Khadas VIM 4: Powerful ARM SBC with HDMI Input

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to take a look at this the vim4 single board computer from cardass this is a powerful sbc with an octa-core arm processor eight gigabytes of memory an m.2 slot and even an hdmi input so let's go and take a closer look right let's open up this exciting little box i think it just pulls if i can get in there we are come on come on come on oh there we are it is open and oh look we've got a new single ball computer and other things have fallen out in the process of opening it we've got a little guide a little card and these look like wi-fi and bluetooth antennas but obviously our main thing we want to look at is the board itself let's get it out i think we'll just tip it out that's the easy way and here we are the vimfore single board computer from cardass it's always great to hold in my fingers a brand new single board computer and just to give you an idea of the size we'll bring in a raspberry pi and as you can see it's about the same size physically as a raspberry pi slightly smaller actually but it clearly hasn't got a raspberry pi form factor but this said the vim 4 does have the same form factor as the previous vim models such as this vim 2. and with all the connectors in the same places it means we can fit a vim4 into previous thin cases such as this nice red one which contains a vim 3 which is one of the best sbcs for running android that i've ever reviewed all do note though whilst you can put and then four into one of these cases the then four has an extra connector the hdmi input very exciting and so if you want to put the vim4 into an existing case you'll have to cut a little hole out if you want to access the hdmi in now as we can see this vim 4 comes with a fan and heatsink pre-installed although the board can also be bought without a cooling solution and talking as such i personally purchased this vin4 directly from the cardass website although it's also available from amazon.com where the price is currently 199.99 without the cooler or 219.99 with the heatsink and fan included this makes living 4 the most expensive arm-based sbc i've ever reviewed and so i do have very high expectations for this boar's performance as well as for the new software technology it includes do note that in addition to the case there are quite a lot of accessories available as we can see here in the cardass sbc section of the new explaining computer's amazon storefront right i've now removed the cooler so we can take a closer look at the vim4 at the heart of which is an amlogic system a311d2 the chip this has four arm cortex a73 cores clocked at up to 2.2 gigahertz along with four arm cortex a53 cores clocked at up to two gigahertz and an arm mali g52 mp8 gpu clocked at up to 800 megahertz the vim4 also has got eight gigabytes of low power 64-bit ddr4 ram and it's also got 32 gigabytes of emmc 5.1 onboard flash storage also here on the top of the board there's an ap6275s wireless module which for some reason has got a very strange fingerprint on it that i can't clean off even with solvents but uh regardless this offers 80211abg and ac and ax wi-fi as well as bluetooth 5.1 and as we can see there are connectors for external antenna on the main lung edge we find a type a usb 2 port and then the usb c port which is used to power the board although it also features usb 2 connectivity there's then a full size hdmi connector supporting 4k output at up to 60 frames a second and then gigabit ethernet and type a usb 3 port on the first short edge we then find reset function and power switches and flanking these a pmw fan header and a header for a real-time clock battery spinning 90 on the second long edge we next discover a 40-pin gpio connector down here a digital microphone and next to that very exciting our hdmi input this is a micro hdmi connector that accepts an input of up to 4k at 60 frames a second and finally on the second short edge we find a second digital microphone we turn the board over the excitement continues for start on the top here we have a micro sd card slot we've got a vin connector a voltage in connector that provides an alternative means of powering the board and then lurking down here tiny little thing this is a kx tj31057 tri-axis digital accelerometer which can allow the vim4 to sense its orientation also on the base of the board we have an m.2 slot this will accept an nvme ssd but it also features usb usb2 gpio and various other connectivity the slot is outward facing but an extender board is available to allow an m.2 ssd to be fitted under the vim4 finally here we've got four connectors four connectors that take ribbon cables the first two of these are csi connectors camera serial interface connectors for connecting a camera and then we've got two more connectors to which you can connect a display the first of these is a dsi connector a display serial interface connector but also supports touch so you can have a touch panel connected to this connector and finally this connector here is a v by one connector also for connecting a display so there we are this is the cardass vim4 a very well specified arm sbc which i think now we need to put to the test right i've now refitted the cooler as you can see and put the vim4 into this spare thin case i had lying around and this is included making a hole in the back of the case so we can access the hdmi in if you don't want to use the hdmi in you can get the boarding without that hole but i've made the hole there it's quite a large hole because it has to accommodate not just a connector but also a plug actually going into it which would collide with the case if the hole wasn't bigger so now what we need to do is to put the top on the case and this is the top and it goes on like this but it's just worth pointing out the top doesn't go on absolutely perfectly and the reason for that i can show you if i just maybe switch that board around and bring in another vin which is early of them and hopefully you can see here that the cooler on the vim 4 is significantly bigger than the cooler on the the previous vim models and this means that when we put the top onto the older vim models it fits on absolutely flat no problems at all we do that onto the vim4 and you can probably see if i squeeze it around it is colliding with the edges of the cooler and there's nothing you can do about that so this top will go onto the vim4 using the standard case but it will be a slight little gap at the edge because of that anyway i'll now fit the screws there we are the screws have gone in and we can clip on the cover over the gpio connector this is a very clever case and get on there like that there we are and normally at this stage in the video we now have to go to another computer and to download an operating system to put onto the sbc but we don't have to do this here and that isn't because there's an operating system pre-installed on the emc flash on the vim 4 there isn't but what the vimford does have is some very clever embedded firmware called ooh wow and this can be used to download and install an operating system and indeed to back up an operating system so this is an sbc we can set up without using another computer so let's get things connected up and go across to its video output and we'll turn on the power and i can hear a fan just bursting into life for a second and here we are running the oh wow software the wizard for making it easy to install any operating system so we'll click on continue there we are and we can see it's picked up our ethernet connection or when it's gone straight across to allow us to install an image and i'm going to pick ubuntu 2204 to start off that seems a good idea so we'll enter on that and obviously download and there we are it's ready to install so i'll obviously press enter to install and there we are it's finished so i can now just press the enter key to reboot and uh obviously looks like reboot again there we are and this time it shouldn't go directly into the ooh wow utility because there's an operating system on the board and if you heard a little noise then it was the fan leaping into action for a second and here we are ready to log into ubuntu 2204. i'll click on that i think the default password is card ask looks like it is we should now arrive onto the desktop i'll let this run through in real time so you can see exactly what's going on and there we are i'm very impressed with that this is an sbc which is downloaded and installed and booted up its own operating system greetings here i am back again running ubuntu on the vim 4 which is a very responsive experience applications come up very rapidly indeed look at that for libreoffice this has to be the most responsive desktop i've ever run on an non-based single board computer we have here in this version of ubuntu 2204 an applications menu that's a bit unusual in ubuntu but it's nice to see that up there although we can also go into the standard applications view whereas quite a few things pre-installed as you can see here if we just flick across to look at what's here on the board various things just for the vim including a little fan setting application so we can set the speed of the fan nice to see they've done that that's a bit of good attention to detail and oh look talking at which the fans just come on the fan is quite loud when it comes and i should make you aware of that but let's now run up that h top just to show us our processes on the system we've already had our eight processor cores all doing a little bit of work at the moment not too much but they're going on and surprisingly there wasn't a browser pre-installed on this system but i have without any issues at all installed the chromium browser here it is and let's use this to do a bit of a youtube playback i'm sure you want to see that and the thing to report here is that youtube playback is very good indeed on the vim 4. it isn't actually hardware accelerated we don't seem to have proper gpu drivers for this board yet but it doesn't seem to matter we're not getting any dropped frames up here we're bound to get one when i move my mouse on me but basically playing back 1080p video on this board works very well indeed and the reason is because we just flicked back to the h-top there you can see all the cores are taking some of the strain we've got h-stop running it's still not dropping frames we've got great youtube playback there's no doubt at all if you want to have a small pc an arm-based sbc which you use for things including things like youtube playback and the vim 4 performs very well indeed i've also installed the caden live video editor just to try and stress the board out and this again look at that we launched caden live very very rapidly i've got a test edit over here like that it's actually a test edit i've used before and it doesn't actually play terribly well on the timeline here because we don't have that gpu accelerated playback but the reason i've loaded this in isn't actually to test out video editing per se on the vim 4 i want to do a render test comparing pin 4 performance with raspberry pi 4 performance and so what we're going to do is to go to project and we're going to go to render where we set up a script to render out this 40 second piece of video and we'll bring up exactly the same configuration on a raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model running a 64-bit version of raspberry pi os bullseye and we'll start both boards off doing the render at the same point in time and there they go it'll take a second so we'll speed forward until something exciting happens and here we are the vim4 is finishing off the render this little fan is going wild right now but it's finished to render in one minute 32 seconds and i should point out that both boards here are rendering to an external ssd and here we are the raspberry pi is also completed in 2 minutes and 19 seconds so clearly the vim 4 has one in this rendering test as we expected it would in terms of price performance ratio the pi is the winner but when it comes to absolute performance clearly here the winner here is the vim 4. final thing i'll just point out whilst we're here in caden live is if we go to settings and we go to configure caden live and we go to capture and sadly no device is presented here for recording from the hdmi input and i've messed around quite a bit i can't find any application which can see the hdmi input here in ubuntu and so what i'm now going to do is to try another operating system right here we are booting up again and going into the firmware interface and to boot into this firmware when the vim 4 has got an operating system installed on boot you hold down its function key and press reset anyway here we are and i'll press continue and what i want to do this time is to install android as the operating system on the vim4 but before i do that i want to backup ubuntu to a micro sd card and so i'm going to cancel out of this screen right now and here we can see the main ooh wow menu with the wizard the ability to write an image to mmc dump an image from emmc which is what we're going to do here various configuration options are available all that kind of stuff there's lots of exciting stuff what is get fun let's have a look at that what is get fun oh look there are various games we can play gotta try that out it really is in the firmware we can play tetris well that's extraordinary isn't it or we could be here forever but uh i think we'll come out of this presumably press escape it'll get us back yes so we'll uh that was fine but we'll get on with backing up ubuntu where presumably go back to a dump image from emmc and enter it's discovered the card i put in so we'll just do a start and there we are it's completed so we'll okay and now i'll go back to the wizard like that and continue and i'll just select refresh images list just to check we've got the most up-to-date stuff it seems that we have and we'll select android like that to write it to the emc on the board and as previously will download and it's downloading and wouldn't it be great if more singapore computer manufacturers included firmware like this on their boards this does seem to me a great innovation from cardass and there we are we can now install the image and there we are we're ready to reboot oh look this looks android like to me it is things are definitely happening and here we are in android under cardass vim4 and presumably i can flick up and see what's available not a lot is pre-installed but i'll have a look around and come back to you after this into title greetings here i am back again and guess what the situation here in android on the vim4 is just as i said a few moments ago there is very little pre-installed i thought maybe i was missing something i'm not but we don't here have the play store we don't have a browser there is an app installer to install files but we can't install from something like the play store which is rather a shame and i find this very surprising because as i said earlier the vim 3 is a fantastic android sbc when i reviewed that board it came with android pre-installed including the play store i managed therefore very straightforwardly to install youtube which worked very well and did fantastic youtube playback on the vim3 which is a great android sbc and back here on the vim 4 it's probably also a great android sbc but we do need the image to make that happen and we don't have it available and it's particularly disappointing because we go to settings here and we go to cardus settings and we go to hdmi in there we are here i am talking to you in android on the vim 4 if you see what i mean i can see it over here this is me making the video here is the the vim 4 wire coming into it from the camera with the obviously hdmi in it works really well so we've got a situation where we've got a pretty good ubuntu image for this board which can't see the hdmi at the moment and we've got android with very little available in it but it's got hdmi there is such potential here with the vim4 but how many times on this channel have i ended the video by saying well this is a fantastic piece of hardware we haven't got the software support yet sadly that is the case in many respects for for the vim4 and things may improve i hope they improve but they aren't quite there yet anyway i might as well conclude the video talking to you here in android on an sbc that's the first for this channel why should i get myself standing in front of the green screen and shooting on that camera i'll just do it like this so uh now that is it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 82,735

Keywords: VIM 4, VIM4, Khadas, Khadas VIM, Khadas VIM4, Khadas VIM 4, HDMI in, VIM 4 HDMI in, VIM 4 Android, Android, VIM 4 Ubuntu, Ubuntu 22.04, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, octa core ARM, SBC, Khadas SBC, Android SBC, OOWOW, Khadas OOWOW, VIM OOWOW, VIM 4 OOWOW

Id: lsfE83wIjko

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022