WAY faster than a Raspberry Pi-but is it enough? 

I'm with you on the forums vs discord thing. Moving to discord not only makes it harder to find things, but all the information is going to be completely gone once the discord server shuts down.

If all these "Pi Killers" would focus more on software and community instead of trying to one-up each other in hardware there might be an actual rival to the Pi. And all these Rock 5 boards are neat, but they're being compared to a Pi 4, which is rapidly approaching four years old. I'm glad you're out there showing what does, and mostly doesn't, work.

I'm just really freaking glad to see other non-pi boards (raspberry specifically) get some competent RU-vid coverage.

Oh man, I really feel your Discord pain. For me, it also runs slows / seems to hog memory on my older laptop, so I've just gotten into the habit of popping in, asking my question, and then immediately singing out

So glad your back into this engineering. Great content, very appreciated! More please!

This may not be the Pi Killer I'm looking for, but Jeff Geerling is definitely the channel I'm looking for! That's why I subbed and stayed subbed after he told us to unsubscribe!

I HAVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR THIS VIDEO! Thank you for covering this amazing SBC.

The old/recycled/used USFF PC option really needs to be pushed more often. It's often a much more viable option in many cases, and usually easier to find.

This SBC has the same issue as every one of them which is not a Raspberry Pi that is a mixture of all the things you mentioned. Great performance on paper for a much higher price with way less support. I still wait to see anything that can seriously compete with their RPi.

If Radsa/Pine64 could get the RK3399 and RK3588 truly mainline, then RPi would truly have a competitor in a lot of good boards. Until then...

This is literally the board I was waiting for! So terrible to hear, that you had issues with compiling a kernel. Waiting to see you make some progress with it. If so, I will consider to use it for a multi media side project. Great video, as always! Thanks!

The most complete video on a Rock Pi 5 / Orange Pi 5 on RU-vid! Glad you are feeling better

Being an SRE engineer, I am torn between being mad about the software support for this board and being happy that it has forced me to learn some core Linux concepts I have been avoiding for years.

Please keep covering the other boards though Jeff. Hopefully you can drum up more community support for these other boards. Then we would rally see the SBC market start to flourish. With people being more and more privacy and tech savvy these days. We could really use newer products for Homelabs and networks everywhere. As always great content brotha!

Great job on the video Jeff! Thanks for making it.

Early comments are great because none of us have watched yet and we’re just reacting to the title and first ten seconds

If they offered that 10GB/s NIC in an SFP+ variant, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

I was looking at these with skepticism. Very well laid out pros and cons on your part. I don't mind having to work a bit, but frankly, that looks like a person would put more work in to making it work just right than working WITH it. I am keeping watch, but not ready to jump in just yet. You gave me a better sense of the real current state of the rock ecosystem. Many thanks.

Hi Jeff. Your channel is amazing :) Thank you for making these great videos!

Great review and great board. Thanks Jeff

I would love to see a comparison of the various OS offerings, since I had a ton of issues with Radxa's Debian image, but as soon as I switched to DietPi or Armbian, the issues went away. DietPi in particular has proven stable in a week-long stress test, and Armbian support came out pretty much the day my Rock5B was delivered, which was nice. They both have offerings for Raspberry Pi and Generic x86, and their documentation and support are pretty good.

I feel like ARM licensees and integrators just don't "get" open source. They all depend on Linux support, but they insist on third party patches and black box firmwares all over the place. I know there are people in the community that have been working to change things, but it seems crazy I can find videos from Greg Kroah-Hartman from like 15 years ago telling the ARM guys to get their crap in order.

Glad to be not the only person who misses forums, I don't think I do anywhere near as much "online socialising", as it were, since Discord etc. started taking over from forums. Live chat is to... well, in the moment to be able to post a good question and get a good variety of answers from different people using different methods. I always like to weigh up my options before doing something. As for the thin client PCs, if you're willing to go with less powerful hardware, but still technically more power than an SBC, you can find Celeron based thin clients by HP on Ebay for as little as £25. I used one to make a smart TV box for my dad, as he was getting frustrated with how slow and laggy his TVs smart functions were. I just installed Kodi and gave him one of my spare game controllers for a remote.

Great to see you back, my friend.

Ever since I switched to armbian on this board it runs very smooth and stable. I run it from nvme. Going to use it for different containers and object detection using the npu. Those thin client like devices all lack that kind of capabilities having no npu.

It's really hard to justify getting one of these when you figure in the cost of the power supply, a 500 gb. NVME drive, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.. when you can go out and buy an actual Windows laptop for the same price, that you can pull out of the box, boot it up, and go to work. Thanks for the review Jeff!😉 I have a RPi 4B and use it daily as a monitor for my security cams, but I have like $150 total in it, a metal case, and power supply, and it's hooked to an existing spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I think the impetus behind cheap SBC's is fading fast.😐

Finally some really helpful video for the community, thanks.

Thanks Geoff. Nice review.

The SW support is the sole reason RPi matters. The move to focus on linux and support from RPi foundation was genius move.

Thanks for the great content Jeff!

This is a very interesting, informative video. Great job!

If Radxa at least provides the kernel headers, it might be possible to just build the missing drivers without building the whole kernel. This won't be an option if anything in the kernel would have to be modified for the drivers to work, but it would be a starting point.

9:37 that adapter is only PCIe 1x so it won't make use of all 4 lanes!

Fantastic job on this video. Kudos!

Always glad to see some other sbc boards out there but you summed it up well with the cost being too high. The Raspberry Pi shortage is getting ridiculous at this point and would like to see someone else enter the space and have good software support at a reasonable price. For me I typically want low power use in a sbc and let my Epyc 24 core based server handle any major number crunching anyways. I plan to eventually run several zero w setups on solar to monitor various things around our acreage, so main thing I need is to actually be able to get the board and tweak it for minimum power usage.

Hey man! Glad to see these videos again on your channel! Because of you i started using again my Raspberry PI the first model, interesting ride with it :))) ... How are you feeling ? Is this clip shot before you did the surgery or after ? Get healthy and keep up the good work! Greetings from Romania!

Brilliant review, as yours always are. You got right to the heart of the issue - software support and docs. If Radxa (or any of the other sbc builders) really want to challenge the Pi Foundation’s market then they have to press the SoC vendors like rockchip to get their platforms supported in the mainline kernels much faster. Also spot on with the comparison to small used TMM boxes. From a cost, performance and ease of use perspective there is no comparison - the TMM systems win hands down. It’s not even close. The ARM SBCs only really compete on perf per watt (and maybe size).

wow, it's getting there. I'm way too faint of heart to dive in now, but I'll follow your progress with great interest!!!

Good to see you up and about, and posting some new vid’s. Any chance you could post a link for the tiny PC?

The Edge2 board costs so much because of the TPU cores - its main purpose is to push neural nets, tensorflow lite, etc. incomparably faster than RPi or any other board that does not have TPU and consumes relatively low power. I'm planing to buy Edge 2 board for my hobby ANN projects, even though it's expensive, it's irreplaceable - TPU cores are really hard to come by these days.

You need an pcie 3.0 x4 riser for the m2 nvme slot! The thing you used in this video will probably only transfer 1 lane. You could put an adapter like that in the wifi m2 slot to use it's pci-e lane. There can be 2 lanes on this but not that often. There are 5 port SATA adapters for the nvme m2 slot that could make this board a good solution for Nas usage. Except from the bad kernel support.

RTC battery - tie an overhand knot in it to change the drection of "lay" by 90 degrees. to get 180 desgrees, use 2 overhand knots.

Thanks so much for the review, I was going to buy one of these.

That blotchy issue was the same that I had on the orange pi 3 lts armbian with the cinnamon desktop! I found that the xcfe actually had a lack of those issues, I do not know if the same would apply for this sbc, though it could be a good shot!

Everyone uses discord servers for everything nowadays. I hate it too.

Top G Jeff, I appreciate your content so much 🙏. 🙏. I'm lost without your reviews and guidance. Thank you and keep up the awesome work 👏 😀.

I went all in and got a Radxa Rock 5B with 16GB RAM. Thanks to this video, I discovered some things I did not know, including how to activate the fan. This is a hardware rich board but it needs great software to support it as you know. I really hope Radxa is up to supporting this board the way it deserves to be supported. I have mine booting from a 1TB Seagate Fire Cuda SSD which makes booting up extremely fast. It is a very ease procedure to get everything set up. Just follow the instructions.

100% with you on the Discord thing. I love Discord for the kinds of chat you would have had a decade ago on Skype, IRC, Mumble, or Ventrilo. As a replacement for forums and wikis though, it makes no sense. I've given up on using things because the devs and community were only reachable through Discord. I'd be slightly less averse to joining servers if I could have a fully distinct identity on each one, just like I could if I was posting on forums, but the best Discord has is per-server profiles.

Thank you for this! I have been wondering if it is time to try new non-RPi boards. Not yet! :D

As always a nice video!! Did you ever try Odroid boards? The biggest reason for me use them is the emmc running a DB for years isn't a problem!

It should not be forgotten what a mess the Pi 4 was when it was first released. It had 2 4K capable HDMI ports, neither of which could actually be made to play 4K video in software. The supposed cheap price was also a misnomer to some degree because it very quickly became apparent that you had to have additional cooling and a new HDMI cable too. Then we had the hardware fault with the initial batch. All indications were that Upton didn't actually put the Pi 4 through any decent form of quality control testing. It took a year before decent software support came along, with pretty much zero support from Upton and Co. There is no doubt that it currently has a wide amount of community support but this should not be taken for granted going forward because technology moves forward at lightning pace and with no Pi 5 coming out this year, the competition has a huge opportunity to kill off the Pi. These RK3588/S boards are quite new (the Orange Pi 5 only a month or so into the market) and community support has already advanced very quickly. I get the thoughts about the Rock 5B's price, although in the current climate, purchasing a Pi 4 at the prices often demanded makes others models look far more attractive. The I/O on the Rock 5 is quite amazing really and whilst the Orange Pi 5 I/O is not as good, it still offers some decent enough storage and ports for the price being paid. And of course the SOC completely blows the Pi 4 away in spectacular fashion. Time will tell of course but there is opportunity to either kill off the Raspberry Pi or make a large dent in it's market. Only the board manufacturers and Rockchip will know what kind of effort they intend to put into supporting these new products. If there is one area that Rockchip are failing at right now, it is the outdated kernel that that they have provided, which will make development a slower process hen it should be.

I've exclusively used RPis over the years for many projects, with also heavy graphical (Qt) application and the use of the GPIOs. Last month I got my first RockPi 4 SE and it was really a mixed experience. Support (searches on the internet) as well as installation and the general setup felt way harder than on the RPi, and I work with Linux systems quite often. Also, other "maker" capabilities are IMHO not that good than on the Pi. So I will probably fall back mostly on the RPi for my "maker" things and may use other, faster boards for stuff like small home servers.

I'm loving my Orange Pi 5. The Armbian build handles all video streaming like a champ and can even do 120 hz at 1080, and the android build runs Dolphin, AetherSX2, and Clone Hero really well

Great video, Jeff. We have to have some Linux ARM support at my job, so I've really been searching for a decent ARM SBC I could have at home to tinker with. We have access to ARM VM's on Azure so this would really be for fun. The extra price vs a RPi 4 isn't a huge deal given the better capabilities. But the poor software/community support is a huge detractor. Things would be SO MUCH better if these SBCs "just worked". I'm amazed none of them standardize on UEFI support.

great analysis and great to test additional hardware like the M2 PCIe or 10G M.2

Been using a FriendlyElec NanoPi R6s with the same SoC. Personally, the Rockchip and Mali driver situation and accompaning hacks, it feels quite difficult really getting into it. I haven't gotten PhotoPrism to recognize the NPU, let alone the GPU - and often I can't tell if Jellyfin is using the integrated Mali GPU for transcoding. And, I see not one but two /dev/dri/renderDxxx devices as well as card0 and card1. I love the amazing performance of this thing though; raw computing on these just rules. It sure is a neat SoC! But Rockchip's open source software situation is a mess. Four Github repos, all seemingly for GPU access, and none have a very clear README imo. And, their Wiki links to a forked ffmpeg repo that no longer exists...bummer. Still love to see those chips pop up in more products, because it sure is absurdly powerful! Almost at 10 docker containers - Jellyfin, Shoko, tvheadend, tubesync, photoprism, and more - and none of them are slow. Its awesome. :D

A pi killer would be a device that can truly give up control of one core to user code, preventing Linux from running interrupts on it, programmable io/dma for the gpio headers, better dac/adc etc. It always seems the rivals try to compete on compute power, instead of the GPIO, the thing the pi was originally built for.

Great video! I'm running Debian 11 (Radxa version) on this SBC with a test version of Home Assistant supervised in Docker on top and although is runs very smooth indeed, thanks to the CPU and the NVME drive, I cannot get Apparmor, which is part of Debian 11 if I'm not mistaken, to run. Home Assistant keeps on complaining about it and it really annoys me so you definitely have a point when you say that the implementation by Radxa of Linux is a work in progress.

12:35 I agree with you there. I hate Discord. Solutions should be written in forums, which a search engine can also index. Discord is not a solution, it's a problem.

1. I totally agree with you about the Radxa documentation and getting started / setting up. I have not started with my RP5 yet, but I also have a Rock pi 4B and a Rock 3a and I feel your pain EDIT: I feel like the ability to boot an ISO installer image from USB would solve at least some of these difficulties 2. That m.2 adapter you showed is only pcie x1 I think - I'd use an m.2 adapter board with a pcie x4 slot directly on it and a pcie extension ribbon cable

Hi Jeff. I just made a comparison video of RK3588 boards I've got. Khadas Edge2 included. And too bad but Rock5B came in last in my favorites list. On paper it should be great, but in reality it's not ready. I'm waiting for mainline support before I'll make my Rock5B review. Khadas is more expensive, but the support team is a lot more active. Every question is answered on the forum. They adapt images when something isn't working. So until mainline is there, this is the better way to go if you are not a developer yourself. Rock5B runs best with Armbian and GPU and Multimedia repo's installed. You can install to NVMe with it with armbian-config. Your pc is much more mass production. So cheaper to make, less cost to create software and support. Greetings, NicoD

I'm with you on Discord. Any time I need a separate app is annoying (even if I have it installed already).

Great review Jeff.

I myself am running some Radxa hardware in my lab. Running Pi-Hole, Prometheus, Grafana, OMV on a Rock 4C+ and 4 SE. That key error on Radxa provided OSes was my first error I ever encountered. I use Diet Pi for them, which has Rockchip support, unlike AllWinner.

Man Jeff, I can't bring myself to buy a Khadas board either. The Rock 5B was expensive enough at least for me. The Edge 2 is almost twice as expensive. Why? No idea. I have never even heard of someone really using one. If you've never touched one either I legitimately have no idea who is using these or why they would overpay so much for something like this. I really like that you mentioned the parallels between the Rock 5B's issues and some of the Raspberry Pi's issues. Both of them shipped with terrible / non-existent boot loaders that needed firmware updates. That's so dumb that the user manual recommends using the USB to TTY serial console. I cannot stand when boards tell you to use this. Fortunately you can use a mouse and keyboard with the Rock 5B but there's a lot of other boards that you actually do have to use the USB to serial console. It's an automatic disqualification to be a Pi replacement if you have to use a USB to TTY serial adapter at any point. Fantastic coverage Jeff. The Rock 5B is definitely not a Pi killer or at least I wouldn't call it that. It's definitely a higher performing board but it also costs more. Some people would do really well building a NAS or server off of this. It's not going to be as easy as a Pi for beginners though. I had to do the firmware update as well on mine to get NVMe boot working and I've found that with almost every board I've touched in the past year which is really disappointing. It's only a question of how hard it is to do it. I would rate Radxa a "Medium". It's not as easy as it should be. They have a lot of work to do on support still before we could call this a Pi killer or a Pi replacement. It's not quite there yet. It's a great high performance option though in this crazy market for those who may be looking for something like this.

Very cool board. To me passive cooling and efficiency is important and I will pay more for a bit lower spec compared to used mini PCs. However, compatibility is no. 1 which is why I am still on the pi. When this board catches up, I might be interested (if at also has a cool heatsink case) Completely agree about the discord point!!!!!!!!!

Another excellent video - the other SBCs out there promise much but are often disappointing in their execution. Reminder to upcycle old thin clients is on point!

12:30 I like how Zulip is used in Rust language discussions, where you can link to the specific real-time comment for future reference by others.

The Pi5 will be interesting, will it be this powerful or better? The Rockchip parts are looking good and from the comments, software support is still evolving.

Jeff, you should look at the lattepanda delta 3 sbc, its a very powerful computer, housing an intel chip and decent IO, also it can run windows 11 and ubuntu by default, its worth checking it out.

Great info, thank you. I can see where this would be useful in certain cases, but not for me.

Jeff, this is, again, a KILLER video! ❤

*sigh* they never are. The only pi killer for me has been the udoox86, and that's because not only is it more powerful, but it also runs full x86 so I can use ubuntu with all the struggles and support that comes with. Its like easy mode compared to these other sbcs that are basically for developers

Great video! What I take away from this and most reviews on Explaining Computers is that ARM sbcs have poor software and buggy operation and you have to be a computer engineer to get much out of them. Maybe RPis are different, but they seem so under powered as to have limited use by anyone not a CE. I admire your patience, and your clever determination to get these things even minimally useful. It’s obvious such boards spend money on great hardware but do little on software. Hope you are healing quickly!

Great video! I'm currently setting up a Rock 5b as a telescope computer (controls image capture, mount movement, auto guiding, etc). I tried the official Radxa images, but had the best luck with Armbian. I had no issuses getting it to boot off NVMe. The instructions (at least at the time I did it) were terrible, but start with a Radxa Debian image on eMMC, then flash using the Radxa provided bootloader and also write Armbian to the NVMe. Then remove the eMMC card and reboot. No special cables... didn't even need to have a keyboard and mouse, just found it on the network and used SSH. I can't comment on video as I remote in with SSH and VNC, but most other things seem pretty stable. I'm running on 12v using a "dumb" (non PD) USB C cable. I haven't been able to make the WiFi/Bluetooth card work longer than a few minutes at a time though... something is fishy there. Ethernet is solid. The big advantage of an ARM computer like this is power consumption. I need to be able to run remotely on a 12v battery, so ARM is the clear winner regardless of price similarities with more powerful systems.

I've been running this thing with Archlinux ARM (see forum posts) as my new homeserver for a month. It's been really great, but the lack of available cases/coolers is a bit annoying. Can't wait for full mainline support, feels like it's just around the corner. Nice to see you cover this nice board! I had troubles with USB-C PD at first, but flashing _all_ the firmware updates essentially resolved it for me. I now only have one charger that it doesn't want to boot with, but other than that everything I have available works just fine. Even the Raspberry Pi USB-C power supply works shockingly well, even though the power requirements are cutting it very, very close.

Great review. I'll stick to mini PCs with real Intel processors (loving the Beelink Se12 so far; using it right now!!!). Love my Pis too though. Hopefully the parent company can get it's supply chain issues sorted and even bump up to Pi5 soon.

I have the same opinion when communities move to Reddit rather than maintain their own forums. Reddit and Discord are not meant to be searched like a forum, so a lot of info just gets lost in waves and waves of trash with no filter for the noise. However, Discord *is* rolling out their own forum system. It still isn't good as traditional forum websites, but it's a massive improvement over standard Discord when it comes to consolidating information. Ideally they'll adopt the functionality of traditional forums with this system, including a better search system.

thnx for your review.

Thanks that was very enlightening

First thing, Love your vids, Jeff... Second: 8 mins and 14 secs "...flashing a chip on the board over an SPI interface..." a Serial Port Interface Interface...? We gonna talk about ATM Machines next?😅 Sorry Jeff, couldn't resist calling it out. I really do love your content and watch it regularly when I need to touch up on what I know.

Cool review. I’ve been watching your videos covering the magnificent Rpi4 for years. Great work. I received my Rock5b in the beginning of November. I recently got Reborn Os booted via SD card but I want android os installed on my 1tb nvme ssd but unfortunately I haven’t been successful with that endeavor: The Rock5b is easily the best looking single board computer I’ve seen so far. Sad that the software implementation side of things are utterly messy in my humble opinion. This board is not for the casual tinkerer of buyer like myself lol. Anyway thanks for this video it’s very helpful.

Jeff, the M.2 to PCIe x16 converter you used only allows PCIe x1 bandwidth, as the USB cable doesn't have enough conductors to transmit more than x1. There are much better M.2 to PCIe x16 adapters on Ebay and Amazon that use the FULL x4 lanes of the M.2 slot for the GPU. Try looking into those, you will be better bandwidth

I don't own this particular board but I have 2 different Rockchip boards by different manufacturers. After 4 years for 1 and 3 years on the other, there is still no fully functional operating system for either. Add to that the fact that there is extremely limited software available on the respective repositories makes not much more than playthings. The manufacturers flood the market continuously with new boards causing the "community" software designers to refocus while previous boards have little to no support. It's a win win for them. They sell boards and don't pay software developers. If you need a board to be productive in any way, you need to a fully supported system. But if you want to spend all your time trying to make a board work as well as a supported system, have at it.

Did you try with Armbian?

This strikes me as not a beginner board but definitely worth having if you have something where the added horsepower would be beneficial. I wanna try running one on some aerial survey equipment.

As always Jeff, I very much appreciate how thurough your reviews are. It's been 4 months since you posted this and I'm testing out an Orange Pi 5B, which I believe has some of the updates you mentioned when comparing with the radxa. Most notably the upgrade to the Rockchip RK3588S. Technology.... isn't it great! :) Also thought I would mention, I do have a Khadas Edge 2 (I bought in to the marketing hype) and I had problems with it rebooting constantly. I'm super glad you pointed out the power supply issues with usb power as that seems to be exactly the problem with that device. I may test it out further once I have a proper power supply.

For information, my main Desktop died a month ago. Since I was working on some Orange Pi 5 8Go RAM, I dedicated one as my new desktop computer and I am working on it every day since one month. Dual screen, extra low cost nvme (12€ / 256Go) and Visual Studio Code, Docker, Chromium, video conference with a webcam etc... Everything is ok, except no graphic acceleration for the moment (I don't play games), and I am very impressed for 100€. The Debian provided by Orange Pi is Ok and the Orange Pi OS (Arch based) is on the starting blocks AFAIK. This CPU RK3588 or 3588S is very competent!

@Jeff, re:discord vs forums: YESSS! I miss that too.

Thanks for adding the power consumption.

Thank you. Great stuff.

Jeff, you are the man here!!!

I heartily second the recommendation to look at those Lenvo USFF boxes. A couple months ago I picked up another batch of slightly earlier machines for $55 each delivered. Including power supplies and new HDD caddies, all in pristine condition. I have used them for years, solid and reliable, a great solution if you just need a functional computer. Of course, without all the fun, challenge, frustration, aggravation and occasional triumph of tinkering with a new buggy, inadequately supported SBC.

Thank you for another excellent video Jeff! You've hilariously made compiling the Linux kernel like the "It's been __ days since an accident at this site" signs in work places. Hey don't give away the cheap thin client secret 😉 j/k

It's really good video, thanks

I feel your pain with the RockChip support in general. A mate came to me with a Banana Pi and wants it to boot from SSD. Usually I can sort these type of things out quickly but thanks to RockChip I'm almost bald now. As for using Discord as a support medium, that took the last bit of hair I had.

Great video! if you keep going like that you'll need a new shirt that says "it's been x minutes since i've recompiled the linux kernel" :D

Bought a rock pi 4 (something) and regretted it with how difficult it was to set it up to do anything. Eventually I did get it set up properly and successfully used it as a passable minecraft server for my friends during lockdown and then wrote a sockets server for it for a side project and it definitely gets the job done. But it would be a hard ask for me to update the image anytime soon, it was an absolute nightmare.

i've been waiting for this video :D

A 30W power is not equal to every other 30W power, they can have different voltage and current e.g 10V x 3A = 30W 15V x 2A = 30W So depending on the hardware it might not be compatible with 15v power input, you can find these info on the manual of your device.