I sounded like a good alternative until you mention the 100mb networking and the GPIO that doesnt match raspberry pi layout. total deal breakers for me. I think a better performance comparison would be the Pi 3B. When available Thepihub has is for $42. Nice review really enjoy your videos.

For me what stands out is the hardware decoding for modern high efficiency video codecs like h256, vp9, and especially av1 since it's so new.

I like your calm and unbiased presentation. You keep it interesting without having to resort to cheap UKposts tricks like talking very fast or shouting or other things. 👍

This is a great review. Thanks for the benchmarks and including the power draw. Great job!

RPi 4 does have ability to boot from internet when OS is not present(It boots into OS installation program), which if I remember correctly, can be also entered by holding Shift during boot. But still, having recovery system on the board itself is really nice on VIM1S. And on Pi 4, you also have to wait for Pi to download boot image from the server.

After seeing how well this held up against the Pi4, now I kinda do want to see their more powerful version. I do think the different gpio was a bit of a misstep though.

Man 94K!! When I last saw it was like 10K lol. This channel exploded when I left. Good job HH! You finally got what you deserved

Great video. I got my pi’s when they were normally priced. One runs OMV6 with a few containers like Plex, and the other is a server running my MotionEyeOS cameras

I ran a Pi 2 for quite some time with 100mbit Ethernet (the adaptor is on the USB bus on that system) and also USB-2 connected spinner hard drives. Functionally it worked within requirements - it was able to serve and exceed streaming speed requirements to watch video on a PC that was read directly from the device, the OS handled contention rather well so slowing down to a point of impeding serving (on SAMBA) was surprisingly rare. I found it stable and workable, the only reason I moved it onto another function was the appearance of the Rock64 which had a USB-3 and had gigabit ethernet on a proper bus of its own; software was remarkably weak on this platform as Pine were comparatively freeloading off the community at the time (according to some insiders). I find that manufacturers who focus too much on android do it to the detriment of everything else; that said some manufacturers are outsourcing their OS development to DietPi or Armbian which is a superb way to handle the problem, the OS development there is generally quite good and their update and maintenance processes are well run. But if your objective is an always-on server that can do slave-functions both these might work. Examples of "slave functions" include file serving on a basic/standard level, download-mule functions running an Aria2 service to perform large scale downloads in the background leaving your browser and workstations free to do their thing without even having to be turned on, an absolute Godsend for slower connections, large files or kicking things off before you leave for work or go to bed.... There's a wild number of other things that both of these can perform as their projects were developed for even earlier and less featured eras of SBCs.

Bro, you're chill. Thanks for the vid

Haven't watched one of your videos in a while and they have improved tremendously! Hats off to you sir!

The main issue i ran into with non-Pi devices is poor support: devices which on the paper look interesting end up being unusable because they only run OK on an arm debian from 1999...

I really appreciate this. Currently using a raspberry pi 4 for a firewall but plan on upgrading to a Odroid H3+. But I also want a backup computer for DHCP, local DNS, time server, home assistant, other minor functions on the network. Kind of a set it and forget it.

I was lucky to purchase the last R.Pi 4B 8GB and R.Pi 400 on the shelf of a local store, at normal price and I am glad I went for it. I wanted to get some more R.Pi 4B 4GB and 8GB, but they never came back in stock and online prices was insane all over the place. The Raspberry Pi 5 was presented and it's coming very soon, I am half tempted to preorder a few of them (at human msrp) thrhu their selected resellers. I have the feeling that we gonna see the same scenario of crazy prices and scalping. Time will tell.

I think the real winner turns out to be the Orange Pi 5. Only slightly more expensive than the VIM1S, faster than the Pi 4, plenty of I/O, and support for M.2 drives. You can also swap built-in Wifi and Bluetooth for the M.2 by getting the 5b. But for server uses, I would generally recommend the original OPI5.

I honestly expected 2.5gb Ethernet from the catchy video title. At 100mb you might as well use smoke signals to transfer data.

Your other videos convince me that I don't need one of those for a file server when I can score various much ballsier thin clients and tiny desktops used and ready to go. Between Hardware Haven and STH used business class hardware looks mighty good.

Maybe the Pi 3 Model B or B+ would be a better comparison. The Zero originally started as a super low cost PC (it was $5 when it came out) and the prices are currently high because of lower supply and scalpers. According to an interview with Raspberry's CEO, the supply problems with the Zero and the 4 should be resolved by the end of the year and I expect prices to drop like a rock. With all that being said, I'm not trying to hate on the video, just trying to be constructive. I do agree with all the the other cool stuff about the VIM1S and I think it looks like a cool SBC. As someone who designs purpose built SBC for a living, its always nice to be introduced to a new general purpose SBC manufacturer.

My old trusty Raspberry Pi 1A, which I upgraded with a switch mode 3.3V power supply feeding the board directly, uses around 1/2 W. Ideal for low power battery powered stuff. Obviously not the ideal hub for a media center being slow and lacking a network connector, but otherwise. Idle 100mW, Can't remember the sleep consumption, but I think it is in the 4mW range.

Thx Hardware Haven for this video, Love it

I bought some Khada's boards around 2017. The flashing tool at that time was highly confusing and in Chinese, if that was not frustrating enough it required Microsoft windows. Flashing was a process that took many attempts. you would literally waste hours of you life. While the hardware was impressive compared to the RPI3 at the time the Khada's VIM was tossed in a box where it's sat for 5 years. It is good to see they have integrated an onboard flashing OS. I may consider them again.

this seems like a great little SBC I almost bought the potato a while back for making a super cheap NAS till I looked up some reviews on making it a NAS.

Nice review, I like your holistic approach!

I just got my Le Potato running and Ubuntu was too slow so I pivoted to Armbian and it is looking good. Great purchase for my use case.

Le Potato is leagues ahead in software running all the latest Linux OSes since it has upstream support. VIM1S uses the S905X4 SoC which will never have good upstream support so in a year, the software will be obsolete. It's already insecure due to lack of Linux updates.

This was comprehensive, thanks a lot.

thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

To be clear, the Raspberry Pi hasn't had any "price hikes." What it has had is "price gouging" due to limited supply and high demand, but as of early 2024 that is clearing. A bit.

My SBC perspective in right now is currently the Zimaboard 832, especially since it's on x86 Architecture. Oh and has a PCI-e slot as well as (2) SATA 6.0 Ports

For the zero I found that its usually just precompiled binaries that dont take such an older cpu into account. If you build it yourself with a crosscompiler you can usually get it to run just fine anyway.

Hi, nice video I like what you have to say and at the moment, scalpers and supply issue is pushing the raspbery pi prices through the roof Now the pizero 2w is a great piece of small pc / sbc - i have one myself doing pihole and samba for basic file sharing, mostly items i dont want in the cloud or more important things i just want to share around my home Kids homework is there, some movies and my favourite music etc - items that were in common shard flders in every pc and laptop originally Anyway, some people sort of push the pizero to far beyond its capabilities, for the next step up i now use older thin clients with large hard drives, now they wont consume 2watts power but more or less under 10 watts ( typically 3 to 5 idle and max is sort of 8-10 ) - and you can run them headless and ssh into them or use remote desktop if using widnows as a os or you can use other custom software Many of the pi alternatives are geared towards the pi3 pi 4 or better in x86 versions, but the dollars gets larger Banana / Orange / Pink ?? / Asus / Tinkerboard / Uduoo / Odroid ( sorry for spelling ) are generally more expensive and almost a different class, the Banana and orange are similar price but lack stable OS systems and a lack of GPIO suoport / apps / addons It is sort of expecting a new mini to compete against a camaro / bmw - each has there own role and place in life Anyway if there were more pi2zerow's ( i would by another 3 or 4 ) - you can use them as a desktop but will be sluggish as they are with youtube video playback My pi3 is a retro pi and my pi400 is in the box and used as a amiga and Apples OS9 virtual machine for retro games etc basically Overall there are many other option to a raspbery environment, but they are more expensive and do not have the OS stability or 3rd party support Regards George

LibreComputer also has the ROC-RK3328-CC (Renegade) 2GB RAM variant for only $5 more than Le Potato. USB 3 and gigabit. Replaced a dead Pi3 B+ with one and am very happy. No onboard BT/Wifi though.

REALLY appreciate your channel and how fun was the retro computer episodes.What I don't understand is how the Walmart Onn which have almost similar specs costs 20$ (add 6$ for subsidized sponsoring on remote control and UI), we are far cheaper than the board you showcased. This applies to RPi and other boards too This only shows that SBC tend to be overpriced and would really like to see projects to convert our existing devices to SBCs ranging from breaking the bootloaders on them to soldering some GPIO outputs to those with appropriate tools.

Nice job. Thanks for the review.

The thing with these rpi alternatives is that there is always something that completley ruins it, if its a lack of ethernet or just software support but i dont know if there is any arm sbc thats actually a raspberry pi replacement, x86 sbcs are a good alternative tho because they are often more powerful, have sata or even pcie but they are more expensive than arm sbcs which also kinda ruins it for some people, tho spending more money on a x86 based sbc is a wayyy better deal than buying a raspberry pi right now I dont know, if you wanna use sbcs for a homelab probably the best thing is to use a rpi if you already have it from before or buy an x86 sbc, or just actually buy a used mini office pc or an old pc and use that

I have skipped RPi for long time (since ~2y ago) when doing DIY projects. An old NUC gen 6 is a very good solution: easily purchased and upgradable, very stable (for my purpose).

Thanks for the great video 😁 I have just started using Home Assistant and I am running that on a Raspberry Pi 3. It is running ok, given that I do not yet have many devices that it controls. I will, of course, have to upgrade at some point. Would you think that the VIM1S would make a good upgrade from the Pi 3?

Thanks for showing me CasaOS! It solves a lot of my hosting problems!

Great video, this shows me that my Orange Pi Zero 2 wasn't the worst purchase compared to the actual Pi Zero, though it sucks compared to even Le Potato, I ran sysbench on it and the results were 502 t1 and 1975 t4 but I can't be mad when it's at least running 8 containers on only 1GB of RAM.

Would have been nice to see the comparison with the Pi Zero 2W

I just bought zeroW's for 12$ and zeroW2's for 18$. There's huge differences on prices because some stores have still their old ripping prices on. I like to use zero's in humidity/temperature sensors since all zigbee sensors stransmit too slowly and Ruuvi tags are expensive and their humidity sensor tends to saturate. I have one controlling my hottub and other on my greenhouse. ZeroW2 controls my heating and measures electricity consumption. I have 3b+ as an stereo to 5.1 expander and subwoofer crossover, another 3b+ controlling my cnc mill and pi5 on my home automation and cloud server.

This could be a good alternative for some of my classroom projects for my students. Its been a paid trying to get my hands on PI's lately.

As a German i have just ONE requirement: the LESS power consumption the better. Because energy prices in German are just absolutely insane and getting insaner with each day....

I wished that they would make higher RAM options for this. Like 8 gb

So IMO the big draw for home server is routing/firewall. IMO the dual gige pi board (DFRobot IIRC) with CM4 is REALLY hard to beat. Not only runs OpenWRT for routing and firewall... but also easily handles running the Home Assistant docker container for home automation. All for less than 4 watts in operation... that was so compelling for me I retired my esxi server on a 1u box.

I bought a rock64 board for $19 on amazon some years back which is a pi alternative with a quad core and 1GB of RAM, it runs pihole and ddclient just fine and doesn't even register 1w on a kill-a-watt meter without the decimal point revision.

The vim boards are great hardware wise. However the software support is abysmal. It's good at the start but they drop supporting the boards very early. While I can still get current operating systems for my Pi3s or even older devices and do useful thigns with them, my Vim 2 is effectively useless. The amazing long term software support the PIs get, is way too often overlooked when comparing SBCs.

I loved this video! Thank you for taking the time and doing it. The setup you use, the video quality, the B-roll, and backgrounds, are great! Being able to actually read the chips on your B-roll is great! he VIM1S is a Raspberry Pi 3 really. It should compare to same. Khadas targets this as a set-top-box for TVs/screens because it can deliver via 5Ghz WiFi. Khadas makes great computers. Explaining Computers has done reviews over the years of them all, and comparisons. I've got four Khadas SBCs: VIM1s, VIM3, 2 x VIM4. They all have a lot of positives and I enjoy them all. Great to tinker with. VIM1s runs the garage's "smart mirror." The VIM3 wakes up sleepy computers using WOL, is the RTC source, monitors systems for up/down, and is the Openweathermap weather data distributor in the house for all (eight) smart mirrors, phones, tablets, and other computers. Khadas has a good eco-system. What I guess i hoped Beaglebone would have been. Oh and just so you don't think I'm shading one way to Khadas or not, I've 20 RP4/CM4 rack-mounted in one of my server racks. Just wish they were faster and multi-thread. And had more RAM. LOL

I may have to see about picking one of these up and checking it out!! Looks very promising :)

You are on point. Pi becoming powerful means nothing for lots of industrial applications or simpler tasks

In my oppinion main point to choose Raspberry Pi over chinese boards, is RPi made in Great Britain and not in China. Support is great and comunity is huge.

These SoCs seem great and are "ok" when you want to run "one" of these 24/7 services. Like a single home assistant. Trouble today is, that expands into Home assistant, node red, influxdb, graphana, mqtt servers and suprisingly the little SoC bandwidth limitations will start to impact. Especially things like Influx and file shares. At some point it becomes far more efficient in time and power to just run a 4th Gen 2010 eWaste desktop as server, idling on 8W but running two dozen different services in docker.

Interesting... but the down-sides are kind of a bummer, tho. I used to run lots of services from multiple RPis. I bought a couple NUC-like systems, installed Proxmox, and have never been happier. I run most my my services with docker-compose (on LXC (Proxmox container), when possible) and for things like Home Assistant, running as a VM is a huge benefit because I can make snapshots before upgrades (and rollback if the upgrade fails). Yeah, it's not exactly in the same price category, but if you buy a few of these or RPi's, you could have had NUC-like (assuming you don't need GPIO and don't mind MUCH, MUCH faster IO).

I use Rasperry Pi model 3 boards as CUPS servers for printers. A board with that kind of power, or just slightly more, higly reliable, and doesn't need any of the fancy high-performance 4k display stuff, but with Ethernet (100Mb is enough) and *good* sensitive wi-fi is all I'm looking for. With the ease of setup (write Debian-based image (e.g. like Raspbian), apt-get install what I need, run and forget) and 'm all set.

100Mbit vs 1Gbit - as for power consumption difference between the two, if 100M is enough you can save about 0.5-0.7W of contant power draw on the board plus similar on the switch

This is the same processor as the Chromecast for Google TV. It's probably the GPU and I'm sure that Google optimized the hell out of it. The Le Potato really should ship with a bottle of Aspirin. You're gonna need it.

For the Apache bench you need to recompile to get it to run on the Pi Zero. I know, not the kind of thing you want to do for a quick test. Furthermore, the fact that you have to recompile, means you are removing hard-coded optimizations for the faster chips in the other boards which means it will score bad. This goes for any program that won't run. Chances are if it doesn't come compiled with the ability to turn off newer model optimizations it is for a reason, which is typically that performance without said optimizations is unsatisfactory.

I had 3d printed a 2u rack for 12 pi. For the time, effort and price it came out easier and about same price to buy 2u PC server. For the Rpi (Pre-covid), sd cards, poe hats, poe switch and 3d printer and time. The 2u Ryzen 5 5600x with 64gb ECC and dual nic and 6tb of raid storage came about same and parts were readily avail.

even with our 40c/KWH electricity i guess used mini pc is the better option unless you need a ultra small form factor

To provide some context, the casting functionality does not operate in the manner described. Only devices approved by Google can receive casting because they possess a secure chip that stores a certificate issued by Google. Consequently, it is not merely a matter of developers adding software. As you might infer, becoming an approved Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) requires significant financial investment and the inclusion of numerous Google features as part of their program. For example to be able to play netflix content above 720p you must be approved by Netflix. One of their requirements for example is to have a Netflix button on the remote.

for its price it seems it has great specs. It's when we start asking for 1 or 10gbps ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, 4k support, holodeck projector and so on that prices are driven up

Old Net/Admin here... Great video!!! I loved the PI when it came out years ago. It fit the bill for a lot of projects. But IMO.... These days it better and mostly-cheaper to re-purpose old PCs for Server Builds. That's unless you really need the physical specs of a PI-type system. I can't stand to not have the ability to install a card(s) to have a needed feature(s) in a server build.

Finally! Hardware with the same name as the best text editor!

It seems that this little device escaped from the jaws of victory by having non-compatible pinout for hats.

Great video thanks!

6:40 performance per watt would be an interesting metric there.

I have the Pi Zero 2W as well but got it at launch. Would be a good option but getting them now.....

It looks like the USB-C port supports USB 2.0 OTG in addition to power delivery, so you could use a USB-C dock to add an Ethernet port without using up the onboard USB port. Not perfect, but an option.

Hee dat klinkt lekker man. Waar kan ik naar je muziek luisteren? GPU is de Graphics Prosessing Unit in je Videokaart De CPU is de Computer Prosessig Unit waat je OS op draait. Thanks for sharing

if you need a cheap good android tv box walmart makes one 4k onn streaming box for like 20 bucks if you are in the u.s

Aren't the Le Potato's A53 cores superior to the VIM1S A35? I understand implementation matters (along with LPDDR4 vs DDR3). Please clarify.

I’m really disappointed at new boards that do not have either a SATA port or an M.2 slot. It has become excruciatingly obvious that users of SBCs often use them for a server and USB3, eMMC, and SD card storage options are not going to suffice.

I can't believe that I just watched a 16 minute ad for an RPi competitor. 🤷‍♂

15:56 the like button lights up when he says, "like." How long has this been a thing?

I’ve used khadas vims for years (hundreds of them) Fantastic little boards

I love the 'Le Potato' but I wished they'd gone all in on that name and just called it 'Le Pomme de Terre' with a baguette emoji or something

Sadly the price rises are all because of 3rd party sellers reselling, and this is primarily due to lack of availability to the consumer market, and it seems like it will continue this way for the foreseeable future, easily into next year at least. Which is a shame because their original mission was to make rpi available for lots of people for educational purposes, but no longer a realistic option anymore.

Odroid H3 from Hardkernel is the best what you can actually get. It takes for sure less than 3W idle (I do not know how much because cant measure less than 3W,) It runs standard x86 processor, can handle for example windows 11 easy. Equiped with hdmi, audio ports, usb ports, and the very nice 2x2.5 GiB LAN. A lot of optional accessories, for example network etc. Has M2.nvme.... So...

I used to get the Pi Zero for 9 Euro...darn, inflation goes fast. I stopped the video at 6:20 simply because I still had not heard the price, which is a pretty important factor in choosing to drop the Raspi for it. Had you mentioned it earlier, one would know if it is even worth watching the video

I always thought stripping down old laptops and using it as a server gets you the most bang for the buck, but the power draw of vim1s looks very impressive. There is no way old laptops would match them in that respect.

I love that video ❤ you searched and presented a valid competitor against the expensive Raspberry Pi where i mentioned in the comments with the issues it comes with. Very well done, even that i switched back to ATX systems, i'm pretty sure, this video is helpful to others which looking for a "raspberryish" small form factor pc. Well done Man!

There's also a Pi Zero 2 that has much more power, also very hard to get at the moment though.

Randomly picked up something that consumes 2W (RPi Zero W) and compare it to something you like.. very strange decision. And if you don't find a matching docker image for the v6-architecture you can utilize docker to build an image. That's a simple workflow.

with low enough price this may be useful, but honestly I think SBC are stuck way too deep in the past and this using A35 instead of at least A5x is pretty crazy how expensive can 4xA510 be? for server use that'd be so much better, even if you mostly need that power only when setting stuff up and would be much more efficient for automation and so on sure

I'm trying to compare performance wise my system (atom) to your tests, what settings did you run sysbennch with?

They all have the same software availability problems though, the Amlogic SoCs are better than some for that but even then, the RPi foundation does a ton of work keeping it well supported and it shows.

Err... I´m looking for something to do my daily stuff as running Firefox, watching videos and such. No gaming, not even in a browser window. I was looking into mini pc´s but then I found this. Can this do that? Run a gui os and ff?

I think now that the Pi 5 is coming out it's a harder sell but still a cool product!

Hmm.. I wonder how this + a pi oriented touchscreen would work as a Home Assistant display? With Android on tap as one of the OS options for the VIM1S it might be worth considering.

I got a Pi 4 4GB at launch for just £50. given what they're going for, I'm considering just selling it because I don't really have much of a use for a single board machine when I've got an 8 core xeon and 32GB RAM server running proxmox. Still interesting seeing a real competitor though.

i have a couple of khadas bords as servers; the edge 2 pro and vim3 pro. decent boards and worth it for their npu's, each easily outperforming my google coral.

Nowadays home networks have 10Gbit/s via SFP+ or at least 2,5Gbit/s, 100Mbit is so 1993, Gbit Networking was broadly available and got normal around 2005, works even over Cat5e - 100Mbit/s like here might work for some VERY niche scenario like old telephone cables abused as network cable, but 100Mbit/s is a showstopper for almost every nowadays szenario.

23 sec, because i know where to find quality content

Hello this is great video. Are you able to check the power consumption and performance on VIM3L with the S905D3 SOC? thx

Im looking to run a pi hole for my home network, but im also looking to host a vpn for my foreign close friends, wondering if i would be able to run the pi hole on the base OS layer then run a vm under that to host the vpn from. Does that sound like it would work? And would the pi hole also eat ads for those connected to the vpn?

This is ideal for me. I need some in house "web servers" that act as management units that receivers of data from various sensors. I am using both ESP32 and Raspbery Pi pico as the sensor brains and to send data. But these units are to weak to act as a webserver, and Pis are either unavailable or to Expensive. In New Zealand a Raspberry Pi is available as a bundle, so are paying $300 and up. That a Pi4 4gb.

Could you do a video on the ROCKPro64 to be used as a NAS.

HOLY COW, I didn't know the raspberry pi zero w went up that much in price! I feel kind of guilty just having it sitting in a drawer right now lol

New Hardware Haven video 😎😎😎

Now that the rpi prices have come down and availability is way up (I just bought a rpi4 8GB for $90) I would not recommend this over a rpi. The vim1s is $65 right now and I'll gladly shell out the extra $25.