This $19 SBC Is Ridiculously Powerful! - Pi Zero 2

how's it going everyone taki here today we're going to take a look at a very impressive low-cost sbc from orange pi this thing came on my radar recently and i knew i had to get my hands on one for a showcase i'm personally a fan of these tiny computers but i usually stick with raspberry pi's so i'm interested to see what kind of performance we can get from a sub 20 sbc there are two configurations of the pi zero but the one that i have here is the one gigabyte model featuring the h616 from all winner with a quad core a53 cpu and a g31 mp2 gpu you can find the full specs for this sbc in the description box below just so you can get a sense for the size of this device here's a raspberry pi zero this new orange pi is roughly double the size of the pi zero this device has a decent amount of i o on the board with an ethernet port a usb type-c charging port hdmi out and one full-size usb port as you can see again this is the one gigabyte version and i've already gone ahead and installed an sd card on here with the firmware that i'm going to use in this video for the purposes of how i will use the pi zero 2 the only thing that really matters to me is the h616 because the 853 cores in combination with the g31 gpu should open up most of the low to mid end emulation emulating all of what the pi zero can do and some of what the pi4 can do now it's worth mentioning that this device does not come with an sd card nor does it come with a charger cable so you will need to provide both of those on your own getting an operating system for this board was actually pretty painless all you have to do is head over to the orange pi website and you'll find a variety of different operating systems that you can choose from that are ready to go i did try out a ubuntu distro that they had just to make sure it worked but i quickly switched over to android 10 since that's where most of the software is that i want to use in this video this is what my android setup looks like after i've replaced the launcher with the atv launcher i don't want to complain too much given how cheap this thing is but the stock ui for this product is pretty terrible and borderline unusable you also will not have access to google play so you will need to use a different marketplace or side load all of your own apps like i did for my device this shouldn't be a big problem for anyone that would be interested in something like this but i wanted to mention it just in case anyone thinks that this is ready out of the box that being said once you do set it up it rewards you with some really impressive gaming performance before we jump into the gaming test here's my antutu 6 score of 32k and my geekbench 4 scores admittedly i could have tested more android games than this but i wanted to primarily focus on emulation in this video as you can see the h616 is decent enough to be able to handle the minecraft pocket edition at around 30 to 40 fps this game is an easy title to throw into a video since it natively supports controllers when we jump over to emulation we're gonna be using a mix of standalone emulators and retro arc let's start first with sega genesis and see how far we can go the 853 processor is also powerful enough to handle a mix of sega saturn games and even though there's only one pictured here i did test about four other ones that i didn't record while testing this board things start to get really interesting when we move over to dreamcast since that's something that only recently became decent in the main raspberry pi line of devices but definitely not something that's possible on the zero line just yet i'm using the flycast standalone emulator for all the games you'll see in this video for some reason redream gave much lower performance which hardly ever happens on any device that i test so i was forced to use this but i think the performance speaks for itself you also have to remind yourself while you're watching this that this is a sub 20 board um with sega done let's jump over to playstation as you can see the h616 makes light work of bloody roar 2 which is one of the most demanding ps1 games to emulate properly [Music] esp was pretty surprising this board is powerful enough to run games that natively run at 30 fps without any issues and you can see from several of the games in this section that the picture scales beautifully to 1080p i knew god of war was going to be out of the question for this chip but i figured i'd include it here just to show what the top end of this processor looks like out of all of the psp games that i tested this was the one that surprised me the most given how good the game looks and how solid the frame rate is as i move around on this first level what you want a piece of me too yeah come on wait what am i messing around here for i'm gonna miss the meteor shower finally let's move over to nintendo and see what's possible here's super mario rpg running on the snes 9x core from here let's move over to gba using the vba core huh because we are running on android we have access to the solid drastic emulator this is also available on linux but the performance is not as good as android at this point this emulator is supposed to go open source this year so look for better linux support in the future out of all of the nintendo 64 games rogue squadron is by far my favorite and it's also the one that runs like garbage on the low end devices that i test i did not expect that this game would run at all let alone be in the playable state that you see here seeing that rogue squadron runs as well as it does this essentially means that no n64 game is going to be completely out of reach as long as you don't mind some graphical issues or performance drops [Music] um conkers is probably pushing things too far for this chip but it is playable if you don't mind the ugly square in the corner i didn't get to mention it yet but the current android firmware is 32 bit which means that gamecube is completely out of the question i was actually really disappointed in this because i'm pretty sure i could have gotten at least one game to be playable based on some tests that i've done on my rk3326 dev board i asked orange pi if they can make a 64-bit image so we'll see what happens going forward anyway that's it for my coverage of the orange pi zero i think it's a crazy value for what you get in this tiny package i'm just saying it here if orangepie can build and sell this device for under 20 and generate a profit someone needs to jump on using this chip in an android handheld asap this thing could power a really good budget device if you want to buy one of these boards for yourself you can find an affiliate link to orange pi's amazon and aliexpress store is linked below if you have any other questions about this device feel free to leave those below and while you're there consider subscribing to the channel to help support my work i'll catch you next time with another review happy gaming everyone take out

Channel: Taki Udon

Views: 206,663

Keywords: Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi, Taki Udon, Raspberry pi 4, Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange pi vs Rasperry Pi, Raspberry Pi gaming, Retro Pi, Orange Pi Zero, Orange Pi Zero 2 review, SBC gaming, Retro pi emulation, Android Emulation, Orange Pi Emulation, Retro gaming, Retro Emulation, SBC 2020, New Raspberry Pi 4, orange pi pc, orange pi zero, orange pi one, Orange Pi 4, SBC emulation, Nintendo 64, PSP, Playstation, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Raspberry Pi Dreamcast, emulation

Id: r_7C2nOU3e8

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/YOU_WONT_LIKE_IT]

Curious why they can’t just come up with a unique naming nomenclature instead of copying.

[u/macromorgan]

Essentially Allwinner’s version of the RK3326. Expect it to hold its own against the RG351Bs and OGAs of the world.

[u/S31-Syntax]

Glad to see Allwinner stepping up and competing. Love seeing me some healthy competition.

[u/Alphos2000]

I would love to know more about Sega Saturn emulation in Pi Zero 2.

[u/SkyGuyTheLegend]

do you have to order all the parts to actually make it a retro handheld?

[u/[deleted]]

If this runs ps3 emulator or at least ps2 it's worth it's price. But alas