WAY faster than a Raspberry Pi—but is it enough?

this is the rock 5 model B by radza and it's an arm single board computer that's three times faster than a Raspberry Pi and that's just the eight core CPU this thing has PCI Express gen 3 and storage is seven times faster I got over three gigabytes per second with this keoksia xg6 that's like hitting Intel 7th gen speeds it's still half as slow as modern arm desktops like Apple's M1 mini or Microsoft's dev kit but it's way faster than a pi it comes with 2.5 gig ethernet and has two m.2 slots on board and well it also starts at 150 bucks so yeah you get what you pay for in terms of performance but I wanted to know for a premium SBC price do you get a better experience the thing that turns me off with so many of these Pi Alternatives is how hard it is to go from unboxing the board to actually using it being able to just plug it in install an OS and do stuff but for Linux and for running open source software how does this board Stack Up is it worth paying a 150 to 200 bucks for more premium Hardware or for that price should you just go ahead and buy a used tiny mini micro PC like this little Lenovo with a full Intel Core i7 processor an enclosure a hard drive Wi-Fi and a power supply and this thing has upgradable Ram too so how does the rock 5 model B stack up this board uses the latest Rockchip rk3588 SOC with an 8 core CPU a Mali GPU a six tops npu and 8K encode and decode though besides the CPU it's not always easy taking advantage of those other features you can get up to 16 gigs of RAM and it can run up to three displays it says it can do 8K though it won't perform amazing running anything on an 8K display just like the pi performs pretty poorly when you're running a 4K display but unlike the pi this USB C Port can do DisplayPort output it has an HDMI input too but it looks like support for it isn't great yet if this explaining computer's video is any indication it has built-in 2.5 gig ethernet two USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.1 ports and a mini audio jack up top there's an eKEY m.2 for Wi-Fi or other PCI Express devices and flipping it over there's another m.2 slot and this one is a lot more fun it's m key for nvme ssds but if you get a fun adapter like this you can break out the slot for more interesting things like graphics cards more on that later the bottom slot only supports 2280 size ssds so if you want to use a shorter SSD you'll need an adapter the killer feature is this slot is PCI Express gen 3x4 that means you can get up to 4 gigabytes per second through it there's also an emmc socket and a Micro SD slot both of which can be used at the same time and camera and display connectors the one I bought is the 4 Gig version and it costs about 150 bucks but that's just for the sport it came in this box and it doesn't come with any accessories you need a separate power adapter and at least a heatsink I didn't order the red that's the ones initially so I stuck on this little heatsink and plugged in a 5 volt fan I wanted to boot the rock 5 off an nvme SSD and apparently you can but it's a bit tricky and you have to reflash something on the board so I went with this micro SD card plugged in on the bottom the getting started guide on RAD says Wiki was helpful but I was a little worried when it kept mentioning a USB to TTL serial cable this was my first time using this thing and it seemed pretty daunting to have to connect to it with a Serial terminal if I just want to boot it up luckily I could just plug in a monitor keyboard and mouse though but maybe the getting started guide could be a little more focused on just well getting started leave the complicated stuff for later I went to the download page and found Android Debian 11 and Ubuntu images once the OS was flashed I plugged the micro SD card in and noticed the tiny slot on the rock 5 is also a bit of a disaster you can easily plug the card in upside down and if you do that good luck figuring out why it won't boot I'd rather see a full-size micro SD card slot like most other boards have but now the last thing to do is plug in power and I didn't have radza's official 30 watt power supply so I tried the next best thing my Apple 30 watt power supply I mean 30 watts is 30 Watts right wrong just like the initial version of the pi 4 USB C power can be weird it's not entirely radza's fault though USBC power delivery is confusing as heck so I'm not surprised I had issues the LED on the board flashed blue and green but the board kept resetting itself my 61 watt Apple adapter did actually Boot and I also found this thread on radza's form that goes way deeper into power supplies than the rock 5. the FAQ for the board does have a section on power supplies and I would definitely stick with Reds as recommendation just buy their official power supply I did that and here it is nice and Compact and no problems booting so once I booted Debian I saw the kernel seems to be based on Linux 5.10 which is a little strange when I looked into it it seems like this isn't even full Linux 5.10 all the Linux images seem to be built with a set of rock tip patches that are based on really old Linux versions and on top of that the first time I tried running updates I got an error about radza's app repository not being signed but it still let me install software without that so I started testing things out I tested the ethernet adapter with iperf3 to see how fast it could go and got a consistent 2.35 gigabits down but only about one gigabit up that's not symmetrical but it's still plenty fast power usage was around four to six Watts on average and with my little heatsink and python the CPU stayed around 30 degrees Celsius most things were Snappy certainly faster than a pie but I did get strange artifacting on the screen sometimes like when I opened the terminal and would see these blotchy parts to really stress the CPU I wanted to run my top 500 Benchmark the same one I run on my Pi clusters like the super 6C but when I went to run it it kept running into errors with apt I found this whole Forum post from November 2020 that had the exact same issue luckily the fix was to manually install a signing key but that was a bit annoying to have to do right away with a fresh install of the official Debian image but with that sorted I ran the Lin pack Benchmark a few different ways and it seems the most efficient way is to just use the four a76 performance cores leaving the other four efficiency cores idle that gave me 46 gigaflops using 15 watts of power so the efficiency is 3.11 gigaflops per watt and that's a lot better than the pi 4 and it's almost as efficient on a per watt basis as my Mac Studio it's just a lot slower than the Mac I could get a tiny bit better performance if I ran the test on all eight cores but the efficiency went down a bit the slower e-cores are better off just running background tasks I also wanted to see how things went with different cooling configurations the CPU got up to 65 degrees under load with fan and heatsink 82 degrees with just a fan and started throttling after hitting 85 degrees with no fan or heatsink but it only had to throttle a little I was surprised by how well this thing performed thermally the whole Board gets pretty hot though so I would always recommend at least a heatsink on the main chip I also ran geekbench to see how this board Stacks up and the rock 5 scored a respectable 565 single core and 2384 multi-core that puts it somewhere between a Raspberry Pi 4 on the lower end and the new windows dev kit I tested a few months ago it's noticeably faster than a pi but it's still not a real desktop class processor it's not even close to M1 performance let alone the newer M2 CPUs but it is a single board computer it's not really meant to be a desktop I was most interested in i o performance this thing has four lanes of PCI Express gen 3 in this m.2 slot I've said for years now the main thing holding the pi back is IO I've taken the single PCI Express Lane on it to the Limit over and over again and it maxes out at 420 megabytes per second well besides Reds and not including an m.2 screw I have nothing but good things to say here I installed this kyocsia xg6 drive and it shows up running at full speed with lspci testing it out with my disk benchmarking script I got up to 3 gigabytes per second in sequential reads even random access was three times faster than the pi clocking in at 1.3 gigabytes per second 4K operations are still fast too booting from an SSD however requires flashing a chip on the board over an SPI interface and that's not something for the faint of heart but it's not that much different than upgrading the compute module's eprom I just haven't tried that out yet we'll get back to the bottom m.2 slot in a bit but I wanted to flip the board over and test the top slot this one is a and e key and it's perfect for Wi-Fi chips like this Intel ax210 actually just did a video on this chip and Wi-Fi 6E so if you haven't seen how crazy fast this thing can make your Wi-Fi go check out that video but I tried getting it working on the rock 5 but I kept running into problems Bluetooth didn't work at all but I also couldn't install Intel's firmware since there was already some Intel firmware built with the rock chip sources the card would show up using network manager CLI but I wasn't able to scan for networks or get connected and six gigahertz is definitely not not supported yet even though I could get that working on the pie but some other people in the forums had it working so it was probably just a bug I ran into but moving back to the bottom slot I wanted to test this this funky looking thing converts the physical m.2 slot into a normal PCI Express slot meaning in theory I could plug in any PCI Express device like this graphics card because of course that's my kind of thing I've tried almost every GPU generation for both Nvidia and AMD on the pi and after years of work I barely got a couple of old cards working but what about this new board the rock chip has PCI Express gen 3 so a modest graphics card could give a huge boost for video transcoding streaming or heck even light gaming on Linux and I was really interested in testing out my AMD Radeon card after I saw this tweet so I did my own testing after installing amd's firmware I ran neofetch and well it's actually lying here the GPU driver isn't actually loaded but since it's connected neofetch thinks it's it's the active GPU but it's not so of course I recompiled the kernel and if you want to commemorate my misery head over to redshirtjeff.com to get the shirt for that but after I recompiled the kernel the rock 5 stopped booting the blue LED started blinking and it wouldn't give me any output at all so for now at least I put a pin in that but I wanted to test other stuff too so I plugged in this crazy little 10 gig m.2 Nick this thing is made by innodisc and it's the strangest network card I've ever used it showed up with lspci so it was just a matter of getting a driver working but since there isn't a driver I can download for arm Linux I had to compile the driver in the Linux kernel I do that all the time on the Raspberry Pi but as I mentioned earlier I couldn't get my custom kernel working yet so I put that on pause two but I want to get back to it soon for PCI Express gen 3 Lanes should give me up to 8 Giga transfers per second or about 4 gigabytes per second of bandwidth and according to Thomas Kaiser's research I should be able to bifurcate the PCI Express Lanes so I could put a 10 gigabit network card in something like a storage controller on here assuming the CPU can keep up this thing could be a pretty powerful Nas certainly a lot faster than the best Pi setup to round things out I also tested some of radza's rock 5 accessories there's an onboard real-time clock or RTC so I bought their battery module it kind of just hangs off the board so it would have been nice to at least have a sticker on it I also bought the fan heatsink combo kit and the Standalone heatsink to test both worked great though the fan was a little confusing when I ran their fan script it said trun on fan in the console but the way it worked was a little obtuse I found a more flexible fan control package from pymumu and use that one instead at lower speeds the fan wobbled a bit and made a little noise at faster speeds the fan was better balanced and still pretty quiet the strangest thing was this little packet of thermal Coupe they included it looked more like Snot than thermal compound so I wiped that off and put on some of my own I tested thermals and both coolers worked great even running a stress test for long periods with the fan the temperatures never went above 50 degrees but with the heatsink I could push it up into the 70s unless you want to push this thing to the max the heatsink should be fine I also bought a 32 gigabyte emmc module and wanted to see if I could use it and the micro SD card at the same time since that's something you can't do on a Raspberry Pi and on the rock 5 you can I also wanted to see how I could flash an OS to the emmc drive but the official wiki says you need a special USB adapter which I don't have there was a reference to maybe flashing it directly on the rock 5 on Discord but let me just take a moment to rant about how much I hate when conversations are all funneled to Discord it's utterly useless outside of in the moment support and it also means I have to have yet another Discord server muddying up my sidebar just to try to figure out how to use this thing I mean maybe I'm just an old man yelling at the cloud now but I long for the days when people used to have discussions on forums which were easy to search and link to and were indexed by all the search engines but back to the board I've tested almost everything so now it's time to compare it to some of its closest Rivals starting with the pie this thing trounces the pie in both CPU performance and efficiency it's three times faster in geekbench it also has faster built-in ethernet blazing fast m.2 nvme support another slot for fast Wi-Fi I mean it's in a different League entirely when it comes to the hardware but the software side still requires a bit more knowledge to actually be productive and there's still the matter of sketchy Linux support there are efforts to Mainline support for the rock chip SOC meaning you could just run plain Linux distros but those efforts seem to be taking a long time so right now I wouldn't recommend this over the pie to just anyone at least when it comes to software and support due to its high price heck I wouldn't recommend anyone pay over 100 bucks for a pi 4 either but here we are but what about other sbcs running the same system on a chip this orange Pi 5 uses the same Rock tip rk3588 well almost the same the orange Pie has the rk3588 S which has a little less bandwidth than the chip in the Rock 5. the orange Pi 5 only has one m.2 slot running at way slower speeds on the bottom which means this SSD only gets about 400 megabytes per second just as slow as on a pie the orange Pi 5 also only has a gigabit port and not even a full 40 pin GPO header but it does have a full-size micro SD card slot so that's an upgrade but the orange Pi 5 is a lot less expensive you can get the same CPU and GPU performance at least and in my case it actually benchmarked a little bit faster for half the price and moving on to the Caddis Edge 2 I don't have one to test and that's because it also uses a slower rk3588s yet somehow costs more than the rock 5 model besides the nicer marketing around CODIS boards I'm not quite sure why they cost so much it doesn't have the same kind of community and support as the pi it doesn't have the higher effects of the rock 5 and heck this board doesn't even include Ethernet or an m.2 slot for that matter if you know why katus charges so much for their boards please let me know in the comments I just don't see the value especially when orange Pie has better features for a third of the price you can even buy a brand new ryzen Mini PC for the price of one of these Edge 2 boards and speaking of mini PCS there are tons of these little Thin Client PCS on eBay I bought this one with everything I needed even a Windows license for 120 bucks this Lenovo m710q includes a 4 core Intel i5 CPU a hard drive Wi-Fi 6 m.2 and upgradable memory it's a little faster in geekbench and a lot faster in linpack though efficiency is a little lower running Ubuntu it only uses 8 watts at idle which is a little more than the rock 5 but still pretty efficient especially considering this thing is spinning a hard drive inside I had almost forgotten how slow hard drives can be but my point is once you hit the 100 price Point you're competing with many PCs like these and once you go into the two and three hundred dollar price points you can even get a brand new ryzen pc but in the end I'm more interested in comparing armboards and the rock 5 is a huge upgrade over the Raspberry Pi 4 in terms of hardware and capability everything is faster and by a lot there's tons more IO at the expense of a little extra board space but at what cost assuming pies ever become available at MSRP again and right now that still feels a long way off the Pi still has two major advantages a cheaper point of entry just 35 bucks and better software support the Linux kernel for all these Rock Chip boards is a mess but focusing on just the hardware the rock 5 at 150 bucks and up is in a completely different price class this tiny PC complete with power supply a case a hard drive and even a Windows license costs less than the base model rock 5 and that's before you even add in things like a case and power adapter rats has done a decent job building up the rock 5 ecosystem around the rk3588 besides the Raspberry Pi this is the best experience I've had with an arm SBC but it still has a long way to go before I would call it a pie killer Ducks need to be more beginner friendly the community needs to be less insulated and Discord and the chip needs more Mainline support I continue to follow rad so closely and I'll continue exploring GPU support with the rk3588 so make sure you're subscribed until next time I'm Jeff geerling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 479,776

Keywords: radxa, rock 5, model b, rock5, rock5b, rock 5b, raspberry pi, arm, sbc, single board computer, armbian, debian, ubuntu, android, performance, test, comparison, compared, review, reviewed, tested, benchmark, fastest, faster, slower, price, expensive, value, router, project, gpio, hdmi, input, wifi, m.2, nvme, ssd, kioxia, sabrent, rocket q, 2.5g, networking, openwrt, ax, ax210, intel, m-key, usb-c, pd, displayport, power, supply, heatsink, fan, cooling, amd, radeon, gpu, graphics, linux

Id: CxD_0q8tAdc

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023