The Sigma: The Most Powerful Single Board Windows PC

are you ready to meet the most powerful single board computer on the market and by powerful I mean 12 cores 16 threads 16 gigabytes of memory two and a half terabytes of nvme storage dual two and a half gigabit Ethernet dual 10 gigabit USB and dual Thunderbolt 40 gigabit ports I'll give you a full introduction to the system and run complete benchmarks on it right here today in Dave's Garage [Music] hey I'm Dave welcome to my shop today in Dave's Garage we're going to take the latte Panda Sigma for a spin and see how it Stacks up against true desktop systems it's billed as the smallest and most powerful complete Windows 11 PC and from what I've seen so far it more than lives up to those promises as you'll see shortly it even outperformed my M1 Mac Mini when latte Panda approached me about reviewing the board I was a little dubious as product reviews are a bit outside my wheelhouse but once I heard the specs and after they dropped the phrase fully hackable on me I was intrigued the fact that the board is fully hackable from an Electronics perspective was the killer feature for me it has a gpio header with more than a dozen pins that you can control and better yet it's fully compatible with the Arduino framework and even its IDE we'll even try coating up a simple Arduino sketch and uploading it to the board today that all said I don't do normal product reviews where I lavish Praise on this week's highest bidder rest assured that no money changed hands I didn't have any input on the contents of this video and they didn't get to see it in advance and that means I'm going to test the weird stuff like can the Thunderbolt 4 ports be used for video can I add my own ssds can the board be powered off USBC alone how much power does it draw can I connect it to an external GPU can I run multiple monitors can it handle the heaven Benchmark how does it fare with geekbench versus a Mac Mini and so on but before we get too far into the weeds doing all those things let's meet the latte panda with a patented Dave's Garage product unboxing all right let's have a look inside the Box The Latte Panda Sigma comes custom matched to my watch it appears so we'll just pop it out of the box and see what's inside pretty nice packaging for a single board computer I might add fancy latte Panda Sigma logo inside we have a little frame that frames our single board computer and the power supply I presume is right below this let's lift out the cover plate and see what's going on inside looks like it comes with a branded power supply which is always nice so I'll set that aside and we can take out the latte Panda Sigma and set it aside for a moment as well still nicely wrapped in its anti-static bag we'll pull out the styrofoam layer here and see what's below it all right looks like we've got power cables from various different formats including European and some other ones that I'm not familiar with let's see what all we've got here we've got small dryer East Germany I think I'm kidding I assume that's European and here we go it's American so I'll set that with the power supply we've also got some stickers that came with it and a little instruction book that we can take a look at of course I'm not going to read through this right now but I will flip through it so you get kind of a rough indication of what kind of information you get besides specs instructions how to install a drive how to jump for it what the ports are all that hope you got that this looks like one of those strips you would put on an SSD to sound it up against the heatsink plate on the back so I presume that's what it is we've got a couple of Wi-Fi antennas and some standoffs let's pull the sigma out of its wrapper and we'll see what it looks like all right so as you can see it's got a lot of connectivity on it on the one side it's got two USB ports and a thunderbolt 4 Port it's also got a power switch and a power LED on the back side we've got a couple of 10 gigabit USB ports dual 2.5 gigabit Nix an HDMI port another Thunderbolt 4 port a power Barrel jack adapter and then some expansion on the left hand side you'll see there's a whole set of gpio pins that can be used for programmatic hacking the back plate of the board is steel or aluminum and it serves as a heat sink for the ssds and now the best part what comes with a latte Panda why of course it's a latte Panda or a Pounder with latte he's actually pretty cute I think we'll uh put him up on the Shelf now one thing I tend to think seriously because I don't want my hose to burn down are power bricks and in this case we're looking at a branded power brick made by Delta and it is in fact UL listed which is of course very nice to have it's a 19 volt power brick and it appears to run up to 90 Watts The Latte Panda Sigma is available as a bare board or with SSD storage and Wi-Fi built in the one I received had a 500 gigabyte SSD already installed but a wasted m.2 Port is a shame so I decided to install a two terabyte Samsung 980 Pro along with it to bring it up to two and a half terabytes total the board has four slots on its backside one was used for Wi-Fi one for the factory drive one for the drive I was about to add and that still leaves one spare slot I know kind of a waste but okay let's bust out the Phillips screwdriver pull off the back plate and have a look at where the ssds and the Wi-Fi card go as noted earlier this back plate serves as a heat sink and so you want to leave it in place I believe as long as you've got ssds on the back screws removed I can pop the plate off and here you can see I've already installed a 980 Pro from Samsung which is a two terabyte unit that's in addition to the Western Digital black SN 770 which is the 500 gigabyte drive that it came with adding the Wi-Fi antennas is a bit of fiddliness here that we've got to push it down in the center once we get it aligned properly let's see if I can get that to go stay on there we go and the second one do I win yes now they don't give you much length here to Route these so I'm just going to wrap them around to the other side put the plate back on and then see where we can stick those Wi-Fi pads I don't really like sticking them here on the metal but uh hopefully it will not cause any interference now I actually don't know the implications of sticking these to a metallic surface so we're just going to have to boot up the Wi-Fi and see what the reception is like and with the antennas connected it's jumped from one bar to a full five bars of service on the Wi-Fi so it looks like they're in a fine location at least for my purposes now it's time to put those ssds to the test to make sure they're getting all the PCI lanes and bandwidth that they need to perform correctly for that testing I'm going to use crystal diskmark and we'll run it on both the factory Western Digital black drive and on the Samsung 980 Pro that I've added let's check out the results so for my test bench I've just hooked up a keyboard and a mouse as well as USBC input power and HDMI output to the monitor because this monitor doesn't have a USBC input like my main Dev station so it's simply getting power over the Thunderbolt Port from the external GPU which I don't have a driver installed for yet and just for completeness I confirmed that both ports allow you to power the board I've now done it off both sides so you can also tell that both work for USBC video time to run some disc benchmarks now the Western Digital 770 that we're going to be testing is rated at 5150 and we come very close to that at 5056 within a one percent or two percent of air and the right is also up to spec holds up nicely for the second batch and then falls off as you expect as the right sizes get smaller and smaller either way five gigabytes a second reads and four gigabytes a second rates fairly impressive for a single board computer at least I think so next Let's test my installed Samsung 980 Pro 2 terabyte drive comes in a little slower at 34.24 and the reads hold up perhaps a little better until the very smallest reads rights are closer to what the Western Digital was able to do but still 3454. now I'm of the opinion that really large transfer rates for really large transfer sizes is really only useful to you if you're moving around huge files like 4K video files since I don't think you'd be editing 4K video files on a single board computer it's not clear to me that these are even useful numbers but hey there they are next I want to Benchmark the CPU and the integral GPU as well as to see if I can get it to work with an external GPU we'll also measure power draw through both the USBC ports and the barrel Jack adapters to see if it makes any difference in Peak power consumption or provides any limitation if you're not using the barrel Jack we'll use geekbench 6 for the testing and we'll put those results in context against a ryzen 5950x a threadripper 3970x and an M1 Mac Mini we'll also put it through the test with cinebench to see how the multi-core performance Stacks up next we'll bust out geekbench 6 and let it run through both the CPU and the GPU benchmarks we'll see how it does compared to a 5950x a Mac Studio and a threadripper 64 thread machine we'll see how that compares to other systems in a moment but just from sea to the pants I think that's pretty much comparable to the 5950 and probably not far behind the Max studio now of course that's single core because multi-core wouldn't be a fair comparison because the Max studio has 20 cores and the 5950 has 16 cores and threadripper has 32 cores so we'll see their multi-scored cores being quite a bit higher but let's uh keep our eye on the single core score and see how it compares next let's run the compute Benchmark so we can see what the 3D graphics performance is expected to be like [Music] and as it wraps up and posts a score of 13 941 that's a score that I would definitely call rocket league in Minecraft so those kind of games are probably going to run pretty well on this machine but you won't be playing cyberpunk at 4K and since I was powering the machine over USBC I was curious to see just how much power it was actually taking and if USBC power was any kind of limitation on the machine's maximum power consumption the first thing I did then was to spin up Prime 95 on all cores so the CPU is maxed and with no GPU action and just CPU I'm just right over the edge of 60 watts but let's say 60 watts that seems to be the max consumption and with the CPU and system pulling 60 watts let's see what happens if we fire up the GPU and get it to do some work at the same time so with prime95 still using every cycle available in the background we're going to run geekbench again and this time running the GPU compute to see if it pulls any more power and surprisingly no so to make sure that it's not anything to do with power supply I'm going to step up to the 141 adapter from my Apple MacBook now as you can see it pulls about one and a half Watts until I power it on once I do that it should ramp up here pretty quickly there we go so when the machine is reasonably busy it pulls about 30 watts and down from there depending on how active the machine is and to give you some sense of what the GPU is like it's running this at 60 to 70 frames per second so as you can see it's not helpless not by any means so it has reasonable Graphics capabilities but it's not going to be like a Mac Studio that has a significantly more powerful GPU built right into the CPU this one's built into the CPU as well but it's far more laptop style than desktop style I would say and now to make sure that USBC power being supplied was not a limitation on the machine I've plugged in the 91 adapter that it comes with and I've got a monitor plugged directly into the wall here so we can see what kind of power it pulls from the wall it's going to be about 5 to 10 watts of overhead at any one time and now that I've got Prime 95 running and I can see it's pulling 70 Watts so that's probably 60 plus 10 overhead for being a power supply of this nature [Music] and with the GPU fully engaged as well as the CPU we're still at just over 60 watts so we're right in that range next I'm going to move on to cinebench R23 which is probably not a very favorable test for a computer like this because it really focuses on multi-core performance now of course this does have 12 cores 8 performance and four economy and so it is of course going to do much better than your typical single board computer but compared to a higher end desktop class computer I don't think it's going to do that well but we'll see where it lands once it's done calculating now I'm going to leave cinebench to run here for quite a while in order to really heat soak the machine and see what it is able to sustain for clock rates once it's fully saturated and to find out we're going to rely on your friend and mine task manager or your sales manager here we go there we can see it's still at all cores at 3.09 gigahertz so that's pretty good for a 1.9 base clock I figure and now let me hit the turbo button on it and uh no actually I'm fast forwarding this footage because it takes a little long to get through all the passes that it needs to in order to complete the Benchmark but it should be done about now and what do we wind up with and it looks like a fairly respectable score of 10 310. with the benchmarks complete it's time to put them into some context to provide that info I run the same testing on three additional systems an M1 Mac Mini a ryzen 5950 and a threadripper 3970 workstation let's have a look at the results now the GPU side is where the sigma struggles a bit at least compared to Modern dedicated gpus the sigma post a score of 13 383 which is still about 70 percent of the GPU horsepower of a M1 Mac Mini which scores in 19826. in comparison to the higher end fare the Mac Ultra approaches 100 000 and the threadrippers Nvidia 4080 Rockets past them all at 227 370. still the sigma has no pretensions of being a graphics and gaming Powerhouse so the real question is whether the integral GPU is sufficient for your needs as long as those needs don't include intensive video editing or Cutting Edge gaming I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at just how well it does just for fun I plugged in an external GPU via Thunderbolt 4 to see if it works this limits the number of PCI Lanes to the four that are available on the cable but it's still posted a score of almost 70 000 which is five times faster than the internal GPU granted I'm not sure why you'd buy a tiny single board computer and then anchor it to a large external enclosure like the Razer egpu housing I'm using but it's nice to know that the technology works and is available if you ever need it on the CPU side of things the single core speed is quite impressive turning in 2073 just shy of the m1s 2325 in fact it handily beats the threadripper 3970x in single core performance and it even turns in more than 50 percent of the threadrippers immense multi-core score posting an 88-67 that also puts at a hand of the M1 mini the ryzen 5950 which boasts 16 cores and 32 threads also pushes past it at 11 873. as a final test I wanted to vet their claim of being a hackable desktop to that end the Arduino IDE already came pre-installed on the machine and was already set up for the latte Panda Sigma in the board options I typed in the classic Blinky sketch which simply turns the built-in LED off and on with a delay and it compiled and uploaded and worked perfectly on the first attempt I noticed that it was uploading to com3 so it looks like the sigma presents itself in such a way as to be trivially programmable using the Arduino framework with a dozen or so gpio pins fully under your control I think it makes a compelling example of a very powerful Arduino host taken as a whole then the performance of The Latte Panda Sigma is impressive when you consider it for what it is a single board computer that's a fair bit smaller than a Mac Mini but still outperforms it in multi-core processing now the GPU may not be a Powerhouse but is comparable to what you'll find in most non-gaming laptops so it's more than enough to do all of your desktop Computing tasks by the way if you have any interest in matters related to autism Asperger's or ASD please check out the free sample of my book on Amazon secrets of the autistic millionaire it's got nothing to do with money and everything to do with living a successful life on the Spectrum so everything I know now that I wish I'd known back then and if you've enjoyed today's episode I'd be honored if you consider subscribing to my channel if I see a sudden spike in subscriptions then I know that there's an interest in this type of content and I'll make more of it thanks for joining me out here in the shop today in the meantime in between time hope to see you next time right here in Dave's Garage

Channel: Dave's Garage

Views: 450,111

Keywords: single board computer, raspberry pi, latte panda, raspberry pi altenative, development board, lattepanda x86 single board computer, lattepanda sigma, latte panda sigma, sigma, most powerful single board computer

Id: ggy378_K9Zg

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023