Agreed. They're doing something that only Apple was able to do until now. Windows has its own ARM translation layer but it works/worked horribly, yet these volunteers are making software that is giving ARM SBCs even more versatility as desktop systems.
This is for the most part a single man effort by a man known as ptitSeb. He is well known in the OpenPandora community, as this all started with him porting hundreds of open and closed source games to that wonderful little system. As he ran out of open source games he started with this project to make even more games playable on arm platforms.
If you had shown me this a couple years ago I would have thought this was a trick-- this kind of performance is insane! Really excited to see what the future brings. As this technology evolves imagine what it'll mean to devices like a potential steam deck 2, for example -- you could have much bigger battery life for starters.
I wouldn't call ~210€ exactly cheap either but then again, getting a used x86 machine of around that price point probably takes more space and wastes more energy.
@@MegaManNeo Nah but it’s cheaper than most gpus right now. Also yeah I’m really big on things being energy efficient,cool,and quiet. I think I’m just getting old though haha. I’d rather have a solid gaming experience on lower settings at a lower resolution on say a 75w 1660 super than I would spending thousands on a 4090 with a 300w tdp that’s going to turn my room into a tropical country mid July.
@@gambyt5952 True, and while we all wish it was cheaper than 210 pounds. By the time you are done upgrading an SFF used pc to turn it into a gaming computer you'll end up approached at least 300 dollars american any ways. Where I live, the cheapest you can get an 6th or 7th gen I-5 SFF PC is 100 dollars. You can usually pick them up from local universities surplus and salvage programs. Then you still need to add an SSD. Since they are sold without SSD's. You can get an 1 tb SSD right now for 55 dollars. That puts you at around 160 dollars so far. With modern games you need at least 32 gb of ram. That'll cost you 80 dollars. So now you are at 240 dollars. You don't need to buy an OS, and these older computers can't run windows 11 any ways. So at least Ubuntu, pop os, and manjaro are free. But you still need to buy an graphics card. And if you want to buy an new graphics card. Then the RX 6400 low profile will cost you 150. End result is that building an basic small form factor gaming PC will cost you 400 dollars american after taxes. Or in terms of pounds thats around 330 pounds sterling. Which is 120 pounds more expensive than the Rock 5.
Stereo sound is amazing, even on headphones. I thought for a second that sound was coming from my speakers until I pulled an ear out. Was worried I would disturb someone, but nope.
Higher end mobile phone already do that, but with so little support is quite difficult to get into it, the power is there just need more dedicated Devs working on it and maybe one day we will have true all in one device.
nvme speeds differ on various rockpi models - something to watch out for - new sbc should be on the way soonish - another thing to note - the combo of more cores,fast nvme and 2.5gbe and wifi7 will make a difference
would recommend testing the harder (city) tracks for Gran Turismo 4. Sadly most systems that can GT4 great fall apart in the slower tracks due to poor optimisation and heavy screenspace effects. Some great work by open source devs (once again!) on getting some amazing performance on x86, something that highly paid Windows-on-ARM engineers would kill for! I've also seen other videos claiming that the Rockchip SoCs are even faster than their real life examples due to worse drivers compared to their equivalent Qualcomm competitors (the SD850 is actually slower than this chip on paper, for example!) so hopefully a lot of optimising coming their way!
Source Engine -> DirectX 9/10 -> Wine (-> OpenGL) -> box86/box64 The technical overhead of the translation layers is insane, and yet, watching those games run /at all/ is a marvel. I am so, so impressed by this chip! :D It is amazing and I can't wait to see future iterations of this!
Great video, You should let people know the difference between this chip and the “S” variant, Found on the Orange Pi so they know what to look out for… they are not the same chip! Ones a value chip, and the other is geared for performance. It would of been “fun” to know the temps before and after a good gaming session. (How that case worked, or not.). 🙏
Hi ETA, outstanding intel about ARM gaming 🥳🥳🥳, how about an active cooling for that Soc??? Just how it did, exceeded my expectations in such early state but just wondering how far can go with a good cooling 😎
I need a PC that is passively-cooled, small, has at least 2 m2 slots, can run Wow Classic(old graphics) and Warcraft 3(due to being old it completely destroys PCs with bad single-thread performance), Intellij IDEa and run code smoothly. It's good to see that with each passing day it's getting closer and closer. I will sell my desktop when SBC I described will be available.
I was wondering about the temps. Is the passive cooling good enough for this ? Maybe some stress testing would be interesting. The Orange Pi 5 has a heatsink with a small fan available for it.
Couldn't find a price for it. The Rock Pi 4B costs at least 115 € in my country which should make this a bit more expensive. The case comes on top. For 160 bucks I get a "full" Ryzen 2000 mini PC which definitely can run Windows apps. So in terms of usability and costs it does not make a lot of sense for me.
From one of the links ETA provided, to the USA it's about 170$ for just the SBC, no case or extras. I agree, neat idea but butts up against "real" PC systems in terms of price.
Just wanted to reply something like this - simply not worth the price. And you have not even considered the price of the SSD and a capable power supply. Edit - also for this kind of money IMO the Xbox Series S is the best viable option for the target audience. You have Retroarch there which covers a lot of systems and also very good standalone PS2 and Gamecube/Wii emulators.
@@HungarianDerrickRose lol its a fortune a power supply? Some images only need a microSD. Do better research. Theres the same chip board being sold cheaper if that causes u much stress. Edit: sure any intel pc or console will do better if hard gaming is what you're looking for and ignoring the possibility of cloud gaming.
@@darkevilpt5306 What better research? I just compared the theoretical price of _this_ board (plus case, a fast SD card for your sake, and a power supply, i checked the prices on Ameridroid) and you will spend cca. USD 200 + shipping on a board that is far less capable than a 4th gen Core i5 based tiny PC or an XSS. IMO it is not wort that price - cool toy but (for me) way overpriced. FYI: cloud gaming on the Xbox is a thing.
...unless you want to play a competitive game that demands Windows due to anticheat incompatibility on Linux. That, and mouse smoothing (And yes, I'm aware it is possible to "turn it off" but it seems that it doesn't "turn off at all".)
Wrong dude, it's the software that still needs to catch up with RK3588 hardware to fully benefit of such powerful ARM64 SoC. Software eventually will do.
@@josephgospa4031 Hardware compatibility =/= software compatibility. Even so, the incompatibilities are there (since years ago, mind you) and it won't (magically) change now.
Do you have the link for the rock5 sbc? I found a few, but I don't know the sites, so I'm a bit worried about using them without verification of their safety.
Cool, but I've had enough of arm base SBC since raspberry 3 then 4 to know that these are ultra limited and will always be for gaming. I don't bother anymore.
Note: such rubber bands on nvme SSD will degrade after 3-7 months of SSD heating up and just stop functioning... Suggest to use either zip ties or proper heatsink attachment
This is great but what about using this in a desktop environment, how about a budget media center, or playing youtube beyond HD videos? Can it play 1080p? Not everything needs to be a gaming device.
hey can you set this up with a rca cable? in the way that the raspberry pi 4 can do ? cause this looks awesome and i like to do a retro gaming setup :)
I am a bit confused why Vulkan-backend is mentioned multiple times. This is a linux build and as far as I know Vulkan is supported only on Android for this board?
It's cool what it is capable of but a Mele 3Q does full windows, Batocera, and Linux with a smaller footprint. I know the architecture is different but for price, tdp and specs Mele is better.
Great review as always. It would be interesting to test this on the cheaper RK3588s variants. Also there is a ARM64 based system that runs (not well) Steam from a small company called Apple. :) Sadly it there is not native version of the Steam app, but ti would be interesting to try my version of L4D on it.
I already have waaaay too many computers at hand, let it be x86 or ARM to justify another just now. However, I love seeing this because this is something not supposed to work like that, running x86_64 code on Aarch64.
Seeing the raw power of Snapdragon chips I keep wondering when will we see something like with with SD chips. Saw old video how an Sd845(55) ran crysis 3 at 30fps with stutter because of memory, just thinking how would 8th gen would perform is nuts.
When streaming to this device it barely needs to do anything. The only bottleneck would be the video output. Anything below 4k 60fps should run just fine - as far as your streaming PC can run it.
So. PSA; the rock5b+ sounds like a pretty big update right? lpddr4/4x to lpddr5 and bifurvated m.keys, with wifi actually on the board. WELL turns out that lpddr4/4x ran at 4224MT/s And 5 runs at 54 or 5500 so sounds obviously better right? well no. lpddr4/4x has a 64 bit bus vs lpddr5 having dual 16 bit busses but is said as 32 bit. so when doing "the math" theres about 30% less data transferred per length of time. It kept emphasizing efficiency and all this other ..... and all i could think is less data per unit of time equals worse. idk whythese SBC makers do this, sorta like orange pi 5 pro and pro max, each one loses something good. pro is the s variant so why even have nvme when you can just get the plus, its lpddr5 is only 1 module vs all other 3588 having 2. & lebun cat has been making quality 55x85 mm rk3588 boards for a while. i do wish that ANYBODY would notice the RADXA NIO 12L. Im also extremely curious how Opi launched a cm5 day one of radxa's. BTW because I loved thee psp im making a cm3 (radxa) cm4 (orange pi and everyone else whho used rk3566 like SOquartz) cm4 raspberry pi, and cmRV being the mars milkv as a module. i had been wishing for alt carriers for cm3588+ but ram is 2133 and 2400 its strange
Anyone try this and have issues with the interface crashing or stop responding? The steam backend seems completely fine because the terminal doesn't report any errors
Interesting to watch and probably fun to mess around with but probably impractical for the average person as even those cheap last gen Intel atom mini PC or newer ones like the n100 you reviewed outperform this at similar or even cheaper cost. Older 2XXX/3XXX ryzen mini PC can be had for not much more as well.
A Celeron should outperform the arm board in steam gaming because it would run games natively. But I'm not sure you can get a whole Celeron system for this price.
@@clochard4074 you can get a second hand tiny PC running a 4th gen Core i5 for less than the total price of this (something line a Lenovo M93p tiny). Also as I stated here in another comment: if you can spend this kind of money on an emulation/gaming system, you should really aim for the Xbox Series S (although the Xbox can't run Steam games).
You don't buy this to play games. It's just a proof of concept of what could be done. May be someone will buy it to build an arcade machine? Besides that, there's insane amount of industrial use for things like this.
