Hackboard 2 Review - Hackboard 2 vs Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe SSD

[Music] okay today we are going to take a look at this hack board 2 single board computer basically this is the original box that it came with this one is the Debian Linux version of this board and this is the uh one out of box and does have the heat sink installed and this one is in the official hackbardt sink and everything so it does have passive cooling there's no fans or anything we're going to take a look at that and also we will compare it although it might not be very fair comparison but we're going to compare that with this Raspberry Pi 5 with the Pineberry pie installed on it with a SSD nvme SSD on it because this one also comes comes with an nvme SSD so we'll check that and also there is the 4G module for this hack board which we are going to take a look at that as well so with that in mind let's get started okay so first when you buy this board it comes in this box although looks like a very big box it's actually the computer itself is just this big I think this is 120 mm by 80 mm so 8 cm to 12 CM so this is the size of the hack board to and when we take this out yeah so this is what you get when you buy this board basically this is the board itself here hack board to the Debian version there's also windows I think 10 version of it so this is the Debian version user hack board and root password is hb2 capital so I think all the boards are shipped that way so let me get this out of of this bag yeah so same thing right this one just has this heat sink installed the default it doesn't have it installed but it comes in the box so just take this off and place it in there so in terms of you know IO ports and what you get in the board this is a fullsize HDMI port that you will get there's a USBC port and 12 volt 3 amp power jack in here there is also a usb2 connector which can used for connecting a camera there is a 10 pin battery connector which you can buy something around 36 to $40 in AliExpress some batteries 7.6 volt basically connected to power this whole board if you want to with LiPO batteries there is also a Raspberry Pi compatible pinouts basically here IO pins here GPO pins I will show you the pinouts when we are doing the testing so here you will get three USB B3 ports and this is the ram basically I got the 4 gbyte version so 2 gig 2 gig in each of these Ram modules and the processor is Intel Celeron n4020 and dual core a 64-bit and it can go up to 2.8 GHz and 4 megabyte cache and it also does have the Intel UHD Graphics 600 which would give you 4K HDMI output as well HDMI 2.1 by the way so there is also anything else special in here I don't see it there is also a fan connector in here if you want to instead of this passive cooling using the official case you can go with a fan and connect it with this fan connector on the other side you will get this uh SSD drive inst pre-installed it basically comes with it the second one it says right here 4G 5G SSD so we are going to take a look at that you can install a 4G or 5G module in here this is that SIM card slot for that 4G or 5G and then this one is called EDP basically embedded display port it supports up to I think 40 40p yeah so we'll check that and then there is also this TP Port which is touchcreen yeah nothing special oh yeah there is this uh Wi-Fi module in here so this is Intel dual band I think AC 95060 so this ated at 1.7 GB per second we'll check that there's also Bluetooth 5.1 and yeah as I said you can install the 4G or 5G cellular modem in here and uh this is the 40 pin gpio just like the Raspberry Pi just sizewise this is much much smaller as you can see but I think the pin outs are identical I think we'll check that so yeah we talked about this processor the ram the rest uh this is like power delivery stuff over here in the back we just have this IC it says basically it it 89 87e so I think this handles the serial flash bios and keyboard controller and everything else I got the data sheet for this in here yeah it seems like Hardware monitoring does have analog to digital converters fan speed controller uart parallel port I don't think it's used here but uh keyboard controller and for the general purpose IO pins which could be the chip that you know manages the I gpio pins so yeah that's data sheet and when it comes to gpio pins the pinouts I printed that as well so it looks very very similar if not identical to the Raspberry Pi pinout so yeah the 3.3 volt in here 5 vol 5 Vol and the rest of gpio ports in here so we'll test that we'll write some small python code to see if we can turn stuff on and off uh just to test and we'll Benchmark it against the Raspberry Pi so oh what else is in the box so you get the board you get the heat sink to be put on the CPU you get the power adapter with different connections so this one I think this is the US one I'm going to be using this but there's for Australia UK and European plug in there so you basically put this in there and twist it and that's it so now it's ready to be used also you get some stickers yeah you get some letters and digits and hackbardt print it yeah but yes this is a gpio configuration so some more information yeah there is pin out over here there's also pin out over there so this one is black and white this one is color and it basically explains the warnings and key features oh yeah everything I talked about is also here so Yep this is pretty much it in terms of what is in the box so let's put this aside and let's start doing some benchmarking and some testing I'll be right back all right so let's get this set up this is the hack board Let's uh set this up the power connection the HDMI cable a USB mouse a USB basic keyboard board nothing fancy here all right so we plugged everything so automatically by just plugging the power it doesn't turn on you have to hold the power button for a couple seconds and let me start also the screen recording so once you hold and press the button it turns on I did not install anything whatever is going to show up on the screen going to be stuck and whatever they shipped it with so yeah keep that in mind so this is the Debian version as I said before it's booting I think it roughly takes like 15 seconds or so to show the login page okay so everything is hooked up as you can see and this is the hack board 2 and I am booting into it with the default password which is the HB Capital N2 so this is the board and I went through it so I just want to cover a couple important points most important thing is remember I didn't do the comparison first to w Raspberry Pi they did it themselves on their website right so they are comparing hack boo to Raspberry Pi so that's I am going to keep doing the same thing so once we log in as you can see we are greeted with this uh KD plasma and if we do a Neo fetch you'll see that it is running Intel cellon n4020 at 2.8 GHz and it does have the Intel UHD Graphics 600 and there is also 8 G Ram in there Dean 11 and the plasma and KD as as I said so there are a couple important things that I want to point out that during my exploration I figured out so first of all the GPI or pins are just absolutely unusable and I am not the only one with this problem I Googled it and I saw a lot of other people's complaining especially on Reddit that these ports are not usable there is absolutely not a single line of documentation I emailed hackbardt did not return to me I just told them as well about this gpio stuff and no matter what I did I could not get it to just turn on a single LED using the cpio pins something that I can do probably within like matter of couple seconds in this Raspberry Pi and documentation wise there is just absolutely not no documentation there is no documentation for the 4G or 5G modem there is no documentation for GPI open pins GPI IO pin sizes although the pinouts are identical to GPA to Raspberry Pi but they are as you can see clearly different size and uh you cannot use hats you were using with Raspberry Pi with the hackboys bench C CPU and run it with four threads what you will see is going to be a disappointment basically the numbers are not that impressive well I guess you're not buying this for a CPU so yeah 3200 events per second and uh that's with the four threats and the other thing that I wanted to do was basically doing the storage test if I had it here but okay let me use here yeah so let's get out of this pseudo storage. yeah so let me run this test I just want to show you as I said these boards come with an MVM SSD storage for raspberry pie you have to buy a hat and install an SSD on it so the price difference this combined with the fan add-on and the hat and the NVM SSD may be equal when you do that so price-wise they might be equally I think yeah this is the $80 for the 8 gig but that's yeah that's also 8 gig and this is the Hat itself was around 50 bucks I think and the SSD it just depends what brand you buy right so as you can see the speeds are 400 mbes per second 470 disc greed and 186 is the right speed so overall 70,000 iops or for for a random read and random right is 49,000 say 50,000 it's very underwhelming I'm going to show you the results from Raspberry Pi so you can decide for yourself the CPU benchmark is not that impressive the io speed is not that impressive there is no way absolutely no way whatsoever you cannot access the gpio pins so I will show you what I did there is a tool called gpio detect it's basically from the lib gpio so you will see that there are four int 3453 gpio chips right there are 80 20 and 35 lines on each gpio chip which could be the chip that I was mentioning in the beginning of the video this it chip right this could be I I I'm not sure because they don't release the schematics and I try to trace the pins in here it all goes through Vias and another via and I see them connecting directly to the CPU some of them so I'm not sure if I couldn't Trace I also did continuity test from here to various pins on this chip I couldn't get it so there is like four gpio chips and when you do gpio info you will see this status current status input output their situation and you know you can change them so what I did which you should not do because you can damage something is basically I brute forced it so for instance this chip I just brute forced gpio chip 2 so what you can do is you can say gpio set and then gpio chip to and then you can say the line let's say 10 right the 10 equal 1 this would set this line number 10 to Output and set it to high so we can test this easily we run it back as you can see now this is an output so I did this I did it I wrote a small four Loop in bash and just did all the pins so this one didn't cause the system to crash but I could not get that to light up anything I couldn't control any of these gpio pins with this I did this with all other gpio chips same result it's just not working it's not here it's not connected to this so I'm not even sure if it is even possible maybe they designed it at the beginning and at the end they couldn't figure it out something was lacking it would have costed more or something they cut the corners something I don't know it just doesn't work I could not get it to work there's no documentation and other people are complaining about the same problem and Library wise I downloaded installed a lot of GP libraries I could not get it to work so that could be one of the biggest problems but there are other problems too so the coil wearing I don't know I really hope that it is getting picked up by the microphone but the coil wearing is terrible in this you know it's just uh right now I hope you're hearing it but you cannot stay in a room with this turned on you can put it maybe away in a rack and close the door and then forget about it but if you are planning to use it in a room right next to you as a small thing client or something I don't think you can that's just my opinion this is just bothering me a lot even during recording of this video and that's not that's also I'm not the only one other people are also saying the same thing the coil wearing is unbearable I tried I have like three boards right already I have this and this and there's another one I don't even know where it is yeah this over there so it's same all over some are worse to be fair and honest but they all have this coil wearing I will investigate that maybe later but yeah that's one of the problems and the other problem I had was ntp was not installed so I could not set the date and time I had to go you know it's for regular user who just wants to start it and set the date in time they I couldn't do it so I had to just come here do a pseudo install AP install ntp sorry and then get the time and date Zone to set properly so let it set because if you don't set your ntp you can't even do web browsing right remember that's important there is also a cr927 battery cell here for adding the BIOS battery so you don't lose that but by default also that is not installed so that's also you have to buy those it's not expensive but that's another thing that you have to do and another problem that I I had with this board is actually this take a look at this if we do the sources. list as you can see the the mirrors are from Huawei so I was wondering why the AP installs are slow and it's not supposed to be slow in my network but yeah it's just a default that's what they ship it with so if you get the Debian version of hackbox if you do AP update it's going to talk to Huawei just so you know I didn't like it but I just wanted to put it out there as well so you know you need to change that so that's the other problem that I had with this boort so overall with this price and this coil wearing not being able to use GPO this is absolutely not a hack board you cannot use this and if you wanted a workstation to you know think client a remote desktop RDP connection to some other computers and maybe watching videos or maybe like even some game play right there is an Intel Graphics built into this maybe you can do that I will show you some footage from the 4K rendering so you will see its performance so if we go to YouTube and just search for some 4K video you will see the performance on by the way as you can see the speed right right now you can see yeah it's slow it's slow and it is with the case remember it's with the case it's with their own power supply and you know considering all that this is the performance and you can see that why people don't like the sport as I said before the comparison with the Raspberry Pi I did not started they did it on their website so they are saying that the Raspberry Pi 5 you know they are comparing it with Raspberry Pi I will show you so if we go to this video and change the settings to 4K yeah I don't think it is playing that yep it's dropping the frames and it's dropping a lot lot of frames so at least in Debian version to be clear maybe it's working properly in the Linux version but in the Debian version it's as you can see it's not even able to play the 4K video so it could be related to the network connection which shouldn't be so let's try 1080p okay 1080p playing the screen resolution is 4K by the way so I also have to mention that so let's see yeah it's dropping a lot of frames even for 1080p it's dropping a lot of frames so it is not doing well even in the graphics for in Debian so in Windows I've seen others run a 4K video I'm not sure if their screen resolution was also 4K but if your screen is 4K and you're trying to play at 1080p it's dropping a lot of frames it's dropping a lot of frames I don't think it is related to Wi-Fi as well because Wi-Fi is sitting right next to me the router and uh yeah and we can do a speed test as well just to confirm let's do a speed test very quickly yeah coil wearing as you can hear it this terrible okay I have gigabit internet but the Wi-Fi is not terrible it's not bad it's not bad Wi-Fi is passable this is the antenna probably I should mount it better but yeah it's 300 megabit per second with the Wi-Fi so yeah the connection is not the problem so the problem is most likely yeah this is the speed test result so this is the internet speed but still it cannot play a 4K video at Full Resolution it is going to drop a lot of frames for you in the Debian version at least yeah it's very very underwhelming it's not doing well this is terrible okay so you saw the results and uh as I said if you go to hack board you will see that they are comparing it to the Raspberry Pi and uh maybe in this page maybe it was on their yeah here in The Craft Supply page I believe they were comparing it yeah right here so they are comparing it to Raspberry Pi 4 to be fair but still I don't think it even compares to that and the price point is very important so yeah $200 for Windows 11 so I got this one right and I got the 8 gig one so this is what I got $175 and you saw the results right I don't think it's a good board and I got this aluminum case as well which is this and uh yeah it's not worth it so let me switch to Raspberry Pi so we can compare the results the benchmarks and the results for the io and for the CPU so overall I'm not happy with this hack board and I think it's not worth the price and I believe we should just zap it all right I will be right back a few moments later okay we are back and now we I connected up this raspberry pie with the nvme hat and the nvme drive and I'm booting from the nvme there is no SD card so I just want to show you some differences so if we go to the do the same test right starting with the storage you will see the difference right away and I just want to show you one more thing it's very important I believe as you can see as The Benchmark is running the power consumption is like 5 WS 1.1 1.2 and I've seen it go all the way 1.4 when you were doing other benchmarks at the same time like a CPU Benchmark So This 5vt 1.2 amp 1.4 and the nvme SSD connected to it it's extremely extremely efficient and you will see the difference in the performance so if we finish up the test as you can see it's day and night so 760 megabyte per second read read and there is a almost 366 uh megabyte right and iops is just 172,000 and and yeah it's day and night compared to the hack board right so if we do the very same test from the sbench and do CPU and run and say threads equal four just like the other one so we are running the same test we ran on the hack board four threads and four threads let's compare the results and I saw the amp goes all the way to 1.4 some point yeah this is the result so it's a lot better and more efficient and more usable there is no coil wearing you can do anything you want with the GPI opens nvme is super fast power consumption extremely efficient it's just not comparable so if we also I'm sure you've seen others do it so I don't need to do it but you can very easily play 4K videos on this and uh it's a little bit slow but yeah 4K and if we play Same video right the very same video Yeah it starts playing immediately although the resolution is 720 let's go 10 may0 and let's see if it is dropping anything not really but I don't see the 4K option here so let's try again so I've seen it I've seen the 4K video play on this with no problem yeah it is just much much faster than the hack board and as I said you can connect uh you know different pie hats to this and it will play uh with no trouble with no problem and then it just works out of box and yeah it doesn't make sense if I'm spending that much money I would just buy an Intel knock something from minis Forum maybe but not this definitely not this the best thing you can do with this is as I said just zap it that's all you can do I'm not going to use this such a waste of opportunity anyway thanks for watching bye for now [Music]

Channel: Technically Unsure

Views: 83,452

Keywords: hackboard, raspberrypi, raspberrypi5, review, sbc

Id: zkaq9GK6uOQ

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024