Rock 5B: Powerful RK3588 SBC

[@Aruneh]

I wish SBC makers could agree on common things so we could have standard Linux support and not have to use manufacturer provided images with spotty support at best.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Yes, an ARM SBC standard would be nice.

[@davocc2405]

Closest I have seen is Armbian. I would prefer they outsourced to them by funding their operation, I find theirs the best solution for my Rock64.

[@davocc2405]

@Tony that's good to hear - I would hope they move towards that trend. I remember Pine having all sorts of trouble and relying on their community far far far too much (I believe it's even worse for other boards), they should be actively supporting and helping them at the very very least. I read an in-depth discussion on how recalcitrant the makers of the Rockchip were at the time about driver support and even basic details for the development of Linux support for their chips, they were expecting nothing beyond basic Android and that's it which is a bit disappointing.

[@mskiptr]

The problem isn't in lack of standards. It's because vendors make crappy drivers and don't mainline stuff. It's all because of this attitude: Let's quickly hack it together. It barely works? Ship it! If they focused on the SoC support in mainline U-Boot, mainline Linux, etc. instead of doing all this Board Support Package bs, the world would be a better place. You could just install any arm distro and run it securely for the next 20+ years (thankfully the community does some of that work instead)

[@AltCutTV]

Wish the same was true for phones.

[@esra_erimez]

This board seems to check all the boxes for a nice ARM development workstation: RAM size, NVMe, and form factor. Nice!

[@alles_muss_anders_werden]

I fully agree ! 👍

[@thewiirocks]

NVMe on 4x PCI Express lanes with 2.5GBps Ethernet is a serious game changer.

[@mihuhih2186]

so it's time for Raspberry Pi 5 ; )

[@thewiirocks]

@@mihuhih2186 No joke. I’ve been investigating Pi 4 Compute Modules with a Waveshare carrier board. That gives me 1Gig Ethernet and an M.2 drive on a 1x PCI Express bus. Which really isn’t bad for the price. But it can’t hold a candle to this 4x integrated board. Problem is that we still can’t get Pi 4 supplies, so no idea where the Pi 5 will come from. I’ve never even seen a Pi Zero 2, despite having a pile of the originals.

[@mihuhih2186]

@@thewiirocks what I mean is that shortly after Rock Pi 4B (4GB RAM, 4+2 cores rockchip debit card SOC) Raspberry Pi 4 was created. Now we see Rock 5 with 16GB of RAM, so probably we will see something like Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM

[@MicrobyteAlan]

Very interesting SBC. Thanks as always. Stanley and Mr in a single episode. Watch for a Falcon heavy launch maybe Tuesday.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this -- I has not been keeping up with the rocket. Fingers crossed for this time.

[@liontuga155]

Looks like a solid piece of hardware. That video “inception” at the end was a nice touch, Chris.

[@samaitcheson7057]

Thanks Chris. Definitely interested in that HDMI input. Might make some old video tech smart. Please keep us updated.

[@Poifix]

Very much enjoyable watching you fiddle around with computers as usual. Even though I'm not that into SBCs or Linux I still enjoy learning about tech. And there is something soothing about your content. Please don't change to much my good Sir. ❤

[@darlakim5120]

As always, enjoying your Sunday videos. It’s certainly interesting to note how far we’ve come from when the RPi-4b was first introduced, and ARM processors in this space was primarily educational and experimental. But this is the foundation of innovation and adoption. I think it’s wonderful to see so many other companies furthering the drive towards SBCs on ARM architecture, and appreciate how your videos highlight this progress. Thanks again! -d

[@dang48]

Agreed.

[@sbc_tinkerer]

I also timed it brilliantly badly. At the stroke of video notification... the kettle started whistling.

[@FritzPinguin]

I love your emphasized "very soon" at the very end of every video, which makes me come back for each and every of your fantastic videos. Keep up the great work, please! 👍👍👍 Greetings from Thailand

[@puerlatinophilus3037]

I love that you made a direct performance comparison to other SBCs. I once asked for it and you delivered. And I love it! It really gives me a way to compare it to my Pi and see what I should expect from it. From the bottom of my heart: thank you! Your content is unique, enlightening and very helpful. One thing I'd love to see in the future: A CPU benchmark that focuses on producing single-threaded and multi-threaded performance numbers. I think sysbench is a great tool for that. But I don't want to bother you with suggestions. Your content is already wonderful as is :)

sysbench would be great, so others (we here) can compare system in video to our systems ...

[@mysticmarble94]

That 4k@60fps hdmi input is a really interesting feature 😮

[@SikSlayer]

The new Amazon Fire TV Cube 3rd Gen caught my eye because of that as well, but I'd rather SBCs with this functionality than an expensive locked down Amazon bastardized locked down Android OS clone. And this is from someone whose Amazon Alexa is his smart home brand of choice.

[@dakzer55]

Got my 15GB Rock Pi 5b from Allnet today. Installed ubuntu, and apart from a problem with hdmi sound which needs changing after a reboot, and the GPU hardware acceleration not working, everything else is pretty good and stable. And despite the voltage ratings, can be run using 5V, for general use, and even works with raspberry pi accessories such as the waveshare UPS. Fantastic bit of kit, and is really well built. The metal case is rock solid, and I am pretty sure it would survive an earthquake. Appears that the GPIO 40 pin is similar to raspberry pi, which means other raspberry pi accessories could work with it. A great buy, I am glad I went for the Rock Pi over the Orange Pi, as their support forums, is pretty good for resolving any issues.

[@treshanremolano159]

What a great simple transition in the end - from desktop to your camera view!

[@Quemedices684]

As Raspberry continues to be unavailable for the average user, it’s good to see such a good review of alternatives. Let’s see if other SBC takes the place of Raspberry

Yes, and pricewise and availability are alternatives better now too... Hopefully some miracle will happen to Raspberry foundation, or they will end up bad. Competition is catching quickly.

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

Yes - Raspberry Pi Foundation seem to have lost the plot and I’m not particularly excited at the prospect of paying 3x RRP to get hold of a three year old Pi 4...so maybe Rock 5B is the answer.

[@simons.5442]

@@gdutfulkbhh7537 don't fall for the trap Hardware is only half part of the story. You'll eat your shoes when it comes to find a Distro that stays Rolling ... or you'll be stuck with a 5 year old 18.04 "LTS" customly backed in no time ...

[@richcurtin9540]

Great video, this is a fantastic board now manufactured and distributed by OKdo and the team that used to manufacture & distribute Raspberry Pi so great to see such good progress on software and expect good availability globally 🎉

[@Josh10976]

This seems to be an amazing board! Will consider for future projects.

[@WSallai]

Congratulations on achieving 400-videos!🎉

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thank you! 😃

[@Rod_Knee]

The trend seems to be lack of software support with non-RPi SBC's, especially when they're new. For example, I was unsurprised that there is no GPU acceleration under Debian, and the awful performance of the video capture under Debian. I'd be keen to buy a Rock 5B, if and when we see solid open source drivers for all the included hardware. Another great video Chris, much appreciated.

[@sprockkets]

That's why I'm just going to go with a small odroid h3 because the intel gpu is supported fine in Linux. More energy, more noise, but more performance, and you don't need a special distro to work with it.

[@Rod_Knee]

@@sprockkets The H3+ looks pretty good. I used a couple of H2's in the past for a customer, they're ticking away nicely.

[@goranjosic]

The main feature of this board is 6 TOPS NPU, especially now when there is a shortage of chips and this board is available for purchase (running neural network over video feed/sensor data and similar)

[@davidlloyd1526]

The difference is that Raspberry Pis all eventually do get good Linux support. With other cards, it's a roll of the dice. This video is misleading in not testing with "vanilla Linux". In two years, the manufacturer will stop updating their custom images, and that's all you'll get.

[@sprockkets]

@@davidlloyd1526 It's 2022 and it still doesn't have gpu video rendering OOB. And isn't good for Kodi and multi channel sound last I checked.

[@perrymcclusky4695]

First time I heard of a 'Pico-ITX Form-factor'. This is another impressive SBC. I like the way the development of SBC's are heading. Looking forward to your next video!

[@youtwobe3507]

Pico-ITX has been around since 2007, but it might be seeing a resurgence right now. SBC makers are figuring out that the smaller Pi Model B form factor is too restrictive now that so much I/O and other features are being added, like M.2 2280 slots. The Pi Model B is both too large (e.g. Compute Module or Zero make for thinner handhelds or Pi-tops) and too small (not enough room for better I/O, more difficulty in designing the PCB).

[@perrymcclusky4695]

@@youtwobe3507 Thank you for taking the time to reply. I appreciate it. What attracted me to the Raspberry Pi model B was its small size. What technology can be put into that size fascinates me. With bigger boards, I start to loose interest. With that being said, I’m impressed with the Pico-ITX size and find it’s size still small enough to fascinate me. I hope that form-factor catches on.

[@erlend9672]

Very interesting, I think many are looking at alternatives for the Raspberry pi. Not only for supply but also Raspberry Pi 4 is three years old already

[@AraceaeFanatics]

A very nice option and I have already thought of many uses for this board.

[@doq]

What a lovely SBC. It could very well be a powerful small server or home automation hub. Can't wait for DietPi to arrive for it!

[@jimlynch9390]

Hi. Chris, thanks again for a very informative video. Given that this board doesn't make use of the GPU as do many of the boards you've reviewed in the past, I think it would be helpful to revisit some of those older boards to see if they ever were able to use the GPUs. It might give us a warm feeling (maybe not) that someday we would be able to make full use of one of these boards if we obtained one now. Conversely we may learn that they never took the time to complete the development before moving on to new projects.

[@davidlloyd1526]

Pretty sure what you'll find is that the manufacturer stops supporting their custom Debian distro, and there'll be nothing that runs on them. That's why only reviews using *vanilla* Debian or Android are useful.

[@ExplainingComputers]

In most cases the answer is "no". Rockchip in particular make providing desktop Linux GPU support difficult -- Android in another thing.

[@ExplainingComputers]

@David Lloyd For ARM SBC hardware, reviews bsed on vanilla distros would be a complete waste of time. These boards are not based on a standard platform, so it is critical to have a distro ported to the board for driver support (audio, storage, etc). Imagine installing vanilla Debian on a Raspberry Pi, rather than Raspberry Pi OS (which is a Debian port from the Raspberry Pi themselves. These are not standard x86 computers. :)

[@botfap]

​@@ExplainingComputers A lot of the ARM SBC's DO have GPU support under Linux, its just that its only under Wayland not X11. Some also have GPU support under X11 thanks to a 3rd party developer Alyssa at Collabora and the Panfrost driver. The Rock Pi 4 (RK3399) actually has pretty good GPU support under Linux now. The big problem is the OEM debian / ubuntu distros that the manufacturers release is generally of very poor quality and they dont put the work in to integrate the drivers nor do they upstream their code to the mainline Linux kernel so that they can be community maintained. Try Armbian instead of the OEM distros, its much higher quality than any of the OEM SBC distros. Rock Pi 5 GPU drivers are in development by Collabora but the OEM distros will never bother to package them. They are only concerned with selling hardware, they never put money into developing the software side. The Android drivers come direct from ARM, the OEM's have no input in this, thats why they are usually available at launch. Sadly ARM​ decided to stop development of its Linux drivers in 2015 which is why we have this driver mess in the ARM SBC world

[@josephgospa4031]

GPU HW acceleration on linux desktop works from day one on Rock5B. Rockchip Provided Blob GPU driver for it. Ubuntu Jammy/Gnome/Panfrost(panfork) is what works better on Rock5b. KZbin works amazingly well with Chromium and Firefox browsers.

[@kychemclass5850]

Great. 8Gb and 16Gb on a SBC. Finally, someone understands SBC's for the modern world (as a viable computer for daily use/tasks)

[@Praxibetel-Ix]

Good morning, Chris! And a happy early Halloween to you and everyone else here. I actually smuggled my breakfast to my room to watch this! A hoopy piece of thinking? You can say that. It was worth the risk! 🤣 Anyway, the Rock 5B is certainly a fast SBC! I was impressed to see it fare better on the drive speed test than the Odroid and the LattePanda 3 Delta. And of course, it really made my day to see both Stanley and Mr. Scissors assisting with opening the packaging. Oh, by the way, congratulations to you and the Pico W robot for getting an article on the Raspberry Pi site! 🥳

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this -- and I'm glad you say the Pico robot article. :)

[@Praxibetel-Ix]

@@ExplainingComputers You're welcome! I came across Raspberry Pi's tweet about the article the other day and it was a nice little write-up. I'm pretty proud of you. :)

[@PeterJasper]

Thanks for a great review of another SBC. It is early days, but the Rock 5B appears very capable and having an HDMI input should be useful. Looking forward to support for other OSs including Linux Mint. 🖥

[@legojenn]

Thanks for the overview. This appears to be the closest SBC that you've reviewed to a general purpose computer. As you mentioned, the software is lagging. I look forward to the future of this and other related devices.

[@firebear14]

Nice video! Would definitely like to see some more videos about this board once the software stabilises a bit more.

[@c0mput3]

I've had mine on pre-order since Jan 2022. Glad to see that its as good as i hoped! Can't wait to receive mine

[@ExplainingComputers]

I think you will not be disappointed. A really solid board.

[@G6DDX]

I didn’t pre-order until June so guess I will have a while to wait yet. Looks good though.

[@francis400]

It is good to see you Mr. Scissors, you are looking sharp!

[@revietech5052]

It would be good to see a test of the NPU capabilities. Maybe some kind of object detection test. I'm guessing the hdmi input could used there. Great video as usual.

[@ExplainingComputers]

HDMI input + NPU. A great idea for a future test. Noted!

[@franke5478]

@@ExplainingComputers Could you do an power consumption test with no load and high load in the next video with this board? Thank you. 🙂

[@TheDavidPoole]

@@ExplainingComputers could be good for your mini-tank robot. Give it some autonomy. And a nerf gun.

[@LivingLinux]

@Tony Mekotronics uploaded a video with their RK3588 device and TensorFlow on Android.

[@Reziac]

@@franke5478 I think that would be generally good info for all these SBCs.

[@Urosaurus]

Another powerful SBC, thanks for the great review.

[@Josh10976]

A new video on another fine Sunday morning.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Every Sunday. :)

[@CCoburn3]

It's good to see full-sized HDMI connectors. It looks like a good board. I really wish they had a version of Mint for SBCs.

[@volvo09]

Mint for SBC would be 👍

[@bertvantol9669]

or even Voyager OS which had a great App Launcher

[@paulstubbs7678]

Or Ubuntu

[@voyager4328]

@@bertvantol9669 Yes! yes I Had .. 😉

[@SomeOne-rh5so]

You take my mind, but even Deb not bad at all - you can customise it, also impressed that it works vs only 4 GB ram, this SBC first pay my attention.

[@kjrchannel1480]

I have noticed the new Odroid H3. I like how powerful! and compact it is, but still pricey. I do like spdif jacks. It is nice to see Rockchip trying to be less Android centric.

[@sebastianutrap1224]

Great video with this new SBC! I myself got one with 16GB RAM as my daiily office desktop replacement. My Raspberry Pi 4 is going to be replaced soon!. You should mention that on delivery the Rock 5 doesn't boot from NVMe and flashing the SPI is necessary. It was well documented on Raxda homepage. Also to mention is that the cooler is a bit cheap... my own hangs sometimes and need a push to start working.. Anyway it seems the passive cooling solution to be a better variant to choose... I hope the armbian gets support up in the main release soon as only gpu support seems to be buggy... Anyway its a great SBC with very low power consumption of about 10 watts with a NVMe drive! The performance is ok for office on a 4k monitor with 60hz too! Exyctly what I wished for in a Raspi 5!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this. I did not try M.2 booting -- yet! :) I see that they sell a very nice passive cooler and top/base "case" now.

[@Rick-vm8bl]

Really nice SBC here, the input options are great, 2.5Gb ethernet very welcome, and the HDMI input could be a fantastic feature to have if they can sort out the framerate issues!

[@ayeminoo2067]

Please do power consumption test for all sbc. One of top selling point is that I think

[@erlinglorentsen4262]

Software & drivers. The nemesis of sbc.

[@jaffarbh]

Amazing. Once again we have a powerful hardware but the limitations are on the software side, i.e. lack of GPU acceleration in Linux and OBS-like capturing app on Android. This means these lovely SBCs remain specialist tools and can't quite become true desktop replacement... yet.

[@davidlloyd1526]

The review is flawed as it doesn't test with vanilla Linux. You don't want to be at the mercy of the manufacturer discontinuing their custom Linux images...

[@ExplainingComputers]

The review is not flawed. For ARM SBC hardware, reviews based on vanilla distros would be a complete waste of time. These boards are not based on a standard platform, so it is critical to have a distro ported to the board for driver support (audio, storage, etc). Imagine installing vanilla Debian on a Raspberry Pi, rather than Raspberry Pi OS (which is a Debian port from the Raspberry Pi themselves. These are not standard x86 computers. :)

[@josephgospa4031]

GPU HW acceleration on linux desktop works from day one on Rock5B. Rockchip Provided Blob GPU driver for it. Ubuntu Jammy/Gnome/Panfrost(panfork) is what works better on Rock5b. KZbin works amazingly well with Chromium and Firefox browsers. It will just get better.

[@brianwood5220]

Great video Chris looks a very capable little SBC. Thanks for sharing

[@JesusMartinez-mk8tb]

Very interesting product for A.I. things. Hope we can see soon an ARM SBC with PCIE for external GPU units.

[@ArniesTech]

Great little SBC. Thanks for the much needed sunday Entertainment/education 💪🙏

[@ChipGuy]

That board design is very good. You can just mount it on the back of any housing and you got access to all the I/O port. I wrote almost the same comment to a similar board you reviewed a while ago.

[@ExplainingComputers]

There is a move towards this "Pico-ITX" form-factor, which is a good thing. :)

[@ChipGuy]

@@ExplainingComputers Totally agree!

[@gerardgauthier4876]

I usually hate sites that review new hardware. I hate listening to these professionals read the hardware press kit back to the viewers(Mac is the worst for this) but this site is a nice departure from that... Good job explaining computers... Explaining Computers!

[@RoboNuggie]

Seems to be a nice little board..... could be a dedicated streaming device, a music streamer, a video capture box or a transcoding box.... hmmm... Let's hope the overall prices fall to their previous lows, as this is really hampering uptake of them for all except the most dedicated of tinkerers.... Thanks Chris, excellent as always. 'Till next time, be safe!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Agreed, and agreed . . . and agreed! :) I am hoping for new SBCs in the Pi price range again in 2023. And in this context, I am very pleased to report that the next, true SBC I'll look at here will be the VisionFive 2 RISC-V board, that is costing me £51.43 (about $60) including shipping. :)

[@RoboNuggie]

@@ExplainingComputers Really!? Excellent.. As Yoda might say, "looking forward to it, I am..."

[@HenryCavillage]

I miss you my friend... I hope to you have a great weekend. Thanks So much for introduce your products...

[@g-r-a-e-m-e-]

Very interesting, and the board is great value. Thanks. Nice to see the sitting down segment!

[@joeg3950]

I like it. However, the price point is above what I will pay at the moment. Thorough and great content - as usual. Also, production quality is fantastic. Thank you. Cheers

[@SchoolforHackers]

Sparing use of thermal compound: Brilliant!

[@kurtweber162]

Sir, I have not found a video of your that I have not liked, and learned from , Thanks for the posts and keep[ up the great work.

[@sbc_tinkerer]

Nice job again sir! Judging from this video I will most likely take advantage of my own $5 reservation discount for this board. Thank you!

[@ExplainingComputers]

I imagined this may be the case.

[@ITGuyinaction]

🤔🤔🤔🤔 Interesting that nowadays we have almost everything in one chip (not counting those "small helping" integrated circuits) while "similar" 8-bit or 16-bit devices some years ago needed many "big" chips... Very good video! As always on your channel! 👍👍👍

[@fattomandeibu]

My old A1200, which is a 32-bit machine from 1992, I've been restoring it recently, and when I opened it to replace the dying hard disk with a SD card to IDE adapter, it was amazing the amount of big chips there were on there. CPU, PPU, sound chip, I/O chip, 2 mask ROMS(one with the hardware drivers, the other with the OS), 4 RAMs, disk controller and a few others I wasn't sure on. It was pretty well crammed.

[@ITGuyinaction]

@@fattomandeibu Exactly! That's another world!

[@anon_y_mousse]

This is pretty cool. Once they fully develop the Linux drivers this could be used as a TV recorder. I have been looking for a new DVR, this seems like eventually it'll give me the flexibility I want.

[@kostasgiagidis]

Mr Christopher as suggestion if you can look it for consideration it will be nice to use phoronix test suite when you testing that boards. it will give us more spherical view about their performance and you can compare it with other similar boards. it will be nice addition to your wonderful and useful videos. maybe it will add some more time in the videos that but will help us more. i want to thank you from my part for the great work you do for all of us :)

[@dang48]

Looks great. When time and finances permit, I'll be purchasing one and experimenting with it. And at the 10 minute mark where the screen went black to show the output, I thought my computer crashed for a few seconds. 😅

[@williama29]

a single board computer is always exciting and best to see i like single board computers

[@ahmad-murery]

I came here and found only 3 comments and 16 views, and for a while I thought maybe this is my chance to be in the 4th position, but then I quickly realized that I'm here for the content 💯🚀👍 so why wasting time to claim a position 🤔 anyway, the first think came to my mind when I saw the laptop screen through HDMI input was what if we can remote that laptop through the HDMI cable only? (I know this is silly but it's just me trying to find some use-cases for what I saw), Great video as expected, Thanks Chris,

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings! :)

[@ahmad-murery]

@@ExplainingComputers Greeting Chris! :)

[@scottnoble5022]

I just got mine yesterday, have tried Debian , Armbian and Ubuntu images from Radxa’s site and Armbian. So far no luck with Wi-Fi working… had minimal issues with the Radxa zero I got last year. Will keep trying.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Which WiFi adapter are you using?

[@scottnoble5022]

@@ExplainingComputersNo antenna installed, maybe that’s my issue…. *slaps forehead*

[@bluehornet6752]

Looks like a nice little ARM-based SBC. On suggestion for you to consider for your future SBC reviews, CB: Whether or not an SBC manufacturer makes available a Yocto recipe for their product. I never used to consider this factor, but recently ran into a situation where I purchased two LattePanda 3 Delta boards for a flight simulation-based project I've been working on. Come to find out that there's no Yocto-based BSP from DFRobot for it, which would me substantially more work. So I researched things further and discovered that Seeed Studios offers one for their Odyssey x86 board, so I purchased two of their J4125-based boards to use on this project instead of the LP3d board. An added bonus was that the Odyssey board also uses a 32-bit ARM-based secondary processor (running at 48MHz) , instead of the 8-bit AVR-based processor running at 16 MHz on the DFRobot board. Not a huge issue, but the added speed/capabilities of the Seeed Studio Odyssey board made it even easier to choose. A great video though, and I'll definitely keep this SBC in mind if I need an ARM-based board moving forward. Its performance looks very good. I really love your channel. Next to Mick Make (who sadly doesn't seem to be making videos any longer), I find your SBC-related content to be *very* helpful to keep me up to date with what's out there in the SBC world.

[@dcc1165]

Those HDMI ports are in the "Gee, I wish I thought of that" category. It's a simple idea and absolute genius to mount them vertically instead of horizontally...This has the effect of providing more room on the (already big) SBC. I'm also interested to see if you can do actual video capture. I have a TON of old VHS tapes (my own stuff I recorded off the air) that I'd love to capture, but I didn't like any of the products I tried in the past.

Well you can always have 2 micro HDMI, which are perfect in my opinion.

[@ThomasBrisco]

Nice content, as always! I appreciate the side-by-side performance comparisons. With the RPi still going for well over the pre-pandemic price - I'm looking for pi alternatives. Would a "raspberry pi replacement" be a good episode? I watch for your new videos each week, and appreciate the quality and time you put into these great videos!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Good video idea, noted. :)

[@DonjiKong]

Yes, this is a huge problem for me. I’m looking for a new tinkering computer, and I love the community support for it. I’m a bit afraid of the rock5b because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to set things up properly. What it like installing Linux? Does it only work with Debian?

[@PS_Tube]

Greetings Chris ! It's always nice to see the reviews of emergency PC replacement boards. This one, the Rock 5 seems promising except for the few kinks here and there. Noticing by time of upload, DST has come into effect perhaps ?

[@ExplainingComputers]

Yes, the clocks changed in the UK last night -- we are back on GMT now.

[@fram1111]

Looks like a balanced computer with its pros and cons. Thank you for another great review.

[@joegee2815]

I love the innovation in this market. I've stopped buying every interesting SBC as I have quite a number that I'm not using. I'll wait until they start competing head to head as a true desktop/laptop replacement. They are close, very close.

[@stanpotter7764]

My Sunday is now complete. Thank you, mate! 🤜🏻🤛🏻

[@EmmanuelNyachokeAchachi]

I have ordered 3 of these with 16GB RAM can't wait to run K8s on them.

[@ExplainingComputers]

The best of luck with this! :)

[@rogerkoh1979]

A powerful SBC indeed. Nice 👍

[@PinakiGupta82Appu]

Very detailed review. Today's ARM SBCs are not underpowered hobby gadgets anymore. SBCs have progressed so far. The onboard 12v 5A power input socket is something most builders will find useful. M.2, USB 3, GPIO connector, power connector, so many options are there. The board's large heatsink looks impressive. Greetings from India!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings!

[@gedgicat2063]

Very interesting video, the future is starting to look up for sbc's

I see all this sbc computers and think: "i can get a QuadCore Lenovo w530 or a full blown t430 for this ..." Raspberry was really a fresh air in this market that is now filled with scalpers.

[@skinwalker69420]

You could use one of the m.2 slots with an external GPU to speed up video hardware acceleration, and probably also have drivers for video hardware acceleration too.

[@jamesbonds3232]

It’d be perfect review if you put an effort to evaluate NPU performance either with tensor or opencv. Btw good job on the explanation

[@CHGOfficial512]

The moment i saw the thumbnail I was like "Screw the raspberry pc, I'm getting this one asap"

[@rpavlik1]

Pretty neat, looks like it has a lot of potential. I think it's a little pricy compared to a used thin client but I am not sure of the performance comparison: how does the rk3588 compare to a gx415 (AMD) or maybe whatever Pentium/Atom chip they have in a Wyze/Dell 3050 thin client?

[@blackterminal]

Thin client seems better

[@none941]

I bought the Rock3A that you reviewed which seemed equally promising with the NVMe adapter and tried to use it as a media server. Sadly, the NVMe bit seemed to be unstable, so I've packed it away to let the software and firmware catchup. Perhaps the 5B is better. I'm not disposed to take the risk. That said, purchasing directly from China has proven to be a fool's errand. When I complained about the issues the board was having, I'd have had to pay as much to return, about $28.00, it as I foolishly agreed pay to obtain it in the first place. If you want to buy Radxa or any other China built devices, I'd recommend obtaining them through a vendor in your own country. The business of international shipping now has the character once ascribed to pirates (Arrrgh!) since they are raping and plundering customers right and left! Clearly they know not to "let a good crisis go to waste!" Cheers!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Sorry to hear that you had problems with the Rock 3A.

[@none941]

@@ExplainingComputers No worries Chris. I don't simply take anyone's advice. I make my own decisions and am prepared to bear the consequences myself. When the available software stabilizes sufficiently I'm fairly sure that it will make a decent Samba server or NAS. Waiting a bit for that to happen is not a problem. I enjoy your videos, and have done for years. Please keep doing what you do. You are a wonderful teacher and clear thinker. The world could use a lot more of that in these times. Cheers!

[@muhhuh2]

Fantastic video, I love watching your content!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thank you very much!

[@Dimythios]

One of the VERY FEW tech sites that I trust.

[@JeriDro]

English people are so good at presenting and explaining, I find the best speakers to be either British or from the US.

[@brianm6337]

I need a pi 4 replacement. That would do just fine. I hope I can lay hands on one possibly next year.

[@matchc0635]

The Allnet stores still listed Rock5 as sold out, hope they will ship them out faster since it seems they are now in production--they are probably already at capacity sorting thru preorder coupons and shipping thems in small quantities but when they pushed these coupons, it felt like its almost a grantee that everyone with them will be able to get it on day one, however we are still stuck in this vaporware-esque state.

[@ExplainingComputers]

As I understand it, the "sold out" on Allnet just means that the board is currently only shipping to people who purchased the $5 discount codes earlier in the year. Stock should be listed once every purchasing with a discount code has had a board shipped.

[@chromerims]

An intriguing and attractive SBC 👍 Kindest thanks.

[@TechExploresNYC]

nice overview, I'm still waiting for mine...

[@johncundiff7075]

Nice job Explaining Computers!! You do it well!!

[@OverWilliam]

Great video, thank you Chris. Are there any interesting applications for old Android phones? I'd love to see a video about repurposing an old, perfectly functional Android phone for some sort of home lab or around the house IOT purpose. Just to keep the little thing out of the landfill.

[@Behnam_Moghaddam]

got mine on it's way - even more excited now... thanks! :)

[@alanthornton3530]

The Rock 5B is quite an interesting SBC with plenty of scope as a low powered desktop replacement, would it have helped if the board had 8 gb of ram? Debian xfce is a nice light weight distro at least it behaved itself. In Fridays update you mentioned about using the terminal to mount a drive, I used the terminal to mount a 1 TB HDD for storage leaving the 250 gb SSD to run Linux Mint & a couple of VM's. Thank you for an interesting, instructional video Chris :)

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings Alan. :)

[@AMDRADEONRUBY]

The RK3588 is a good processor and it's a nice board too I need one so bad now

[@larrywebber2971]

Impressive SBC. If I heard correctly, the fan was running hard with Android but not with Debian. This makes me curious as to why given a fairly robust CPU and GPU.

[@tonysheerness2427]

An interesting board and if they can get the software right would be very useful. However it seems to me, to be jam for tomorrow, but will it come? To many boards are let down by the softare, Debian the hdmi input barely works and Android a lack of apps.

[@keithmiller9665]

Hi Chris, another interesting SBC video. I have recently become a great fan of the 11th gen Intel Pentium Gold 7505. I remember seeing one in your PC upgrade and I have one in a Chromebook. I would love to have one of those CPUs in a SFF PC. It would give me QSV video transcoding which is a great weakeness of these SBCs, i.e. no hardware video transcoding apart from possibly v4l2m2m. Price of this SBC is also too high. Better to look for a cheap NUC.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Hi Keith. The Pentium Gold CPUs are indeed very nice. :)

[@YeOldeTraveller]

Very interesting. I would be interested in the thermals, and if there is an issue with the control software for the fan under Debian.

[@kattz753]

Great video. Always interesting to see the latest SBC. Rockchip boards first appeared in the Android/Android TV boxes (aka Kodi boxes). They were always considered inferior to the AMLogic based boards and were the budget option. I am always surprised at the way these Rockchip based SBCs seem to struggle with video considering that there ancestors were sold specifically to play video. It was also surprising to see the fan spin up as soon as Android was loaded. You would think that they would know how to optimize Android by now. I would like to see AMLogic make a board like this. It would be an excellent general purpose small PC.

[@tissuepaper9962]

Could be that the OS forces the BIOS to pin the fan to full no matter what, and that the board is actually quite comfortable with the workload. Just a thought.

[@arthodart4712]

Greetings from the US!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Greetings!

[@clivewiddus3953]

The video was very interesting, I was surprised you were not using Mint being your favourite Linux distribution, I will say that for copyright reasons Debian doesn't have any of the driver files for a lot of devices, and you have to download them separately before external devices will work.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this. The Rock 5B is an ARM SBC, and Linux Mint is x86 only, so it cannot run on the board. More broadly, as with all ARM SBCs, the board can only run distros for which an image has been specifically prepared for the board. The Debian driver issue has nothing to do with copyright. It is because there are no suitable drivers for the ARM SoC (the RK3588) that the Rock 5B uses. So hey cannot just be downloaded, as nobody has written them! :) This brings me back to the fact that this is a custom ARM SBC, not a generic x86 computer. And when it comes to running Linux, these are very different platforms.

[@indigowyrm]

Thanks great video as ever! I've ordered the 8gb but what Power supply do you need to run with the m.2 nvme ? Cheers

[@stoneysauce]

I want to see how well this Rock 5B stands up to the Odroid H3+, which additionally provides windows 11 compatibility. This is an excellently informative video btw.

[@qzorn4440]

wow great rock video. It was hobby fun when SBCs were around $50 like RPi and smallish. now SBC price and learning curve? thanks for the wonderful demo video. 😎

[@ItsMeLah]

Thank you Chris 👍

[@dantevortex]

This is that point in your life when you find out you also need a sorted cabinet full of random screws and bolts, becuase that's just the way it goes. I'm glad to see there's finally a board that actually meets demands to make a decent desktop replacement device. And the price is fair even.

[@ExplainingComputers]

I have many thousands of such parts, which included about 30 M.2 retaining screws (several from other Rock/Radxa mounting hardware). But only one fit the thread on the Rock 5B. :)

[@dantevortex]

@@ExplainingComputers Figures, you have a million screws, except the one you need. A classic curse upon us. **cue sad music**