Raspberry Pi 4 Alternatives: Five ARM Contenders

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time we're going to look at alternatives to a Raspberry Pi 4. specifically I'm going to present you with a range of rmsbcs from five different manufacturers that I've reviewed on this channel in the past couple of years and which remain on sale for no more than 100 an ideally significantly less when I first reviewed these boards we're going to look at some had relatively weak software support so this video provides an opportunity to see where things may have improved right I thought we'd start with the banana Pi M5 which I first looked at in April 2021. this is one of several banana spcs I've reviewed on the channel over the past nine years and the banana pie M6 has now been announced however the m6 doesn't seem to be available yet and indeed it's not listed here on the banana pie AliExpress store which is still headlined by the M5 and indeed if we click on the M5 we see it's currently selling here for 67.51 and it's also available on America Droid for 91.95 so what do we get well under the heatsink which I've added to this board we have an amlogic s905x3 system on a chip which has four two gigahertz a55 cores along with an arm Mali g31 GPU and we also have four gigabytes of RAM on this board we have 16 gigabytes of onboard flash storage which is rather nice we have four USB 3 ports we have gigabit Ethernet we have 4K HDMI output but we don't have on this board Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and we also don't have camera or LCD connectors turning to software since I first looked at the board updated images have been released here on the banana Pi M5 Wiki and these include Android as well as raspbian and yes I did say raspbian and Ubuntu and Debian back in April 2021 I found that the Android image was stylish and stable but very much provided for development purposes and so this time I've decided to go straight to Linux and here we are running Ubuntu with a Marte desktop and whilst the latest September 2022 image from banana pie is for Ubuntu 2004 having installed it I was prompted to upgrade to Ubuntu 2204 which to my amazement worked absolutely fine and that's what we're running here if we just bring up the system monitor and go across to a system you can see yes we're running Ubuntu Jammy jellyfish and as we just saw the resources are happily wandering along not a lot of activity at the moment and this is very stable and very very responsive incredibly responsive for a Linux distro on and on board let alone one at this price point we can bring up software nice and quickly Let's Just Launch there always good to see the mushrooms coming up and uh that was fast wasn't it we are running off emmc flash storage but uh even so that was impressive and uh impressive is the adjective I would use to describe this system it really is a very nice desktop distro running on an arm SBC but uh we'll come out of that because we always have to we can't stay there forever because I'm sure some of you want to know about browser performance I've had a bit of messing around to get the browser working after the upgrade but it's working fine now here we are on expanding computers and I'm sure you want to see YouTube playback so I'll just set up my usual test and here we are and I'm sure you can see there are quite a lot of drop frames top left but it's mainly when things settle by the time things have settled down as they seem to have done now we've got very few drop frames YouTube playback performance here is very good I am very impressed it seems the software has improved quite a bit on the banana Pi M5 it is certainly a very good Raspberry Pi 4 alternative foreign s which I first looked at in October 2022. here the board is fitted in one of the excellent cardass cases these comment lots of different colors as you can see and you always get a great feel of quality with cardass Hardware so let's take off the top here we go and we can now see the board which is currently selling on the cardass website for 64.90 and the same price on amazon.com in terms of specification we have an amlogic s905y4 system on a chip with four two gigahertz A35 cores and an armale g31 mp2 GPU this is coupled with two gigabytes of RAM 16 gigabytes of on-board emmc flash storage and onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth however other connectivity is a little limited around the back here we do have an ethernet port with its only 100 megabits rather than one gigabit and we do have two type a USB ports but they're only USB two there's no USB 3 on this board since I first tested the vim1s new Android and Ubuntu 2204 images have been released and can be installed using the onboard Infinity wow firmware previously whilst Android performance was excellent YouTube was not in the Play Store and had to be installed by other means but this is now being corrected and 1080p YouTube playback in Android on the vim1s is perfect with the previous issue of a tops bar remaining in full screen mode having been fixed so there is no doubt that the vim1s is an excellent Raspberry Pi 4 alternative if you want to run Android meanwhile in the latest edition of Ubuntu for the board performances solid and stable although it's also a bit sluggish which is perhaps not surprising given that we're running this heaviness of distro on a two gigabyte bought and as last time I also had to install my own browser there was no browser pre-installed here I have installed chromium that's just a roll it up to come up in a second come on chromium you can do it run up here on the vim1s there it is and I've set it as you can see to show us the status of graphical acceleration and we don't have Hardware acceleration here probably not a surprise given that there was no browser pre-installed in this operating system but we will just do a YouTube test and I'm sure you want to see it and here we are and we do have some drop frames so they're not too many only three so far oh no 73 now and like with some of the other boards once things settle it's not too bad this is pretty usable YouTube playback but uh there are a number of drop frames there it's nowhere near as good as we just saw on the vim1s running Android where I'm sure we had Hardware acceleration now let's take a look at the odroid C4 this is one of several potential Raspberry Pi 4 Alternatives from hard kernel with the others including the M1 and the N2 Plus however the C4 is a recent board closest to the Raspberry Pi 4 price point currently selling for 62.95 on ameradroid and 77 pounds 53 including taxes on odroidco UK for this we get an amlogic s905 X3 with four two gigahertz a55 cores as well as an arm Mali g31 mp2 GPU and there's also four gigabytes of RAM on this board we have four USB 3 ports gigabit Ethernet we have full size 4K HDMI and we have a barrel Jack for power with a 12 volt 2 Amp adapter being recommended however sadly we don't have any onboard Wi-Fi on the C4 we don't have LCD or camera connectors and we don't even have a 3.5 millimeter audio jack this is a bit like an SBC made by Apple but underneath we do find a socket for an emmc flash module now when I first reviewed the C4 in May 2020 I tested several different operating systems and had to do quite a bit of messing around since that time hard kernel have continued to release new images with the most recent being a July 2022 version of Ubuntu mate so let's boot it up and here we are we can see the Jammy jellyfish on my desktop of yodroid C4 and buy another route We've Ended up running the same version of Ubuntu with the same desktop as we did on the banana Pi M5 and the banana Pi M5 has exactly the same system on the chip as the odroid C4 and it's therefore not as a price that they both got good performance in this distro wasn't inevitable but it is the case we go down to system tools and we bring up the system monitor we can see again there we are running Ubuntu 2 2204 Jammy jellyfish here on the odroid and things are pooting along quite nicely not a lot of requirement being made on the system right now but things are running okay let's run up a browser this is a very stable operating system I've been playing with it it works very well I'll be very happy to do lots of work on this system we have gone to explaining computers we can check out sbcs many of the spcs in this video in fact all the sbcs in this video on this list somewhere there's so many spcs on this page anyway I'm sure you want to see the YouTube playback test we don't have here GPU accelerated media playback well we will do the test as we do with all the boards here because it's important to us to run on any desktop operating system these days and whilst we do have dropped frames once things have settled playback isn't too bad it's perfectly usable the frames are still being dropped as we can see top left but uh this is watchable it's not ideal but it's certainly watchable I'm I'm impressed with a Ubuntu mate running here on Leo Droid C4 and if you want to see it running some other operating systems including Android and coralect just look across to my previous video right I thought we'd now take a look at the Rock 3A which I first reviewed in December 2021 and I'm very keen to return to this board partly because it's a great piece of hardware and partly because like all rock xpcs the 3A is designed by radza but it's now exclusively manufactured by OK do and OK do is part of the RS group and for 10 years it manufactured Raspberry Pi's indeed if we look for example at this Raspberry Pi 4 box we can see an OK do logo but in July 2022 OK do cease to be a licensed Raspberry Pi manufacturer and is now heavily promoting its Rock SBC range indeed online we can now visit the OK do software and downloads Hub as well as The Rock SBC shop and this lists many rock boards including the rock 5B which I looked at in October 2022 but which I've excluded from this review as it costs at least 129 dollars returning to the Rock 3A this is based on an rk3568 system on a chip with four two gigahertz a55 cores and an R Mali g52 GPU the board comes with two four or eight gigabytes of RAM with prices ranging from about 45 to 85 dollars we also have two USB 3 and 2 USB 2 ports we've got a full size 4K HDMI connector we've got a camera and LCD connectors but we don't have on this board onboard Wi-Fi however we do have this e-keyed m.2 slot and this can take a wireless module something like this and these start from about 7.50 also underneath the board we've got an emmc module socket currently occupied with an emmc module and we've also got this m.2 slot this can take an nvme SSD although it does point out this way so it really needs to be used with an extend board when I first reviewed the Rock 3 a there were some issues connecting to Wi-Fi in Debian and I also couldn't access an nvme SSD in Debian although it worked fine in Ubuntu server but since then new Debian and Android images have been released so if we boot up with an nvme SSD attached here in Debian I'm now pleased to report we can access and then the SSD and if I bring up a terminal we can also test its speed like this very exciting what are we going to get I know you don't let's have a look and there we are 960 megabytes a second that's a good speed for an MDM the SSD on and on SBC particularly want this price point this set device to the few software issues in this distro for start if I click on web browser there we get that error that's probably just a link but it's not good in the official distro and also if I try to launch for example the Chromium browser it also doesn't work nothing will happen we just sit here until the end of time so we won't use the Chromium browser we will actually use the other browser here which is Firefox ESR there we are that will come up and we'll use this to do a YouTube test I'll warn you advance it won't be fantastic but we'll do the test a great deal of messing around here to get this to play at all as you can see it's not very play at the moment oh it's finally playing it's uh this is not good YouTube playback lots and lots of drop frames even when we let this settle as but it isn't that bad now it's settled a bit but this is not the board on which you want to watch a streaming media playback in a browser so let's now take a look at Android and here we are and this does seem to be a bit of a work in progress we do have the Play Store but when I pull it up like that as you can see we get this message which isn't a terribly helpful there is quite a lot of software pre-installed which does include for example YouTube which is good to see let's go to a YouTube clip my standard YouTube test clip we get our message again and if we play this playback is okay it doesn't seem to be dropping frames I can't find a way to bring up stats for nerds here the controls are not what I'm expecting to find in Android and clearly we're not here in the high res and we keep getting this message anyway which would make playback hardly a ideal so there we are as you can probably tell I am disappointed I expected by now the rock 3A particularly with OK dudes backing to be a fantastic Raspberry Pi alternative and yet sadly it is still a fantastic piece of Hardware which is let down by weak software support all right our last board is this the orange Pi 5 which I first reviewed back in January this is one of several orange pies that can serve as a Raspberry Pi 4 alternative with others including the LTS versions of the orange Pi 3 and orange pi 4. however the orange Pi 5 is the most powerful with this four gigabyte model currently selling for 75 on AliExpress so it fits within our criteria although orange pie prices do seem to change a great deal the orange Pi 5 is based on this Octa Core rk3588s which has got four 2.4 gigahertz a76 cores and four 1.8 gigahertz a55 cores as well as an arm Mali g610 mc4 GPU in addition on this board we've got four gigabytes of RAM we've got an 8K full-size HDMI connector and next to it a USB C port with DisplayPort 1.4 output on the board we also have two LCD connectors two ecsi camera connectors and underneath we've got an m.2 slot this is emptied for an nvme SSD although it's designed for a 2242 form factor card and the pcie 2.0 interface on this board constrains the speed to under 400 megabytes a second it should also be noted we don't have onboard Wi-Fi on this board and the gpio connector here is 26 pin rather than 40. as we saw back in January the official Ubuntu and Debian images for the orange Pi 5 are very responsive with the board significantly outperforming a Raspberry Pi 4 in a Caden live rendering test here in Ubuntu if we run up a browser there we are down there that will run up Google Chrome when it comes up you will see in the second there we are we do not have GPU accelerated video playback but regardless if we set up my standard YouTube test we find that we get good video playback because we've got a lot of CPU power available to throw at rendering the video and so the actual playback is very good when it settles there are no drop frames at all and before somebody types it in the comments I am aware there is GPU Hardware acceleration available in other distros such as reborn OS and I'm not going to try that here as it's going to be the subject of another video in December 2022 I interviewed Evan Upton about Raspberry Pi availability and from what he told us we know that things aren't going to get back to normal until the second half of 2023 and in that context I hope you found this video to be useful if you'd like me to make a follow-up video on alternatives to a Raspberry Pi zero do let me know down in the comments section but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed but you've seen here please press start the like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 164,419

Keywords: Raspberry Pi alternatives, Rock 3A, Odroid C4, VIM1s, VIM 1s, Khadas VIM, Odroid, OKdo Radxa, Radxa, OKdo, Banana Pi M5, Banana Pi, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu ARM, Ubuntu, Orange Pi 5, Android, VIM1s Android, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, SBC review, best SBC, best SBC 2023, top SBC 2023, top Android SBC, best Android SBC

Id: k8clrUclPIs

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023