Radxa X2L: Low-cost x86 SBC with RP2040

Radxa X2L J4125 single board computer review and demo, including a test of its RP2040 microcontroller. And yes, this an SBC with an Intel microprocessor and in effect an onboard Raspberry Pi Pico!
You can learn more about the Radxa X2L on its website here: radxa.com/products/x/x2l
The X2L featured in this video was purchased from AllNet here: shop.allnetchina.cn/products/...
I have playlist of videos about the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040 microcontroller) here: • Raspberry Pi Pico
And my latest review of Linux Mint is here: • Linux Mint 21: The Bes...
All ExplainingComputers SBC reviews can be accessed from this page:
www.explainingcomputers.com/s...
More videos on SBCs and wider computing and related topics can be found at:
/ @explainingcomputers
You may also like my ExplainingTheFuture channel at: / @explainingthefuture
Chapters:
00:42 Unboxing
03:31 Specifications
07:17 Guess the OS (Performance tests)
13:45 RP2040 (test)
15:36 Wrap, inc more test results!
#RadxaX2L #X2L #RP2040 #X64SBC #ExplainingComputers

[@lesliedeana5142]

It's been a while since I've been this exited to see a single board system! And it actually works! GPIO, X86 compatible, and more... This has me saying (WHY has this taken so long to be done? It seems kinda, well, perfect!

[@SpeccyMan]

I do hope you closed the door after you exited. 😁

[@iamperplexed4695]

For what?

[@ExplainingComputers]

Hi Leslie -- and I am in total agreement. :)

[@backgammonbacon]

Low cost was the problem. When the cheapest x86 you could buy was $50 the computer its in aint going to be cheap. Its also massive overkill, you probably already own a PC so you just need the RP2040 for a couple of quid. Though I would be interested in it if it had at least 2 more USB ports or better 4 would be perfect for automated Astrophotography then. To be honest this looks like a Melee quieter 2 PCB with GPIO added.

[@bgg-jp5ei]

Yes it is an impressive sbc. But doesn't touch the performance of a modern gaming rig. For most people's everyday use it would probably be ideal

[@zetaconvex1987]

What a nice concept, a PC that combines a microcontroller. It seems to have a good combination of price, power consumption and speed, too. Nice little machine.

[@Praxibetel-Ix]

I'm not gonna lie, seeing the RP2040 microcontroller and 40-pin GPIO was a pleasant surprise! Also, duckies two weeks in a row? You're spoiling us. 😊🦆 Anyway, this is a very beautiful single-board computer.

[@alanthornton3530]

Hey Ford It's always good to see plenty of ducks, quack quack, hope that you're keeping OK? We got to see Mr Scissors & Stanley in action, along with this nice SBC project board it's got plenty of scope. :)

[@Praxibetel-Ix]

@@alanthornton3530 Hi, Alan! Things are okay on my end. It rained so much yesterday, we wound up with a flash flood warning. It's a happy, sunny day today, ideal for seeing duckies and fishies. I hope that things on your end have been good and, considering how he's late, Chris is doing okay.

[@PS_Tube]

Congratulations on crossing 1 million subscribers, Chris B. That's a boat load of I/Os on an SBC. Surprisingly, it's more than what is provided on modern laptops.

[@SnakebitSTI]

In fairness to modern laptops, you can probably get more out of a few USB4 or TB4 ports than all of those. But it is nice to not need to cover a desk in adapters and dongles.

[@Robbie-mw5uu]

I honestly think this "sbc" is just a repurposed laptop or barebones pc motherboard. It is shaped exactly like one.

[@TheRailroad99]

Also, one can use the RP2040 PIO state machines to implement a very low level Custom Interface (like SWD etc.)

[@houseofno]

This is the first SBC I've seen whose name resembles more of a T-shirt size than a computer. My biggest pet peeves are when companies choose these difficult to remember alphanumeric names to market their product. The BRZ4X has entered the chat. Thanks for the video, Chris.

[@BooleanDisorder]

You have such a pleasant way about you, and love your graphics and the way you show things. Thanks for existing!

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@JasonWhittle1]

It's bloody late in Australia, but not too late to watch some computer stuff. Great content Chris!

[@dh2032]

it's always late some where 😞than one of the problems of us all living on a globe ? the sooner we go back to the flat earth model the better ? 🙂

[@seriyserek]

​@@dh2032 dude the timezones won't disappear

[@kiodiekin]

Yes it’s very nice. I’ve ran retropie on it x86. Been toying with it since January. Adding the cmos battery it does boot faster and instantly. I missed the rpi addition originally. I got the wireless module I need to add the right drivers for it which wasn’t simple. Company sent me a fix that I haven’t tested yet. I’m using the raspberry pi5 official power supply. Booting windows was a hassle getting it to flash. I had to use my m.2 drive. My only negative take way. Missing the m.2 set screw and no plans for them to make a case. But fortunately they have the palm version with the case which is the same thing

[@trevorberridge6079]

I'd say the Raspberry Pi is the Tesla of SBCs. It led the way and now we have a wealth of SBCs of all levels of capability and varying price points. Something to suit everyone. It's great that SBCs have returned so much control to home computer enthusiasts. We can control our machines again and can do more than ever. We are truly only limited by our imagination and determination. This has been helped in no small part by Chris's determination to cover as much of this tech as he can and get in on the ground floor of new development. Well done again Chris.

[@nddulac]

I really enjoyed your testing of the GPIO functionality on this SBC in your introductory video! I just ordered one of these boards, and look forward to future videos and projects using the board!

[@johncundiff7075]

Great first video on your way to 2 million subs!! Keep up the great work Dr. Barnatt!!!

[@stryk3rsandwich578]

its always a good day when EC uploads, btw congrats on the million subs

[@Praxibetel-Ix]

Good morning/afternoon! Another day, another SBC to look at. :)

[@volvo09]

I always love SBC days :)

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings! :)

[@Praxibetel-Ix]

​@@ExplainingComputersHi, Chris! You hearted your own reply, by the way.

[@rafflesnh]

@@Praxibetel-Ix That's what a gold play button can do to you! ;-)

[@allffrommars6019]

The channel is like the 80s 😁 like it so much 👍

[@eugeniusz7144]

Awesome review! This looks like a very nice board. One more thing I really liked in this video is the attention being focused on what really matters - not very often seen these days. Thanks!

[@noname-vl6vy]

happy to see this channel is going strong. keep up the good work!

[@Chris.Brisson]

My daily driver PC is a J4125 (with 16GB of RAM and an NVMe SSD running Windows 11), and it is sufficiently snappy for all my productivity activities (e.g., watching ExplainingComputers on KZbin at 2K resolution). It pleases me to consume so little electricity (without all the heat and fan noise of typical consumer PC). Including the RAM upgrade, I spent less than $150 (not including a monitor). I find I run the air conditioning in my room less, thus saving even more electricity. I plan to solar-power my J4125 system as a fun project in the coming year (with batteries for 24/7 operation).

[@DigitalProphet]

That is a completely reasonable little board for the price. I'm always amazed at the cheap SBCs you can get now.

[@RoboNuggie]

You are an excellent salesman Chris 🙂 This board is something I think will suit my needs, and the selling points to me are the price and the power usage. Thank you for the review, and as always take care & stay well....

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings my friend, and thanks for your support. :)

[@CommanderKlag]

Yes, Its nice but what fan or heat sink would you use? I can't find the Radxa Heatsink 9010B. I would like to use this product but I don't know how to provide a cooling solution. Does anyone know?

[@rutkowskir]

I agree. I have a lab full of devices I picked up after seeing reviews by Chris. He should make commission on all these sales!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for your support. :)

[@AdmiralSym]

I was just looking at this a couple weeks of weeks ago. Glad to see a video on it

[@Uniblab8]

Oh great...another SBC that I don't need so I will probably get this one. Your videos are costing me money, Chris and I love them. This is another great vid.

[@deechvogt1589]

This is a raspberry pi 5 killer board! Wow!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Agreed.

[@thedave7760]

@@ExplainingComputers I am looking for a robust SBC that will handle live streaming from one camera via OBS. I noticed here that the Video encode is software only with hardware acceleration disabled. Is there a way that I can enable this? Would the software encoder be able to handle one camera stream encode at 3000 Kbps? Could you recommend a better SBC I sould consider for this project?

[@JohnWilliams-gy5yc]

Also for feature perspective, I don't think Pi 5 has the UHD 600 for QuickSync video codecs: AV1, H265, H264.

[@wereoctopus]

​@@JohnWilliams-gy5yc the Celeron J4125 on this board doesn't have AV1 encode/decode. Intel added a hardware decoder with their "11th Gen" processors (Tiger Lake), and encode is only on their newest "Core Ultra" processors (Meteor Lake). The Raspberry Pi 4 has a hardware decoder for H.264 and H.265, but the Pi 5 only has one for H.265. Presumably they thought software decode would suffice for H.264?

[@christopher480]

and for a lot less money plus no worrying about a hat for the hd. Although its a bit disappointing that they are too cheap to include a battery.

[@nakfan]

Thanks for a very thorough review of this thing 👍 Now I am looking forward to the cases that must be coming soon...

[@DocuFlow]

You may need to add Charlie the Crowbar to your list of tools

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@chromerims]

1 million subscribers, hooray 🎉 Congratulations!

[@montecorbit8280]

Great video! Thank you for making it!! I seem to remember someone else including an RPi 2040 on their x86 board, sing a song in one of your videos....but I seem to remember you had to run one or the other but you couldn't run both, or at least you couldn't control the RPi from x86 like you can on this one. I thought that was kind of cool.... Hope you have an excellent day!!

[@mikefinn2101]

Another great exciting video from you Peter Nice demonstration always enjoy learning something new. Many Thanks Mike

[@Jeff_Seely]

Thank you Christopher for another fantastic review of more project hardware. and sorry for the late chime. It's a nice piece of versatility, especially for the price!

[@robwisdom4521]

Congrats on 1 million subscribers!

[@jimlynch9390]

Again, a great video. Thank you, Chris.

[@ConfuSomu]

Woah, this SBC really is cool! Now if only I could find a use for it, but my laptop is enough for doing x86_64 stuff and I already have a few Pis. I can see this SBC being used in public (art?) installations due to its feature set. Great video as always, and it was awesome that you were a guest in the Late Night Linux podcast! (just regretting that I didn't get around to listening that episode earlier and only saw it now :P)

[@DigitalJedi]

I think it would be awesome for some robotics applications. If you have the eMMC storage you can presumably add another PCIe device to that slot, which would be a great place for something like a Coral TPU/NPU card. There's enough GPIO to drive a nice few servo and motor drivers and plenty of CPU and RAM to host a little web interface for remote control.

[@rv6amark]

Another good review of a nice SBC. Thank you, Chris.

[@HKey_Root]

Excellent. I look forward to the future projects.

[@brianwood5220]

Excellent review, Chris. Thanks for sharing.

[@montecorbit8280]

At 2:19 Getting into the box.... I just thought, you have trouble getting into almost every package. Then it made me realize, how can you put all those little bitty computer parts together?? One of the wonders of KZbin!! Back to the video for me....

[@Colin_Ames]

An interesting SBC. I look forward to the projects you have planned for it.

[@perrymcclusky4695]

It looks like a fun single board computer. I want one! Looking forward to your next video.

[@prvinsharma]

Nice piece of hardware that would probably solve my migration problems - both head and location wise. For a start I have brought Rpi5 with me as a laptop replacement. Decided against iMac also as I wanted full control. Have installed debian with various WMs. Am using it to browse the web on the go without carrying the clunk. I already have monitor and peripherals here. Thanks for updating us with recent disruptors!

[@rickster2317]

Nice presentation Chris. It has been a long time since I built an X86-Windows based PC, but this SBC has me considering it. I really like the RP2040 with GPIO addition to gain on-board real world access. Maybe in the near future........ Thanks for another great video Chris!

[@EarnestWilliamsGeofferic]

Now this is a fascinating little board. My mind races at the possibilities and the great price point.

[@dang48]

As always, a video to look forward to and learn from.

[@johnvirgin405]

Another great SBC video. Many thanks.

[@christianburch479]

Ordered one of these last week. Eagerly anticipating it's arrival.

[@ExplainingComputers]

I think and hope that you will be very pleased. It is an excellent SBC.

[@Kw1161]

Chris thanks for the review and demonstration of a new SBC. Good to Mr Scissors and Stanley the knife gainfully employed!..😊! However, the way you handled that 52 pound SBC shows you can take of your self, but a 52 pound SBC is too heavy for me…:)! Have a great week!

[@NightOwlAmbient]

For those interested in the disk performance, with a new Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB nvme SSD on Windows 11 Pro on the 8GB Radxa X2L, I got the following on CrystalDiskMark: reads: 1703 MB/s, 1021 MB/s, 134 MB/s, and 52 MB/s. Writes: 1447 MB/s, 995 MB/s, 75 MB/s, and 69 MB/s. Also, Speedtest shows 16 ms ping and 953 Mbit/s down, 38 MBit/s up, which is just shy of my 1 Mbit/s down cable internet, so the nic is providing full bandwidth. Setup for Windows 11 from a USB 3 thumb drive took about 30 minutes. The only thing I haven't got working is the Wifi card. Windows did not recognize it during setup.

[@GertBoers]

This is one really interesting board. indeed! Nice video!

[@RobinTheHoodedMan]

Another great video. Interesting SBC. Congrats on reaching 1m+ subscibers, (but it was only a matter of time, lol ).

[@jmcbri]

Chris - Another great video. As I watched this one, I started to wonder what my motivation is. Mostly, I have watched your videos over the last years out of curiosity, without a real use case. But more and more, I've been thinking about whether these devices have gotten good enough to replace my usual practice of using an old desktop or laptop for my "servers", particularly when power is considered.

[@jpmyers6950]

Great video, very interesting board. Thanks Chris!

[@PeteVanDemark]

Nice little board with some cool features at a great price. Thanks for sharing!

[@CommanderKlag]

No, I can't seem to find the cool fan that makes it cool, It seems required to use it on the board without burning it up. The Radxa Heatsink 9010B is not available unless I've overlooked a solution, please advise.. How can you cool this device?

[@gearsgamer7115]

@@CommanderKlag I got mine from Arace?

[@SergiuszRoszczyk]

Finally found a time to watch. Expected yet another unfinished product and I found great x64 SBC with Pico as a GPIO coprocessor and proper power input. A good relief after Pi5 and its stupid 5V5A input. This one you can power even from a cheap charger from blue/yellow furniture shop 😀 Also software support is way ahead of ARM especially in a GPU department. I like that SWD header is exposed (I think you missed it?) - pretty exciting for C++ development and debugging RP2040 using second RP2040. And a good thing is that when you burn GPIO the chip can be replaced and is dirt cheap

[@MarkTheMorose]

Decent spec for the price, a sane layout of the I/O ports along two edges, and good performance. It should do brisk business for Radxa.

[@microlinux]

Yes, I was also alarmed by the amount of sbcs by radxa and others that used to make rpi form factor sbcs that had way more I/O for such form factor. This is the right way when you have a lot of I/O

[@metalheadmalta]

An absolutely beautiful board with loads of potential. The RP2040 is an added bonus too. Beautiful design, compact, x86... we should have had this ages ago! Wonderful!

[@jrclad2964]

No wifi !

[@biblbrox]

I think wifi pci card is a possible solution.

[@mikemacdonald2094]

Nice. Lots of possibilities. Thanks for showing us.

[@Maxume]

This looks like a great little SBC. I am definitely partial to the x86 architecture as it currently offers a much wider range of easy options for everyday use than ARM.

[@microdesigns2000]

While unboxing I thought we might need to get Rudy the sledgehammer. I've been having a growing desire to construct an x86 cellphone that leaves the x86 system sleeping off in cellphone mode, but then becomes a PC when Office or other functions are needed. My goal is to not need cloud services but to bring my work with me, on my person. This board appears suspiciously cellphone shaped. I wonder if I could find a little HDMI LCD to match the shape. My first cellphone was in 1988 and I have no problem carrying around a small brick. I kind-of miss brick phones.

[@rnts08]

If you find a decent touch ips panel that fits and a battery pack of decent capacity, it could become a decent hack tablet with basic phone functions running on the pi board and have a stripped Linux distribution running on the Intel cpu. It would be a super interesting project. Too bad it doesn't have Bluetooth and wifi built in though.

[@PenryMMJ]

That is very nice. Perfectly usable as a daily driver / media PC that can also be used for physical computing projects, and it costs about a 3rd of what I spent on a Dragon 32 40 years ago. It does have a physical "low profile", but it's awareness profile has just been raised quite a bit.

[@ronaldmarshall5845]

Great Vidro Chris! Great SBC!

[@carabara3947]

Just Setting Up My GeekomA7 Lot Of Money But Watching Your Video With No Sub Station Hum Vibration From Fans Nice And Quiet With No Big Metal Box Taking Up Space Thank You Very Much

[@TauCu]

Very nice for the price. It's good to see some cheap yet still performant SBCs.

[@ozzymandius666]

Very nice unit, especially at the price! Thanks, Chris!

[@sebastianotrunfio5]

interesting to see this board used as motherboard for a nas project! great video!

[@alanthornton3530]

This board would make an ideal replacement for my set top box which has lost KZbin, Netflix etc, etc! I'm just measuring up an old project case which might just be an ideal fit for it. I liked the way Linux Mint & Kdenlive ran on it which is a plus point for me, I suppose Windows 10 would be OK too, maybe a future test? Thanks Chris for an excellent video & another happy Sunday :)

[@ExplainingComputers]

My TV PC is a J4105, so less powerful than this, and works very well. I can see this replacing it at some point in the future, probably running ChromeOS Flex.

[@superangrybrit]

The successor to the Radxa ROCK Pi X Cherry Trail board. Good offering.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Very much so. And a far more powerful board.

[@Rushil69420]

Great review! An x86 SBC with GPIO and on-board M.2 NVME expansion for under $100 is certainly interesting- but the performance benchmarks when compared to the the Orange Pi 5 make it a much less appealing option than some of the RK3588 boards. @MakerbyMistake also pointed out that the X2L occasionally spiked to pretty high power consumption under load (relatively high, anyways). And we're almost at full upstream kernel support for the RK3588 too!

[@erikkarsies4851]

Orange Pi5? Intel N100 minipc's are offering way more for about the same price.

[@Rushil69420]

@@erikkarsies4851 when it comes to single core performance that’s true but there’s a number of multi-core benchmarks and real-world scenarios in which the RK3588 does better than the N100, and you generally don’t get the 40pin GPIO with N100 Mini PCs. N100 SBCs obviously exist but I’ve noticed they tend to cost a bit more than the barebones mini PCs.

[@christopher480]

Another great review :)

[@maxdiamond55]

Great video Chris, thanks.

[@MoraFermi]

It's always fun to see new boards showing up with already discontinued CPUs on them.

[@trevorboys9140]

Looks like a very exciting board!

[@jaimecosta2966]

Recently i found a slim case for the X2L saying that excelente vídeo wish you well

[@Chris.Brisson]

The Palmshell SLiM X2L is exciting.

[@ExplainingComputers]

I saw the case after uploading -- it is nice.

[@familyplans3788]

I am convinced your Million Viewer unboxing video was an A.I. generated deep fake , it went too smoothly lol Seriously a great video and looking forward to the projects you have planned for this board

[@makerbymistake]

I have the model with the emmc and I reviewed it recently. The emmc doesn't work like other SBCs and it's only used for OS recovery. Had known that, I wouldn't have bought the emmc version.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Very interesting. Is that just for Windows? I know that Windows can object to being installed on eMMC if it detects it as removable media (aka a flash drive).

[@makerbymistake]

@@ExplainingComputers it's for both windows and Linux. The emmc is only accessible when pushing a physical button on the board and is meant to store a recovery OS.

[@Darkk6969]

It seems emmc is hit or miss on these boards which is one of the reasons I would skip the emmc version. Another reason is that limited writes before it becomes useless. If the emmc is removable like those on Odroid boards then it's not too bad.

[@kiodiekin]

fyi ps2 emulation runs better on this than orange pi 5 and raspberry pi 5 linux. i did a video on it. and on geek bench it registers around 370

[@ExplainingComputers]

Cool.

I found my next PC, thanks teacher!!

[@user-yw8sr3uj1w]

what a lovely little computer!! I might have to get one and make a DIY laptop or cyber deck with it!! Thank you

[@youdolantube]

Another interesting SBC review. I just might purchase one....

[@kevinshumaker3753]

I have put one on my wish list, too. M.2, x86, and under $100 with cooler. Shame it's using a discontinued CPU, but they went in the right direction, for sure.

[@user-28qhfk65]

​​@@kevinshumaker3753That cpu & soldered ram (its normal DDR4 not LPDDR) is disappointing but the price is not bad. Edit : I was wrong it's actually LPDDR4!

[@dogzdontzbarkz6540]

I got a less boring day when Chris uploaded this video :)

[@ptzzz]

Chris I find it amusing that every time I watch your videos when my mother is around her reaction is like "He kinda looks like John Lennon" I always just chuckle and reply to her "He is British". Onto the SBC. I was expecting a bigger performance gap between the J4125 and the N100 and your Kdenlive test showed that it wasn't that much. Other benchmarks I've been vetween the two processors indicate around 2x the performance of the J4125, but I was just surprised by your results.

[@AndrewTSq]

Looks like a great board, at a great price. impressed.

[@david78212]

For what I’m planning (inexpensive navigation system) this actually looks like a better option than a RPi and more useful as just a general PC.

For that price this is an amazing value board really. I expected to cost at least twice as much. It has the same price as a Pi 4 4GB, which is kind of insane. Also the mini PCIe slot allows some extension options, there are mini cards which can provide extra SATA ports for example, or you can extend it to a normal size PCIe slot with a riser. Tempting. :)

[@whitneydesignlabs8738]

This is so very cool Thanks! This might really fill some gaps where the RPi5 leaves off. For my use case in robotics, I want to test an on-board LLM that can also control GPIO. I tested this on a Pi5, and it works, but power management is an issue. With 32Gb of RAM available in the future an onboard LLM could perform quite well, and be able to interact with hardware via the Pico GPIO. Very exciting. Indeed. :)

[@benjaminlee3669]

The Radxa nio 12l is a little computer which is a game-changer for my home theater setup. Dual displays and smooth 4K streaming with the genio 1200 - amazing value.

[@davidgomez79]

Wow, Interesting SBC!

[@Grant_S_M]

Sunday is EC day! Good to see you, Chris :)

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings!

[@scottwatschke4192]

I like the new size form factor.

[@jacobsouls]

Wonderful Video!

[@jackdoggett4714]

Chris, you can use the lspci command to check the actual PCIE version and number of lanes connecting a device. Cheers!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Very helpful, I will try to remember this. Thanks. :)

[@ConfuSomu]

Yep, through you might have to pass '-vv' to see the number of lanes in the output.

[@wereoctopus]

Radxa's product page says the NVMe is PCIe 2.0 ×4

[@microlinux]

​@@wereoctopusyes, it's 4x 2.0

[@leskaighin8903]

I will be interested in the upcoming projects with this board.

[@MicrobyteAlan]

Very interesting, thanks. 👋

[@heisenbergstayouttamyterri1508]

Nice review, EC! But please can you review Arduino Giga? Not many videos out there in KZbin. As always, keep up the great work!!!

[@IndependentNewsMedia]

Nice unboxing video, x86 and Arm on one board has many possibilities, God bless.

[@mohamedbenguerraiche1616]

Holly molly! I want one NOW!

[@bruceblosser384]

Now, if only I could find one of these, anywhere on the planet! :)

[@russc788]

Oh darn, are they hard to get?

[@nielderfp]

There's only one thing that's even more amazing than expecting something to work is when you're convinced it's not going to work but it does.

[@AMDRADEONRUBY]

Nice a new PC board I love them congélateur again fot golden Play button

[@qqmber]

Very interesting and promising model SBC

[@tonykeltsflorida]

I am a Kdenlive on Linux Mint user. Of course I use it on a Core I5 11500 PC. It was cool to see how good it worked on this SBC.

[@paulmilligan3007]

This looks a great product for those of us who like to play with hardware. I see it as an “as well as” rather than “alternate to” a Pi 4/5. however it’s also a nice way to start with the Pico. A version with an included licence for Windows would also be nice.

[@JoseAlba87]

Congrats on Gold 🥇