboard Gb Ethernet adapters provide PoE support? Thanks for awesome unboxing and review, Dave. You're really quite good at it, even if you don't much care to do it! Cheers

The piano backdrop music made this video so relaxing 🥺

Now this is an extremely impressive device.. It checks a lot if not every box.. Intel NIC, fast RAM, decent GPU, extensibility, thunderbolt and as you benchmarked does very well.... Very tempting and pretty much beats the Intel 13th gen Pro NUC as far as I can see and then some.... Pricing is still on the very steep end I suppose but then again, that is the market these days

It's an i5 1340p on a tiny board, the laptop version of the 13400. It appears very well designed and produced, and seems to allow that 1340 to saturate it's power targets.

Great review! Do you know what is the resolution limitation for the integrated GPU? May I also know what is the audio quality like (low, mid, high)?

Great Video!

Hey Dave, I realise I am a little late to the party and this may have been said already. The first plug you returned to the box is the British plug design. Lastly, I love your content (and task manager lol) please keep doing what you do.

Nice video again Dave. I'm looking for a computer that can run in my soundstudio. I'm using Presonus Studio One together with some VST plugins and approximately 20 to 60 track simultaneously. Presonus uses the GPU for drawing the faders, volume graphs in real time. I also need some control software for my Focusrite Digital Interface. It needs to absolutely as quite as possible. What is your guess, would this single board computer fit my needs?

Keep punchin thi board Dave. It is a very interesting bit of kit. Can it run top end audio DAWs like cubase.?

How did you speed up footage smoothly like you have it? It looks really crisp and fluid looking. Davinci Resolve optical flow? Thanks again Dave!

I wish this had VGA out on the machine as well. I like that in a PC with HDMI also. Sometimes I like 4:3 Tube stuff. Sometimes I like an HDMI widescreen tilted for pinball.

I'm waiting for the ryzen 7040 framework boards, though we might see some Z1 SBC from other vendors soon too. (the 780m igpu on the 7840 and Z1 extreme should be about twice as fast as the xe on the sigma)

Dave, love this and these type of videos! Please keep them coming. LattePanda Sigma: Hmmmmm well the hardware says, "firewall," but the pricing at $648USD is $300 overpriced. So no. Just no. I WANT to like their brand, and they have some (other) good SBCs, but I can get a Beelink or other knockoff mini with two network prots (or a MOGINSOK clone of a Protectli fan-less fw) for less than $200 less. If this was in the $300 - $400 range, rack mounting these would make a decent cluster. :) I miss Threadrippers. :(

Excellent content, as per usual.

Great review Dave! Definitely seems like a good low power NAS or Firewall appliance.

I have discovered some desktop computers that are single board computers. Dell Micros and equivalents. The micro I own supports 32 GB RAM, 1x M.2 SSD, 1x M.2 WLAN. ethernet, one SATA, 4 USB3 on the back, 1 x Dp. It's quite old, Optiplex 7050. No header though. I can grip the case across its length, but it's too heavy for me to pick up. This has an i5, it supports i7 too. Although it is a SBC, it is intended to be use in its case.

I have never heard of that single-board system, but I might use it as a retro-gaming machine/spare computer connected to a TV.

Nice this is wonderful for academic purposes

Amazing! This is beating out top shelf CPUs from what it looks like.

I've got 2 deck out systems. evo NVME, RTX30xx, Crucial Ram etc. That little board is faster than my I7-10700K and almost as fast as my I7-12700K (single core of course) on geekbench. Pretty impressive.

Hey Dave, one very important thing you didn't mention, is the thunderbolt routed via the chipset or connected directly to the CPU ?

I was going to go down the LattePanda path then decided to go with a Erying Mini ITX solution with an Intel 12700H cpu built in. The whole build with a dedicated low profile GPU for me came out about the same price as just one LattePanda board.

Hey Cap'n Dave -- How are you liking the RIGOL scope? Which model number? How about a show on the monitoring and logic gear you have around the shop!? ❤🎉

So basically, like a laptop board with 3 M.2 slots, 2x2.5G ports and GPIO. Pretty nice if you need it, considering the price is just $130 more than the Framework’s 13th gen i5 board (which uses the same CPU).

This sounds like the perfect solution for a off-grid home computer

why am I just discovering Dave's Garage?!? Great video, just subscribed!

I absolutely don't need one of these. But I'm sure as hell going to buy one. Might as well upgrade my RV main server. 🤷‍♂️

A trick for the wifi antennas that Ive learnt is to snap, clip it in from an angle (30 to 40 degrees), not straight down, you'll bend stuff.

Please test as an RDP server. Having a desktop host on demand is really handy. What’s the idle power usage?

Can't wait for the Dave Tech Tips channel to take off.

Benchmarks mean i am subscribing.

I noticed a Hakko FX-888D soldering station. I have the same unit at home. Try a JBC station (& review it), you'll thank me!

Thats a good find!!

im thinking of adding this to my GR supra. datalogging, tune flashing, obd2 diagnostics, google maps, websurfing video gaming for passenger.

with good internal gpu comparisonable with discrete one, this red pill was a deal

Dave I have a problem you are perfect for helping me with. I graduated high school in May 1995 & was a big tech nerd (God I miss those days of the tech industry 😢) I went from DOS 6.22 to Widows for Workgroups 3.11 to Windows 95, Windows 98 etc. I need to recreate a Windows 95 or 98 system so I can play the game series The Journeyman Project (1: Pegasus Prime, 2: Buried In Time & 3: Legacy of Time). I have tried creating a Virtualbox & I just can't get it to work properly & these particular games run horribly on newer versions. Any thoughts? Thank you!

I want one! And I want one more if it will make a great Test Box that good for Cyber Sec.

Are there any cases for that thing? I have a couple of potential use situations for that, but I need to put it in something! Enjoyed the review, btw.

Take a look at the OneDock eGPU adapter. Doesn't need a huge thing like the razer any more.

Great video Dave, but the 1340p have 4 performance cores and 8 efficient cores not the other way around (12:18) but still very informative and entertaining video.