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

The Rock 5 model B is certainly a beast, as far as ARM SBCs go.

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Contents:

00:00 - 7th-gen speeds
01:17 - Quick overview
02:46 - USB-C PD is as confusing as ever
04:46 - Finally booted
05:39 - More efficient than Pi. WAY more.
07:25 - Faster IO than Pi. WAY faster.
08:21 - Trying out WiFi 6
09:06 - Now THIS is pod racing!
11:07 - CPU Snot?
13:04 - vs Raspberry Pi 4
13:49 - vs Orange Pi 5
14:36 - vs Khadas Edge 2
15:36 - vs Tiny PC
16:05 - Value proposition

[kisiello]

I'm with you on the forums vs discord thing. Moving to discord not only makes it harder to find things, but all the information is going to be completely gone once the discord server shuts down.

[brianogram]

If all these "Pi Killers" would focus more on software and community instead of trying to one-up each other in hardware there might be an actual rival to the Pi. And all these Rock 5 boards are neat, but they're being compared to a Pi 4, which is rapidly approaching four years old. I'm glad you're out there showing what does, and mostly doesn't, work.

[Demios]

I'm just really freaking glad to see other non-pi boards (raspberry specifically) get some competent YouTube coverage.

[MegaManNeo]

This SBC has the same issue as every one of them which is not a Raspberry Pi that is a mixture of all the things you mentioned.
Great performance on paper for a much higher price with way less support.
I still wait to see anything that can seriously compete with their RPi.

[xntumrfoivrnwf]

Oh man, I really feel your Discord pain. For me, it also runs slows / seems to hog memory on my older laptop, so I've just gotten into the habit of popping in, asking my question, and then immediately singing out

[NormanLyon]

The old/recycled/used USFF PC option really needs to be pushed more often. It's often a much more viable option in many cases, and usually easier to find.

[alexanderleitner]

This is literally the board I was waiting for! So terrible to hear, that you had issues with compiling a kernel. Waiting to see you make some progress with it. If so, I will consider to use it for a multi media side project. Great video, as always! Thanks!

[MarcoGPUtuber]

This may not be the Pi Killer I'm looking for, but Jeff Geerling is definitely the channel I'm looking for!

That's why I subbed and stayed subbed after he told us to unsubscribe!

[RobertGallop]

So glad your back into this engineering. Great content, very appreciated! More please!

[ivolol]

If Radsa/Pine64 could get the RK3399 and RK3588 truly mainline, then RPi would truly have a competitor in a lot of good boards. Until then...

[misteragony]

Ever since I switched to armbian on this board it runs very smooth and stable. I run it from nvme. Going to use it for different containers and object detection using the npu. Those thin client like devices all lack that kind of capabilities having no npu.

[EmmanuelNyachokeAchachi]

Being an SRE engineer, I am torn between being mad about the software support for this board and being happy that it has forced me to learn some core Linux concepts I have been avoiding for years.

[Yuriel]

Please keep covering the other boards though Jeff. Hopefully you can drum up more community support for these other boards. Then we would rally see the SBC market start to flourish. With people being more and more privacy and tech savvy these days. We could really use newer products for Homelabs and networks everywhere. As always great content brotha!

[DarkFiber]

If they offered that 10GB/s NIC in an SFP+ variant, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

[johnstogner]

I was looking at these with skepticism. Very well laid out pros and cons on your part. I don't mind having to work a bit, but frankly, that looks like a person would put more work in to making it work just right than working WITH it. I am keeping watch, but not ready to jump in just yet. You gave me a better sense of the real current state of the rock ecosystem. Many thanks.

[fattomandeibu]

Glad to be not the only person who misses forums, I don't think I do anywhere near as much "online socialising", as it were, since Discord etc. started taking over from forums. Live chat is to... well, in the moment to be able to post a good question and get a good variety of answers from different people using different methods. I always like to weigh up my options before doing something.

As for the thin client PCs, if you're willing to go with less powerful hardware, but still technically more power than an SBC, you can find Celeron based thin clients by HP on Ebay for as little as £25. I used one to make a smart TV box for my dad, as he was getting frustrated with how slow and laggy his TVs smart functions were. I just installed Kodi and gave him one of my spare game controllers for a remote.

[goranjosic]

The Edge2 board costs so much because of the TPU cores - its main purpose is to push neural nets, tensorflow lite, etc. incomparably faster than RPi or any other board that does not have TPU and consumes relatively low power.
I'm planing to buy Edge 2 board for my hobby ANN projects, even though it's expensive, it's irreplaceable - TPU cores are really hard to come by these days.

[DJGuaguanco]

Hey man!

Glad to see these videos again on your channel!

Because of you i started using again my Raspberry PI the first model, interesting ride with it :))) ...

How are you feeling ?

Is this clip shot before you did the surgery or after ?

Get healthy and keep up the good work!

Greetings from Romania!

[taypc]

I would love to see a comparison of the various OS offerings, since I had a ton of issues with Radxa's Debian image, but as soon as I switched to DietPi or Armbian, the issues went away. DietPi in particular has proven stable in a week-long stress test, and Armbian support came out pretty much the day my Rock5B was delivered, which was nice. They both have offerings for Raspberry Pi and Generic x86, and their documentation and support are pretty good.

[AngadSodhi]

The most complete video on a Rock Pi 5 / Orange Pi 5 on YouTube! Glad you are feeling better