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 UKposts 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!

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.

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

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 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.

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

Hi Jeff, if one was wanting to make a hand held gaming machine (about the size of an xbox controller but wider for a 5inch approx screen), would you recommend an orange pi 5? I'm looking to build something inbetween a steamdeck and basic anbernic emu unit that runs of a 18650 or 18350 and was considering it as it did have that m.2 support which "seems" a little more reliable than a SD card. Would love to know your opinion on 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 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...

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

The most complete video on a Rock Pi 5 / Orange Pi 5 on UKposts! 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 review and great board. Thanks Jeff

Jeff Geerling Hi! Do you have any idea why the Rock 5's emmc has two connectors while those on Odroid boards only have one?

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.

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!

Is the top M.2 A/E-Keyed slot a PCIe x2 lane or just two PCIe x1 lanes? Note that many Intel M.2 WiFi NICs split the lanes for WiFi & the (USB) Bluetooth module.

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

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.

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

I would like to build cluster from 5 rock pi 5b but i really don't know which power supply will be good , can someone help? on forums i didn't found a solusion😢

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.

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.

Thanks for the great content Jeff!

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

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.

Hey Jeff, sorta on the subject of these boards. Have you played with any Desktop-sized arm boards? Like the Firefly ITX3588j? I've been eyeballing one as a way to build a low power system that can take a desktop GPU and fit in a standard PC case. 'm not a fan of all these ultra tiny micro PCs. Have you seen any other desktop form factor boards like that one? As you can imagine, finding them is somewhat difficult these days.

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

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.

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.😐

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.

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 👏 😀.

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).

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!

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!!!

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!

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.

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

Great to see you back, my friend.

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.

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

Fantastic job on this video. Kudos!

Can I use asus hyper m.2 x16 pcie 3.0 x4 expansion card gen 4 with this?

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

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.

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

Thanks Geoff. Nice review.

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

That M.2 -> PCI-E riser card seems to use USB cable/plugs? Is it normal (or in spec) to put PCI-E over USB?

Great review Jeff.

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.

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

You prob need to use their toolchain if you want to compile the kernel and have it boot. Is there one available? This is pretty normal for SBCs other than the Pi, as they have weird and custom hardware configurations. With the intel firmware issue, did you try replacing the files with a startup script and unloading and reloading the kernel module. You might also need to blacklist the one that comes as part of the kernel. Im sure you know to try this, but just suggesting

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.

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.

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

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.

@JeffGeerling - Wanted to ask if you could start including AES benchmarks when comparing ARM SBC's. I'm full up on pi 3b's and pi 4b's... and won't be looking to replace them until the SBC's start coming with AES acceleration / offloading. There are some ARM cpu's that will do this, but knowing when they show up in various SBC's has been confusing. Please and thank you. :)

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

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!!!!!!!!!

Once you'll get Radxa CM5 which is same but in CM form factor can you check how it goes with Home Assistant Yellow? Hopeless I know but why not check...

Finally some really helpful video for the community, thanks.

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.

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, 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

Hi Jeff, I am interested in mipi camera. I was wondering how are the camera support on these systems?

*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!

@jeff hey, I got my CM4, because your video on the Tuning 2, I was looking for CM4 solution. I am very impress with it, I know we spoke you were waiting on yours, did you get it? I'd like to get a couple more and the Tuning 2 to see it they we work with it. Anyway. Thank you for your videos.

Thanks for the review Jeff. Out of curiosity do you know if any of the Lenovo type mini pc's support adding a PCI card? Thinking they might be good for adding a small Nvidia Quadro P400 as those are very cheap on eBay and can handle things like transcoding pretty well.

Hi Jeff Thanks for the video. Just out of curiosity, did you test the power consumption in load and idle?

Just wonder if there is a good evaluate function that take in the price, number of cores, benchmark per core, RAM, power consumption, size and weight, io ports with and without gpio, NPU to run ML model at the edge,... and output the score? Killer or not depending on your use cases and the availability 😅

@jeff : I'm actually wondering why it is not possible (/advisable?) to install vanilla Ubuntu/Debian distro on the Rock 5b, when you can install it on any random PC with random parts/periphericals. Is this because of the RK3588 Linux kernel support ? Should we wait for some upgrade from Ubuntu/Debian side ? I'm uncomfortable installing a custom-made distro (and come on Radxa, Ubuntu 20.04 ?? really ?), and I'm just wondering what's so peculiar about this SBC (other than the SoC) hardware... Anyways, Armbian offers an ISO for the Rock 5b which has been running great on my Rock 5b for a month now ;)

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.

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.

Hi Jeff, what are you catting for the temp?

Can you use display capture for the pi or just buy a second one and use that for hdmi in

Did you try with Armbian?

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

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.

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.

thnx for your review.

Does the E-Key support 2x PCIE Lanes? Would like to use the Google Coral that has 2x TPUs in it.

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.

Is there any chance you could please do a round-up of Linux Compute SoM (System on Modules). After searching UKposts I conclude that nobody has done this recently. Thanks.

HI Does it support programs such as LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor

Hey Jeff! Maybe RebornOS might be worth a try? Or maybe ARMbian for kernel rebuilds?

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.

Can relate to the Discord support vs Forums/FAQ/HOWTO support.

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

So which RPi version do you recommend now with RPi5 available??