This Single Board Computer is Faster than a Mac Mini AND a Raspberry Pi

this little single board computer is screaming fast it combines a fast processor faster than an Apple Mac Mini into a form factor not much bigger than a Raspberry Pi Beyond a fast CPU it supports Arduino and has gpio opens so you can go do projects on it there is a load of expansion and networking on board and this thing can even support a form of ECC memory while this might be small there's a lot here so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this is a latte Panda Sigma if you're like me you probably have a bunch of Raspberry Pi's laying around to doing various tasks but sometimes you might wish well maybe that Raspberry Pi was a little bit faster now there are certainly a wide variety of different options on the market with things like rock chip and all those other types of arm processors but sometimes you know you just want to go fast and in the past going fast in a small system like this meant that you were probably gonna use only e-cores and so you're always going to be limited in speed and features so I have to say that I was completely shocked with the overall performance and even things like just how quiet this system was and I have to say I vote a lot of single board computers over the years and one of the things that I don't like about leaving the Raspberry Pi ecosystem is you always have to worry about support like is the OS going to be supported is a board going to be supported over time and one of the nice things with this is that because it's a 13th gen Intel Core processor I'm going to run nus out of the box it was super easy to go set up Linux and windows and everything on this now this thing is super awesome but I do want to point out that this is a review unit that we were sent to go and do this video at the same time we never let vendors read sth content or csth content before it goes live so it's being done completely editorially independently like it should be and of course we have a whole bunch of things that we connected this to that we'll show you in a little bit so if you do want to support us you can always go join the sth YouTube channel become a member down below any help is always appreciated with that let's get to the hardware okay so normally we have external then internal Hardware overviews but uh this thing is kind of a almost bare board so we're just going to do this all at once and the first thing you'll probably notice is that I did put the included uh standoffs on here and then uh you know folks are just going to ask like what's the size of this thing I thought the easiest way to convey the size is with a hard drive I mean if you take a hard drive you plop It On Top This is a three and a half inch hard drive size SBC so first off let's start with what's under here and I'm not going to take this off real time but we do have a photo of the CPU under this this is an Intel Core i5 1340p which is a raptor Lake Edition processor this is the same type of processor that you'd find in other mini PCS even things like laptops and things like that now the core i5 1340p is a 12 core processor now there are four P or performance cores which have hyper threading so you get eight threads out of those and then you get another eight efficiency course the graphics on board here is the Intel XE Graphics now this is the some unlike a lot of systems doesn't use sodim memory instead the memory is soldered on to the board itself and we get 16 gigabytes of LP ddr5 6400 memory so on the plus side we get more performance on the negative side we lose upgrade ability I will note that this is the 16 gigabyte version but there is a 32 gigabyte version that I think is on pre-order and frankly if I were getting this system I would want 32 gigabytes and although we get more memory performance on the flip side I really like to be able to upgrade things especially on something like this where you're saying like hey we have Arduino and like you know gpio and all that kind of stuff and it's hackable all that and then you can upgrade your memory so that's just kind of a bummer still I understand the design decision I would just get 32 gigs if I bought this now on top of that processor we get this little cooler and I'll let you hear this when we get to our power and cooling thing but I'll just tell you that this is not loud by any means um this is actually sitting right over here on the side on this table back here and I was like looking around I was like wait where the heck did I put that latte Panda and this thing was running and and I didn't even hear it okay so let's go through some of the ports and stuff that you have on here so the first thing you're going to see that we have two USB 2 ports and then we have a power button a fun thing is that this little power button that you see here was actually just kind of floating around in the box and some of the pictures don't even have it on so you have to install this yourself which I I just don't really like that level of hackability I'd rather just have this thing you know already working one feature that we didn't get to test but it's here is a micro SIM slot which you can see just under the cooler and above the PCB and the fact that this has Thunderbolt 4 means that you can expand this with everything I mean you can put GPU you could put networking you could also do something like put an AI accelerator all that kind of stuff because you have that Port so I just feel like this gives it another level of flexibility beyond what you typically would see with something like a Raspberry Pi one other little thing that we found uh just behind this power button is that there's this little tiny like like button right here and that's actually the reset button for the microchip co-processor that is something you typically don't see on many PCs okay so looking at the other side we have our headset Jack then we have two 2 USB 3 and these are 10 gigabit per second type A ports we then get our ethernet ports which are two two and a half gig ethernet ports and these Network ports use the Intel i225v for networking next to our Network ports we have our HDMI 2.1 output so you can go drive pretty high resolution displays out of this next we have another type c port and this is also a thunderbolt 4 Port so we get two Thunderbolt ports one on the front and one on the back which is awesome these Thunderbolt ports also will do things like run alt display mode or DisplayPort mode so you can run displays off of them as well next we have our DC power jack and then we have a power in with a connector that we don't have the mating connector for and if all that I O didn't sound exciting enough well there's even more just on this top part so here you can see our gpio block and this GPI block I'm going to let you go guys go and like look up the specs on that if you're really interested but that gives you the ability to go do things like run Arduino projects and go you know just create stuff out of that which is just fun if you're into that kind of stuff and then also we have a SATA 7 pin port here so um you can also put a hard drive you know this is the size of a hard drive so uh maybe you know you could add one there I guess I don't know and then even with our latte Panda backplate you'll see that we have an RTC battery header and then also on the other side we have an e DisplayPort uh connector as well as a touch connector now liberating The Latte Panda Sigma from its base that requires four little screws and washers to be pulled off and then you can just pop it out and once we do that you can see that there are little spots for thermal pads here but then you know the really cool thing about this is the fact that there's a ton of expansion on the bottom here now these are labeled on the board but we get two m.2 slots for nvme ssds one is PCA gen 3 and one is a pcie Gen 4 slot we also get a third one though which is a b key which can either have SATA or it can run I think as pcie gen 3x1 and then that doesn't even include the fact that this has Wi-Fi and this is using the Intel ax 211 which means it's Wi-Fi 6E and it's a cnvio version you can see that we have our little CR 1220 battery and not only is this expandable but just a great example of how hackable the system is is that there's this little com selector switch which lets you pick between rs-232 and rs 485 just by going like this now if you get a version that's not pre-configured well then you won't get the Wi-Fi you won't get the SSD but if you do get the configured version you'll get this wi-fi 6E and also a half terabyte SSD at this point you've probably noticed one thing that I hate about the system and that is the fact that sure you get your Wi-Fi 6E but unless you have very good Wi-Fi it's going to be a struggle to use it because well there's no antenna hooked up to this instead um well they give you a little uh little ESD pouch that has two little antennas that you can stick somewhere wherever you want you may think like hey let's go stick them on the base plate but then remember that if you do want to service the bottom of this then uh well you'll be de-sticking these or pulling them out and these things are just such a pain to put in next let's talk about performance of this this so the performance of this is pretty good it's about what effect from a Mini PC even though it's in a singleboard computer form factor and because this is a 12 core 16 thread processor it's actually pretty fast with raptor Lake it's actually faster than the M2 Mac Mini that we have sitting over here now because of the lpddr5 memory and the Intel Iris XE Graphics in this generation you actually get a pretty decent GPU this is probably not going to go replace your RTX 4090 by any means but on the other hand it is certainly perfectly capable of doing just about anything desktop related that you want the other side to it though is that you also have things like av1d code which is awesome and with all these display outputs you can do a total of three 4K displays plus also the I think EDP can do like 1080 or something like that so overall you could actually put up to four displays on this little thing and before we get to power consumption noise I just want to point out real quick that we did put Windows 11 Pro we also put Ubuntu and then we put proximox ve 8 on here and they all worked no problem but I think the power noise on these are completely fascinating so let's go take a look at that now the power situation on this is exactly the personality of this latte Panda because you would expect that there is something very flexible and of course we're not even using the power in header that's over here because we don't have that connector but what comes with the unit is you actually get a nice Delta power brick that's a 90 watt power brick which is absolutely plenty for this little system but if you don't want to use the DC power brick one question that a lot of folks ask us is well can you use the USBC in and the answer is most certainly yes and so we're actually running this thing off of USB C power right now we have our USBC power in to the Thunderbolt Port right here and then we have our little power Z meter here which we'll Link in the description if you want to learn more about that and that can show us our power consumption idle power consumption you'll see from our fancy power Z meter that we'll Link in the description and somewhere in that maybe 4.8 to maybe 7 or so what range we're running Windows 11 Pro this is our background processes that kick up every once in a while and you know cause that fluctuation we also have our meter setup with a little action camera so you can see how loud it is from about one meter away Alex will overlay that but I want to let you hear this thing at idle just to hear how quiet it is so in our 34 DBA noise floor Studio at one meter this thing is registering about 34.7 to about a little over 35 DBA so it's really not making much of an impact and frankly if it's one meter away from you you're probably not going to hear it at idle now kicking things up you'll see that power consumption jumps pretty dramatically and it's running from anywhere from maybe about 44 to just over 50 Watts it's definitely not a you know 90 watt or 100 watt like we've been seeing some mini PCS hit recently it's definitely a lot lower power than that but it is also way more power than a Raspberry Pi and let me just let you hear this real quick the noise has definitely picked up but it's not necessarily the worst especially given that this is the 100 noise overall I think this is very reasonable now with all of these I like to have key Lessons Learned and I think that there are two here first off I just think that this performance package and like all the the you know I O that you have on here with like Thunderbolt we have multiple m.2 slots and all that kind of stuff and even down to things like having two two and a half to youth in airports I think that overall this thing has a ton of just i o and it's just awesome to have this much power in a single board computer I mean let's face it in a three and a half inch hard drive footprint this is way more interesting than a hard drive right but the second and perhaps more interesting thing is that this also has an Arduino component you'll notice that in the specs you have a co-processor the coprocessor is a microchip at Mega 32 u4 mu and by default our system came with the Arduino IDE already built in so you could do things like you know pull down a blinky light program and start going immediately with this system which I thought was really cool and really easy to use now if you don't care about Arduino then I guess you know we probably don't care about the future but if you do care about it or you might be you know Arduino interested well this is an opportunity to do that of course a lot of folks are going to say well hey there are all these lower power platforms for that of course they are but also just remember that this is connected to a giant processor and storage array so it might be actually pretty interesting to combine those this is not just a Mini PC this also has that hackable component to it which I think is really interesting I lied there's a third one that I want to talk about and that is this ECC thing so as we're doing the review latte Panda sent us this long guide and we'll just kind of scroll through it here so you can see it but you can actually enable in-band ECC on this platform now if you don't know what inband ECC is it's a little bit different than our typical ECC memory that you would see and I just realized I didn't have an ECC ddr5 dim on set but I didn't have ddr4 once I can kind of show you this real quick so this is a little Samsung dim and what you'll see and I just kind of this is an ECC rdim but you'll see that we have a total of nine chips across and that's eight chips plus one extra for parity so one of the reasons that ECC memory is usually more expensive is because you're adding that ninth chip for that parody chip there are a lot of different version but I'm just going to kind of keep this simple here so what in band ECC does is imagine that you don't have these like two extra parody chips here and you just have eight across then what you could do is you could say well you know I can do something kind of like almost like raid five I know it's a crazy simplification people are gonna get really really pissed off that I even use that but think of it kind of like raid five where you're taking some of the overall capacity of your memory pool and you're using that to go do your parody so what that means is that you're sacrificing some capacity for that error checking and correction so we followed the guide went into the BIOS and turned it on and it appeared to be working which is pretty cool and something that we weren't expecting because sometimes uh you know you have issues with it with Windows is that even when we boot it up into windows we saw a difference in the memory capacity for the ECC off and inband ECC on which I kind of wasn't expecting because I thought just it wouldn't work so while it's not the same as having ECC memory it does give view an ECC option for non-ecc memory if that makes any sense or maybe it's easier just to say it's the type of ECC that is probably better than nothing now I know that was a huge oversimplification of inband ECC there are plenty of Guides Online if you want to go research that still I think that has to make it into a key lesson learn hey guys I hope you like this look at this latte Panda Sigma it's certainly an interesting little single board computer that I was not expecting to have all these features and then we started using it I was like oh there's there's another feature no there's a feature here oh it has Thunderbolt oh my gosh and it was just really interesting to go play with this and do things like turn on Arduino and just start playing with that because that was pretty easy I hope you like this look it's something that's a little different than a lot of the mini PCS that we normally review if you did like this well why don't you share it with your friends and also give this video a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 477,089

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, 2.5gbe, intel, lattepanda sigma, lattepanda, apple, mac mini, mac mini m2, apple m2, raspberry pi, raspberry pi alternative, intel core i5-1340p, in-band ecc, ecc, sbc with ecc, arduino, low power mini pc, low power pc

Id: kIEv6ueNxUs

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023