NanoPi NEO4 Ultra Small SBC - 6 Core CPU 4 Core GPU USB 3.0 & Type C

**Nano Pi Neo4 Review: A Detailed Look at Its Performance and Features**

Introduction

In this detailed review, we will explore the Nano Pi Neo4, a single board computer (SBC) from FriendlyARM. This device represents the most powerful SBC in its size class, according to ZTA Prime, who has tested numerous Rock Chip-based boards on his channel. The article will cover the features, performance, and real-world applications of this compact yet powerful device.

Size Comparison

The Nano Pi Neo4 is remarkably small, even when compared to other popular SBCs like the Raspberry Pi 3B+ and the newer Raspberry Pi 3 A+. Its diminutive size makes it ideal for projects where space is a premium. Despite its compact dimensions, it packs a punch in terms of performance.

Cooling Needs

One critical aspect of the Neo4's design is the requirement for effective cooling. The RK3399 chip generates significant heat, necessitating the use of a heat sink. While the included heat sink is substantial—matching the board's size—it is essential for maintaining optimal performance and preventing thermal throttling. Even with this setup, additional fans may be needed under heavy workloads.

Pricing Breakdown

The base cost of the Neo4 starts at $45. However, adding essential accessories like a heat sink ($51), an eMMC module for Android ($63), and necessary cables and power supplies can bring the total to around $72. While alternatives exist for some components (e.g., repurposed fans or power sources), the eMMC module is crucial for running Android, as it does not support Micro SD cards at this time.

Specifications Overview

The Neo4 boasts a 64-bit six-core Rock Chip RK3399 processor, featuring two Cortex A72 cores at 1.8 GHz and four Cortex A53 cores at 1.4 GHz. It offers 1 GB of DDR3L RAM (expandable to 2 or 4 GB with the Nano M4 variant). The board supports various interfaces, including full-size HDMI 2.0 for 4K/60Hz video, dual USB 3.0 ports, and two additional USB 2.0 headers. It also includes 40 GPIO pins, a CSI camera connector, gigabit Ethernet, and Bluetooth/WiFi capabilities.

Connectivity and Features

The board lacks AC WiFi but includes Wi-Fi (802.11bgn) and Bluetooth 4.0 for basic connectivity. The inclusion ofPCIe support via GPIO opens possibilities for external storage and peripherals with the right adapters. The Mali-T860 GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.2, making it suitable for certain gaming and graphics tasks.

Benchmarking Performance

In Geekbench 4 tests, the Neo4 showed strong single-core performance but fell short in multi-core benchmarks compared to the Nano M4 variant. GPU benchmarks using GFXBench T-Rex revealed lower scores, indicating room for improvement. The board performed adequately in real-world scenarios like YouTube playback and gaming, though thermal throttling occasionally impacted sustained high loads.

Real-World Applications

The Neo4 excels in headless systems but struggles with Linux desktop environments due to driver limitations. Android 7/8 runs smoothly, albeit with some memory constraints (1 GB RAM). Minecraft ran well at default settings, while emulation saw limited success, often requiring tweaking for optimal performance.

Pros and Cons

**Pros:** Compact size, powerful RK3399 chip, affordable price point, extensive GPIO support, and full Android functionality. **Cons:** Limited RAM, insufficient cooling without a heat sink, lack of AC WiFi, underwhelming Linux desktop experience, and dated RK3399 architecture compared to newer alternatives like the Nvidia Shield.

Conclusion

The Nano Pi Neo4 is a solid choice for those seeking a compact, affordable SBC with sufficient power for various projects. However, its limitations in memory and compatibility make it less ideal for demanding applications or Linux-based desktop setups. For users requiring more power or versatility, investing in alternatives like the Nvidia Shield may be worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys ZTA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new Nano neo4 so I test a lot of single board computers on this channel and this is the most powerful single board computer in its size class that I've ever tested this thing is Tiny so if you're a regular viewer of my channel you know I've been doing a lot of these Rock Chip $33.99 single board computer reviews and there's good reasoning behind it these are the only chips that all these manufact are putting in new single board computers besides o Droid with the new H2 and I will have one of those very shortly but that's x86 and not arm if you've been looking around at new single board computers you know it's kind of stagnant we have the RK 3399 some allwinner h6s and that's pretty much it we do need something that's affordable we need something that has more power than the Raspberry Pi 3 but I don't think that the rk3399 is where it's at either way we're going to take a look at the new neo4 and see how it performs here's a quick size comparison between the Raspberry Pi 3B plus and the new Nano Pi I also threw in the new Raspberry Pi 3 A+ for good measure and yeah the neo4 is smaller than both of them but I have a confession to make if you want the rock chip 3399 to perform well you're going to need to keep it cool so nanop piie does make a heat sink and as you can see it's pretty massive it's the same size as the board itself you know USB height so when we put everything together we got a pretty tall single board computer here and if you want this chip to perform well you're going to need this heat sink on there and it wasn't Hur to add a fan either because even with this heat sink I have hit thermal throttle with it what about pricing on a board like this well the base cost is $45 but then we start adding on accessories like the heat sink brings it up to $51 you also might want the proprietary emmc module bring it up to $63 and if you don't have a USB type-c cable and a decent power supply you might want to add that in too by the end you're at $72 now you could get away with no heat sink you could find something laying around the house you could get away with no power supply you can find those all over the place but you might want this emmc module because as of making this video you will need the emmc module to run Android it will not run from a Micro SD card yet so the setup I have here the nanop pi neo4 the heat sink power supply 16 GB emmc module and it does come with your Wi-Fi blooth antenna everything you see here will run you $72 from the friendly arm website now it's time to dive into the specs I'm sure I'm going to leave some stuff out here so if you want to find out the full spec list go ahead and check out friendly arms website link is in the description first up CPU we have a 64-bit six core Rock Chip RK 3399 two cortex a72 cores at 1.8 GHz and four cortex a53 cores at 1.4 GHz as for Ram the neo4 only comes with 1 GB DDR3 1866 MHz Ram if you want a little more they do offer the nanop M4 you can get it in 2 or 4 GB I really wish they would have slapped another gig in here this would be an amazing little board with 2 GB of RAM did run into a few issues running Android where a couple apps ran out of memory the board is normally powered by the USB type-c port it does power and on the-go storage but you can power this from some GPO pins if you really want to gigabit Ethernet one four lane mipic CSI camera connector it will do 13 megapixels two USB 3.0 ports and there's also two USB 2.0 headers on the board so if you want to add two more USBS to this thing is very easy to do so 40 GPI pins now it's not laid out exactly the same as the Raspberry Pi this board is just too small to put it like that and another cool thing that friendly arms been doing on most of their new boards is giving support for PCI ex2 through the gpio now you need the correct adapter for this to work but you can add external ssds and other pcie peripherals there is a proprietary emmc socket on the board and like I mentioned if you want to run Android Android as of making this video you will need an emmc module fullsize HDMI 2.0 Port it will do 4K 60 HZ now that doesn't mean that every single video Codec is going to do 4K 60fps but the CPU is capable of handling some formats at 4K 60fps operating system choices we have Android 7 android8 lubun 2 armbian friendly desktop and friendly core now there may be more coming down on the road but that's what we have right now and I've said this in other reviews that I've done on this rk3399 board running a Linux desktop on here is not fun it's not a great experience there's a lot of tweaking you need to do to get it up and running correctly these are great for headless systems but until Rock Chip puts out the correct drivers we don't have full acceleration on the desktop in most operating systems except for Android and finally another shortcut they took on this board to make it a little cheaper than the others was not adding AC WiFi so we only have 802.11bgn and Bluetooth 4.0 so with the specs out of the way let's get on to some testing I have run some benchmarks and I'm going to face off against some other rk3399 boards that I've tested in the past plus the Asus Tinker board and since we're doing Android here might as well throw in the Nvidia Shield it's very unfortunate that we just don't have a good option for a Linux desktop on the RK 3399 I've tested everything and the closest thing that I can get to having a really nice experience is R&B in and even then they got some work to do I think they'll be the first ones to get to it but it's a little ways off all right so here's the neo4 running Android it's pretty much stock but they did throw a few extras in here like the gpio tests and we do have full access to Google Play now some things will not install they're just not compatible with this but one thing holding this board back at least running Android is this 1 GB of RAM as you can see we only have 452 megab free and I did have a couple apps crashed due to not enough memory here's that Mali t860 4 core GPU it will do openg 3.2 and even though there is an Android 8 build for this I went with the 7.1.2 because it seemed a little more stable so the first thing I always do out of the box is run some benchmarks this is geekbench 4 single core score at the very top we have the neo4 followed by the Nano M4 which is pretty much this same board here it's a little bigger with 2 or 4 GB of RAM The Rock Pi 4 which is another rk3399 board I recently reviewed Tinker board and because we're on Android I can't leave out the Nvidia Shield TV here's the geekbench multicore now if we take a look at the neo4 versus The Rock pi4 they're not far off from each other but that M4 does Jump Ahead quite a bit now these are low scores so every little bit helps taking a look at some GPU benchmarks this is gfx bench T-Rex onscreen this is using openg 2.0 unfortunately the Tinker board did not finish and the neo4 is coming in kind of low this is actually one of the lowest scores that I've got with these Rock Chip 3399 boards next we have a 3D Mark slingshot Benchmark now if we take a look at all of these boards they're relatively low compared to the Shield or compared to any modern smartphone and the final Benchmark I ran was 3D Mark ice storm extreme when you run the extreme version on the shield it just says maxed out when it's done and it looks like the nanop pi M4 pulled ahead by quite a bit now these are still relatively low scores compared to some newer devices out there but I still wanted to run this just to see where the neo4 fell moving over to some real world testing I wanted to go ahead and get YouTube out of the way we cannot access 4K content on this at least using the stock YouTube app that you download from Google Play but if you want to do some 1080p 60fps playback it's going to handle it just fine even over a 2.4 GHz Network native Android gaming seems to run Asphalt 9 pretty well except for the fact that I did have two crashes with this game and I think it was due to only having 1 GB of RAM but once you get it up and running it does handle the game fairly well I always like to test Minecraft on these little boards this is all set at stock so I believe the rendering distance is set to eight chunks I haven't messed around with any of the settings I can tell you right now if you start increasing that distance you're going to run into a little more stuttering than we're seeing here and there is stuttering every once in a while I really notice it overall it runs pretty good I didn't have any crash issues due to the amount of ram I have in this thing so Minecraft is definitely playable on the neo4 and finally I wanted to test out a little bit of emulation this is Dreamcast Marvel versus Capcom 2 I am using the Standalone version of raycast I tried it in retro Arch seems to run better here but that's not saying much cuz we're only at 30 FPS and the stutter is pretty much constant I usually do Native 4K video playback testing when I do single board computer reviews because a lot of these manufacturers claim it can do 4K 60fps yes it can with certain codec but I don't think that the 3399 is a great choice for 4K video playback I would kind of write it off off as an option I would go and get an Nvidia Shield or invest a little more money and buy an Intel nut to tell you the truth I don't think the rk3399 is a good chip in the first place it's been out for a while nothing much has happened with it I'm getting the same benchmark scores same performance as I was a year and a half ago today so if I was you I would stay away from the rk3399 unless you absolutely have to have something yes it is more powerful than the Raspberry Pi but the pi has that Community behind it and even if tons of people bought this I don't think we're going to get to that point with the RK 3399 it's already been out for so long and a lot of people have just kind of overlooked it really appreciate you guys watching I will have one more video coming up very shortly on this chip here I got a lot of boards that I kind of want to Benchmark out I want to talk a lot more about this if you could hit that like button subscribe to the channel and like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on guys ZTA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new Nano neo4 so I test a lot of single board computers on this channel and this is the most powerful single board computer in its size class that I've ever tested this thing is Tiny so if you're a regular viewer of my channel you know I've been doing a lot of these Rock Chip $33.99 single board computer reviews and there's good reasoning behind it these are the only chips that all these manufact are putting in new single board computers besides o Droid with the new H2 and I will have one of those very shortly but that's x86 and not arm if you've been looking around at new single board computers you know it's kind of stagnant we have the RK 3399 some allwinner h6s and that's pretty much it we do need something that's affordable we need something that has more power than the Raspberry Pi 3 but I don't think that the rk3399 is where it's at either way we're going to take a look at the new neo4 and see how it performs here's a quick size comparison between the Raspberry Pi 3B plus and the new Nano Pi I also threw in the new Raspberry Pi 3 A+ for good measure and yeah the neo4 is smaller than both of them but I have a confession to make if you want the rock chip 3399 to perform well you're going to need to keep it cool so nanop piie does make a heat sink and as you can see it's pretty massive it's the same size as the board itself you know USB height so when we put everything together we got a pretty tall single board computer here and if you want this chip to perform well you're going to need this heat sink on there and it wasn't Hur to add a fan either because even with this heat sink I have hit thermal throttle with it what about pricing on a board like this well the base cost is $45 but then we start adding on accessories like the heat sink brings it up to $51 you also might want the proprietary emmc module bring it up to $63 and if you don't have a USB type-c cable and a decent power supply you might want to add that in too by the end you're at $72 now you could get away with no heat sink you could find something laying around the house you could get away with no power supply you can find those all over the place but you might want this emmc module because as of making this video you will need the emmc module to run Android it will not run from a Micro SD card yet so the setup I have here the nanop pi neo4 the heat sink power supply 16 GB emmc module and it does come with your Wi-Fi blooth antenna everything you see here will run you $72 from the friendly arm website now it's time to dive into the specs I'm sure I'm going to leave some stuff out here so if you want to find out the full spec list go ahead and check out friendly arms website link is in the description first up CPU we have a 64-bit six core Rock Chip RK 3399 two cortex a72 cores at 1.8 GHz and four cortex a53 cores at 1.4 GHz as for Ram the neo4 only comes with 1 GB DDR3 1866 MHz Ram if you want a little more they do offer the nanop M4 you can get it in 2 or 4 GB I really wish they would have slapped another gig in here this would be an amazing little board with 2 GB of RAM did run into a few issues running Android where a couple apps ran out of memory the board is normally powered by the USB type-c port it does power and on the-go storage but you can power this from some GPO pins if you really want to gigabit Ethernet one four lane mipic CSI camera connector it will do 13 megapixels two USB 3.0 ports and there's also two USB 2.0 headers on the board so if you want to add two more USBS to this thing is very easy to do so 40 GPI pins now it's not laid out exactly the same as the Raspberry Pi this board is just too small to put it like that and another cool thing that friendly arms been doing on most of their new boards is giving support for PCI ex2 through the gpio now you need the correct adapter for this to work but you can add external ssds and other pcie peripherals there is a proprietary emmc socket on the board and like I mentioned if you want to run Android Android as of making this video you will need an emmc module fullsize HDMI 2.0 Port it will do 4K 60 HZ now that doesn't mean that every single video Codec is going to do 4K 60fps but the CPU is capable of handling some formats at 4K 60fps operating system choices we have Android 7 android8 lubun 2 armbian friendly desktop and friendly core now there may be more coming down on the road but that's what we have right now and I've said this in other reviews that I've done on this rk3399 board running a Linux desktop on here is not fun it's not a great experience there's a lot of tweaking you need to do to get it up and running correctly these are great for headless systems but until Rock Chip puts out the correct drivers we don't have full acceleration on the desktop in most operating systems except for Android and finally another shortcut they took on this board to make it a little cheaper than the others was not adding AC WiFi so we only have 802.11bgn and Bluetooth 4.0 so with the specs out of the way let's get on to some testing I have run some benchmarks and I'm going to face off against some other rk3399 boards that I've tested in the past plus the Asus Tinker board and since we're doing Android here might as well throw in the Nvidia Shield it's very unfortunate that we just don't have a good option for a Linux desktop on the RK 3399 I've tested everything and the closest thing that I can get to having a really nice experience is R&B in and even then they got some work to do I think they'll be the first ones to get to it but it's a little ways off all right so here's the neo4 running Android it's pretty much stock but they did throw a few extras in here like the gpio tests and we do have full access to Google Play now some things will not install they're just not compatible with this but one thing holding this board back at least running Android is this 1 GB of RAM as you can see we only have 452 megab free and I did have a couple apps crashed due to not enough memory here's that Mali t860 4 core GPU it will do openg 3.2 and even though there is an Android 8 build for this I went with the 7.1.2 because it seemed a little more stable so the first thing I always do out of the box is run some benchmarks this is geekbench 4 single core score at the very top we have the neo4 followed by the Nano M4 which is pretty much this same board here it's a little bigger with 2 or 4 GB of RAM The Rock Pi 4 which is another rk3399 board I recently reviewed Tinker board and because we're on Android I can't leave out the Nvidia Shield TV here's the geekbench multicore now if we take a look at the neo4 versus The Rock pi4 they're not far off from each other but that M4 does Jump Ahead quite a bit now these are low scores so every little bit helps taking a look at some GPU benchmarks this is gfx bench T-Rex onscreen this is using openg 2.0 unfortunately the Tinker board did not finish and the neo4 is coming in kind of low this is actually one of the lowest scores that I've got with these Rock Chip 3399 boards next we have a 3D Mark slingshot Benchmark now if we take a look at all of these boards they're relatively low compared to the Shield or compared to any modern smartphone and the final Benchmark I ran was 3D Mark ice storm extreme when you run the extreme version on the shield it just says maxed out when it's done and it looks like the nanop pi M4 pulled ahead by quite a bit now these are still relatively low scores compared to some newer devices out there but I still wanted to run this just to see where the neo4 fell moving over to some real world testing I wanted to go ahead and get YouTube out of the way we cannot access 4K content on this at least using the stock YouTube app that you download from Google Play but if you want to do some 1080p 60fps playback it's going to handle it just fine even over a 2.4 GHz Network native Android gaming seems to run Asphalt 9 pretty well except for the fact that I did have two crashes with this game and I think it was due to only having 1 GB of RAM but once you get it up and running it does handle the game fairly well I always like to test Minecraft on these little boards this is all set at stock so I believe the rendering distance is set to eight chunks I haven't messed around with any of the settings I can tell you right now if you start increasing that distance you're going to run into a little more stuttering than we're seeing here and there is stuttering every once in a while I really notice it overall it runs pretty good I didn't have any crash issues due to the amount of ram I have in this thing so Minecraft is definitely playable on the neo4 and finally I wanted to test out a little bit of emulation this is Dreamcast Marvel versus Capcom 2 I am using the Standalone version of raycast I tried it in retro Arch seems to run better here but that's not saying much cuz we're only at 30 FPS and the stutter is pretty much constant I usually do Native 4K video playback testing when I do single board computer reviews because a lot of these manufacturers claim it can do 4K 60fps yes it can with certain codec but I don't think that the 3399 is a great choice for 4K video playback I would kind of write it off off as an option I would go and get an Nvidia Shield or invest a little more money and buy an Intel nut to tell you the truth I don't think the rk3399 is a good chip in the first place it's been out for a while nothing much has happened with it I'm getting the same benchmark scores same performance as I was a year and a half ago today so if I was you I would stay away from the rk3399 unless you absolutely have to have something yes it is more powerful than the Raspberry Pi but the pi has that Community behind it and even if tons of people bought this I don't think we're going to get to that point with the RK 3399 it's already been out for so long and a lot of people have just kind of overlooked it really appreciate you guys watching I will have one more video coming up very shortly on this chip here I got a lot of boards that I kind of want to Benchmark out I want to talk a lot more about this if you could hit that like button subscribe to the channel and like always thanks for watching\n"