It has built-in 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.1 ports, and a mini audio jack. It has an HDMI input, too, but it looks like support for it isn't great yet, if this Explaining Computers video is any indication. 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.īut unlike the Pi, the USB-C port can also do DisplayPort output. You can get up to 16 GB of RAM, and it can run up to three displays. This board uses the latest RockChip RK3588 SoC, with an 8 core CPU, a Mali GPU, a 6 TOPS NPU, and 8k encoding and decoding-though, besides the CPU, it's not always easy taking advantage of those other features. If you'd rather watch the video instead of read this blog post-watch my full review of the Rock 5 model B on YouTube: Or for that price should you just go ahead and buy a used TinyMiniMicro PC, like the Lenovo M710q (pictured above) with a full Intel Core i7 processor, an enclosure, a hard drive, WiFi, and a power supply! And this thing has upgradeable RAM, too! do stuff.īut for Linux, and for running open source software, how does this board stack up? Is it worth paying $150-220 for a more premium SBC? Being able to just plug it in, install an OS, and. The thing that turns me off with so many Pi alternatives is how hard it is to go from unboxing the board to actually using it. But I wanted to know: for a premium SBC price, do you get a better experience? So you get what you pay for, in terms of performance. But it's way faster than a Pi, it comes with 2.5 Gig Ethernet, it has two M.2 slots on board. It's still half as slow as modern ARM desktops like Apple's M1 mini, or Microsoft's Dev Kit 2023 ( see my review here). And that's just the 8-core CPU-with PCI Express Gen 3 x4 (the Pi has Gen 2 x1), storage is 7x faster! I got over 3 GB/sec with a KIOXIA XG6 NVMe SSD. Radxa's Rock 5 model B is an ARM single board computer that's 3x faster than a Raspberry Pi.

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