Rock Pi X: Low-Cost x86 Windows & Linux SBC

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to take a look at this the rock pi x from radza this is a low-cost raspberry pi form factor single ball computer with an x86 64 processor so it's capable of running windows 10 and mainstream x86 based linux distributions so let's go and take a closer look right here we have our very exciting brown cardboard box which i purchased from allnet and which contains a rock pie x as well as a required heatsink so let's open it up bring in the stand overnight just to cut through the tape down there and we can get straight inside here we are and oh yes i can see we've got oh that clearly is a antenna antenna as well this is the board this will be the heatsink i'm certain let's go to the board itself and get into the board i can see a familiar bit of rad so tape on here or we'll use stanley knight as well getting in there and hopefully in a second we will get inside and ah yes it says rock pie x we've got the right board and there we are what a smart looking single board computer very very exciting indeed and it's worth pointing out that the rock pi x comes in various models with either one two or four gigabytes of ram and either 816 3264 or 128 gigabytes of onboard flash storage with prices ranging from forty nine dollars for the one gigabyte 16 gigabyte model up to 99 for the four gigabyte 128 gigabyte board and here if you're wondering what i've got is a four gigabyte ram board with 32 gigabytes of emmc flash storage on the board and this cost me 75 dollars and then the heatsink over here still in its exciting crinkly bag that cost an extra 7.99 and then together with shipping it means i paid a grand total of 95.67 to have this sent to me in the uk which was a 73 pounds 35 delivered if you wish to know so with all that out of the way i think first of all we should compare this board to some other single board computers so let's start out by putting it down over here next to a raspberry pi 4. so there we are the rock pi x next to the raspberry pi 4 we can see they clearly have got exactly the same form factor the raspberry pi 4 here which is a four gigabyte model this costs 55 compared to 75 for this four gigabyte pi x but of course the rod pay x has got onboard flash storage and really the boards i want to compare this to more than the raspberry pi are these boards over here so let's put the rot pi x down in the middle like that and what we have here are your choices if you want to buy an x86 based single ball computer for less than 100 dollars and specifically over here we have a latte panda version 1.0 2 gigabyte ram 32 gigabyte on-board storage model which costs 89 from df robot and then over here we've got an atomic pi which has got 2 gigabytes of ram and 16 gigabytes of onboard flash storage and this is a rather strange board because it was never manufactured to be a single board computer it was made to be a robot control board the robot project got cancelled the boards got remainder they got sold off and rebranded as the atomic pie which initially sold for 34 dollars and today you can still buy an atomic pie if you're lucky for 39.95 from for example ameridroid although i think the supplies are getting very limited and it's worth noting that all three of these boards are based on the same processor which is an intel atom x5 z8 350 that's a 64-bit quad-core cpu and it's a chip from 2016. and i mentioned this because when i said on my channel a few weeks ago i'm going to be looking at the rock pie x i think it's fantastic new board some people said no it isn't it's based on the 2016 chip and i'd say two things about that one is there's nothing wrong with chips in 2016. many people today in the world are using pcs with far older cpus than four years and secondly you have to make compromises if you want to make and you want to buy a single ball computer with an x86 processor for less than a hundred dollars and the compromise is a slightly older chip so with that point made let's look in a bit more detail at the specification the hardware of the rock pi x right here we have the rock pi x which as i've already noted is based on a quad core intel atom z8 350 cpu which is a 1.44 gigahertz base frequency bursting to 1.92 gigahertz and if you're wondering where is the processor it is a under the board under here there it is that shiny thing there is the atom chip sitting next to our two memberships here providing here are four gigabytes of ram which is one eight sixty six megahertz low power ddr3 and also here on the base of the board we can see our emmc flash memory module here 32 gigabytes of onboard flash storage and alongside the emmc chip is a micro sd card slot which supports cards up to 128 gigabytes in size as well as a display connector supporting an lcd display and then at the other end of the base of the board we find a real-time clock battery connector and then next to that a usb 3 otg switch and so that's it for the base of the board we're seeing all we can over here so let's flick things back the right way up stop the board being disoriented and if we now turn to the first short edge we find gigabit ethernet and we find four type a usb ports and as you can see three of these ports are usb2 and one is usb 3. and it's a shame we've only got one usb 3 port but at least we've got one usb 3 port rotating around we find a 3.5 millimeter jack offering stereo audio output and a microphone input and which appears to be gold plated and then at the other end of this edge we find a usb-c connector which is used to power the board in the middle of these two jacks we then find this a full size hdmi connector always good to see a full size hdmi connector and according to the specs on the radar wiki this supports 4k output at up to 30 frames a second however i'm skeptical of this claim as the intel specifications for an atom z350 state that the maximum hdmi resolution is 1920x1080 and that's what i expect from this board and indeed radsa do label the board as having intel gen8 hd graphics and there's a bit of a clue there in the name of those hd graphics spinning 90 again we find one of those tiny little wireless antenna connectors and then next to that there is a power switch next to that nestling down here somewhere we find a couple of leds a status led and a power led and then finally on the end there is a connector for an external power switch in case you want to turn the board on without having to press little switch down here finally on the last lung edge we find a color-coded 40-pin gpio connector and then lurking behind it at one end there is the wireless module which offers 802.11 ac wi-fi and bluetooth 4.2 and at the other end of the gpu connector down here we've got a four pin power over ethernet header and so there we are the rock pi x a rather nifty x86 based single ball computer with a raspberry pi form factor now just before we try this board out we need to turn our attention to its heat sink so let's uh open this thing up in a little crinkly bag here we've got a very large piece of metal and also some mounting hardware and we've got some heatsink compound here it's good to see this is going on with thermal paste not using a thermal pad and just bring the two in together you can see this obviously is the same size of the board roughly it goes in on the underside got it the wrong way around there these two things will go together so we've got a heatsink on the cpu and the memory something like that so i think i'll put this together using the magic of filmmaking and there we are it's gone together very well indeed this really is a very nice construction and the final thing i need to mention is a power supply to power the board and the power supply is going to be this this is the razer usbc power supply they do recommend that you use a power supply but doesn't just provide five volts and this power supply provides five volts at three amps nine volts of two amps and twelve volts at one amp so it'll be a good power supply to power via the rock pi x so there we are i think we're now all ready to test this board out greetings here i am back again and as you can see i've got the rock pi x all connected up and running and indeed we're running windows 10 here we are running windows 10 on the rock pi x and it works perfectly well a little bit sluggish here and there but it certainly works and it was a very straightforward install the rockpi x has a standard bios so you can just go into the bios on boot and then go along and find a boot override as i did here boot from a usb drive with a windows install on it and you end up with a windows 10. and admittedly i've spent about seven or eight hours today going through the whole process of installing windows 10 and doing all the windows 10 updates don't we get a lot of those these days getting all the drivers working but everything is now working absolutely fine and let's just run something like i don't know the 3d viewer to show you the things do work on this machine let's run that up as i say a little bit sluggish running things up but it does work hopefully we'll get to the wonderful 3db in a second come on give us the 3db oh it's coming in over here i always find this is a good test i like animation 2 here and there we are we've got the the flying bee so as you can see there are pixels got a little bit of a power to generate things like that and we'll also nip to the internet or we've got to go to the internet oh look we're going to visit the world's favorite website that seems to be working we can check out single world computers things like that all the friends of the rock pi x and i'm sure you want to see what happens if we try to go to youtube so here's my sample youtube clip and it seems to be pretty sluggish getting a youtube clip going it takes a long time to buffer things and get working but when it does get working it seems to work pretty well so hopefully this will eventually allow us to a full screen here we are we're getting to a full screen hopefully we're in hd getting to this point was a painfully slow but once we've got there playback is is fine i wouldn't recommend a rockpix as a youtube playback device but i have to admit once you've gone through the process of getting your video playing everything works very nicely indeed you can get decent hd playback streaming in a browser here on the rock pipe x but the other thing i want to do we just come out of this there we are it's catching up with us i want to run pass mark so i've got a shortcut here to pass mark so let's just run up past mark nine there we are pass mark is now up and running still trying to collect some information on temperatures for the hard disk and gpu don't think it's going to do that but as you can see the cpu is running at 57 degrees c and it's worth noting the heatsink is doing its job it's getting pretty warm the heatsink not untouchably warm but it's certainly working doing its job so let's now run the passmark tests and there'll be various breaks i'm sure in the recording as we do this do we want to run over tests yes we do and we'll speed on through and here we are running some of the graphical tests i'd note the test before this one was not recordable there are various resolution changes go on during the past mark process but here we are with the floating jellyfish in space which is achieving about three and a half frames a second this is a very strenuous test to be giving the poor little rock pi x and here we are looking at some of those lovely shapes we see in the past mark test it's worth noting that the previous graphical tests timed out but this one's running perfectly well and there we are it's finished we've got a final pass mark score of 659.4 and if we put this on a table of past march scores from other x86 based single ball computers i compared in the video a few months back you'll see this actually a pretty good result given the price of the rock pipe x because the score here is beating both the latte panda version 1.0 232 model which sells for 89 and it's beating the score of 430 we got for the latte panda version 0 4 64 model which sells for dollars so this is a pretty good windows performance a pretty good passmark rating for the rock pi x so it's now the next day and as you can see i've installed linux mint 20 here on the rock pi x and this was a far less time consuming install and update than windows 10. it took just over an hour to get this system all up and running on the rockpi x and it's a nice responsive system it runs a little bit faster than windows i guess we would expect that it's just not quite as heavy a distribution heavier operating system the only problem i do have though is as you might notice down here i'm running here with a wired connection which works perfectly well because i can't get the wi-fi adapter working in linux here on the rockpi x what you cry you can't get wi-fi working on a linux distribution that's never happened before in the history of the human race has it well it has and even in windows i took about an hour to get the driver working for for wi-fi which i did get working in windows it's probably possible to get it working here in linux i just haven't got it working yet and so that's why we're on wired connection and we've got a bit more space left on the system on our emmc flash module in linux as you would expect let's just go to uh this usage analyzer there and you'll see that we've got 21 gig free on our 32 gigabyte emmc i didn't show you the comparable thing in windows we had about 11 gigabytes free in windows after windows had installed and updated and indeed when i chose my specification for the rock pixel model to get i went for the four gig ram 32 gigabyte emmc very much thinking of doing linux installs let's just run up a browser why not we're here might as well see if we can get online of course we can where are we going could you guess there we are but let's also go and do a youtube clip again just to show you streaming media playback here in linux again it takes a little time to get going but nowhere near as long as it did in windows and let's just uh make sure we're in hd oh there we are um no we're not we're in 720p it's having a little think but i said less of a thing than it had in windows and hopefully in a second there we are it's working and you will see from stats it is dropping frames here quite considerably according to the stats which it wasn't in windows although we got to this position much more easily so it's not quite as good a playback i think it's perfectly acceptable but uh there we are i just thought you might like to see streaming media playback here in firefox in a linux mint 20 as opposed to what was in microsoft edge in windows so uh there we are we've seen that windows and linux mint 20 running on the rock pi x as we've seen in this video the rock pi x delivers on the promise of being an x86 based raspberry pi form factor single board computer sold for the lowest possible price now whether you'd be better buying a raspberry pi or another arm-based sbc rather than a rock pi x has to depend on what you want to do with the board but certainly there are occasions where it's very useful to be able to run an x86 based operating system and applications on a small board and it's those sort of situations the rock pi x is most suited for but now that's 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: 252,334

Keywords: RockPi X, Rock Pi X, Radxa, Radxa x86 SBC, Radxa Rock Pi X, x86 SBC, Windows SBC, low-cost x86 SBC, Atom SBC, Z8350, z8350 sbc, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: cGxScUmkzNs

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020