The Performance of Arm-Based Board Computers: A Hands-On Review

This video is gonna play fine on this board, so this board is gonna handle 30 FPS 4K video playback pretty good with most codecs that are supported with the CPU. Let's move over to 60 and see what happens. I've never really been able to get any of these Arm-based board computers to play this file properly, and that's the problem I always run into. The audio desync will actually even skip whole parts of the video, and then we'll just get real choppy.

I'm gonna go ahead and test another 4K video. This is 120 megabits 4K UHD HEVC 10-bit MKV. You look pretty smooth, no stuttering, no skipping. I've actually had really good luck with the Arc A33.99 board files just like this. Seems to handle them fine. As for YouTube 4K video playback, I just can't get it to set at 4K, and keep getting this error here. So, I got to go to 1080p and forget about Netflix 4K. It has to be a certified device to even get that version of Netflix installed on something like this. That's just another thing to think about when you're looking for a media playback device.

But if you just need 1080P, something like this is gonna work fine. We have zero dropped frames, and it looks great. Native Android gaming seems to work fine here. This is Asphalt 8. Unfortunately, I could not get Asphalt 9 to install. It was incompatible with this device from the Play Store. I could have side-loaded it, but I have tested it before on RK33.99 hardware; it does run, but it's not the best. If you want to play Rockstar games from the Play Store, like Bully and Grand Theft Auto, they're gonna work. You might have to set it to medium. Minecrafts will work fine on here, even at low settings. But I really wouldn't recommend it; it's not a great experience either.

I tried some Dreamcast emulation with Raycast the standalone version and Retroarch. It runs better in the standalone version but is still very choppy. This is Sonic Adventure 2. You can take a look at the top-left hand corner; we're at about 30 FPS, 33. We should be at 60. You can really feel the lag here.

I also went ahead and tried Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Take a look at the top-left hand corner. We're at about 30 FPS, 33. The board will handle easier-to-emulate N64 games like Waverace, Mario Kart, Super Mario 64. There's a ton of games that are gonna be playable on here, and then you're gonna run into a few like this that are just a bit laggy. And the final emulator I tested was PSP using the standalone version of ppsspp.

This is Tekken Dark Resurrection 2x resolution. As you can see, it's handling it just fine. So, there are a ton of PSP games that are gonna work perfectly on this board, and you're gonna run into some like God of War: Chains of Olympus, Killzone, Midnight Club that just aren't gonna run well on this thing.

God of War: Chains of Olympus 1x resolution. All the speed hacks on this is as low as I can set it, and we're only at about 25 FPS, should be at 60. Overall, I mean it performed like I expected it to. These Arm-based board computers aren't much different from each other and are a lot out there right now. The chip isn't a new chip to hit the market; it's been out for a little while, and I expected performance to dramatically increase over time.

The CPU in the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is more powerful than this CPU, but with the Raspberry Pi, we have the backing of the community; everyone's got a pie, and everybody's doing something for it. And that's why the Raspberry Pi is just one of the best single-board computers out there. If you're interested in purchasing one of these or learning more about it, I'll leave a link in the description to the official website. You can check out everything you need to know there.

And definitely keep an eye on the channel because I do have kind of an Arc A33.99 shootout coming up very shortly. I got a lot of these boards and just want to get down to which is the best one out there right now. I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button, maybe subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up-to-date. And as always, thanks for watching.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna be taking a look at the red AXA rock pi 4b now as you can see it looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi and I'm pretty sure that's what they were going for here they make a few different models of this with different Ram sizes and the price varies now I haven't been able to find a price for just the board itself only the kits they include the power supply case heatsink and your USB type-c cable for power for the one gigabyte kit $64 but I have heard rumor that the one gigabyte variant without any extras is around 40 bucks the two gigabyte kit is 74 and the 4 gigabyte kit is $90 now you got to remember if you're in the United States this is shipping from China I have no clue how much they're gonna charge you shipping so you might want to factor that in on top also recently a lot of these manufacturers have been releasing boards just like this not the same form factor but with the same CPU the rockchip $33.99 on paper the CPU should be pretty powerful but I have yet to see somebody come out with some really good software that supports everything that this chip is capable of the closest thing we have right now is Android and I know a lot of people get these single board computers to run like a Linux desktop on it I have not had any luck with any of the boards that I own which is at nine right now nine of these arcade $33.99 boards sitting on my desk right now and I have not had a great experience with any of them running a Linux desktop now if you want to run a headless Linux server or something like that be my guess is gonna work fine but we don't have acceleration on the desktop you tube acceleration unless you do a lot of configuration then some stuffs not gonna work in one area and it's gonna work better in the other it's been a mess with the arcade $33.99 but I wanted to take a look at this one here because it is the exact same form factor as a Raspberry Pi 3 on the right we have the PI 3 on the left we have the rock pi 4 be theoretically the rock pie should fit in any case that the Raspberry Pi 3 can fit in but you got to remember this thing generates a lot more heat than the pi does and it doesn't use micro USB it actually uses USB type-c which is a bit wider so there is a little bit of modification you may have to do the model of the rock pi that I have here is the 2 gigabyte version I also got the USB type-c charger case and heatsink I'm gonna go ahead and throw it together then we're gonna go over the specs and test this thing out sometimes I really enjoy these acrylic cases and then sometimes they're just a little bulky but this is necessary for the heatsink on the bottom I have tested a lot of these $33.99 s and I can tell you it needs a heatsink if you want maximum performance out of this chip you better keep it cool so for the CPU in this thing we have the rockchip rk3288 for the GPU is the Mallee t 860 mp4 it's a four core GPU already talked about the different models with different Ram sizes so we'll move to storage it does have a micro SD card slot an emmc module slot and an MDOT two connector on the bottom for MDOT two SSDs 802 11 AC Wi-Fi it does two point four or five gigahertz Gigabit LAN with power over ethernet and bluetooth 5.0 two USB 3.0 ports two USB 2.0 ports 40 GPIO laid out just like the Raspberry Pi and MIP ICSI Tulane camera connector as for operating systems in this video I'm going to be testing out their Android TV version but they do offer a few others on the website and there's more to come so with all that out of the way I'm ready to get into some testing here I want to see if this performs any better than the last arcade $33.99 board that I tested alright so here we are guys nice-looking Android TV interface here when I originally tested this they did not have Google Play I tried installing it it wouldn't work but the newer builds do have Google Play and they do work fine first thing I want to do here is go into i-264 so obviously we have that Rockchip $33.99 two gigabytes of ram and supposedly it is ddr4 for a 53 cores at 1.4 to a 72 cores at 1.8 and we have a screen resolution of 1920 by 1080 with that Mally t8 64 core GPU this will do up to opengl 3.2 Android version 7.1.2 this is new gig so I've already run a bunch of tests here and we're gonna go over a couple benchmarks versus some of these other arcade $33.99 towards NVIDIA shield and the tinker board just to kind of get an idea of how this thing does perform overall it's pretty snappy and like I mentioned I have tested a lot of Linux desktop builds for these RK $33.99 boards and they're just not great if you want to run Linux on something like this make sure it's like a Linux server or a headless setup desktops are not good here there's no acceleration unless you do some crazy configuration and it's just not a great experience for an average user Android on the other hand works really well the first benchmark Iran was Geekbench for at the very top we have the rock pi/4 that's the board we're using right now right underneath there we have the nano PI m4 it has the same exact chip and it actually has two gigabytes of ddr3 then the Asus tinkerer board and finally at the very bottom I went ahead and threw in the Nvidia shield Android TV since we're using Android here it's really hard not to think about the shield it goes on sale all the time for a hundred and thirty bucks and it's actually my favorite TV device to use geek bench multi-core the m4 still nudged ahead by a little bit now this could have to do with cooling the m4 does have a bigger heatsink on it and maybe throwing a fan on this thing will net better performance but I wanted to keep it stock straight out of the box to see what we got but if we take a look at that shield score it's ahead of everything onto some GPU benchmarks this is GFX bench this is using OpenGL 2.0 t-rex on-screen rock PI and the Nano PI m4 were right there with each other unfortunately the Asus tinker board did not finish and again you just can't deny the performance of the shield 3dmark ice storm extreme now you won't see a score here for the shield because every time I run the extreme version it just says maxed out as I was running this I was sure that the rock pi was gonna score right around with the m4 scored now I know these are lower scores and today's standards for newer Android phones so every little bit helps here and as you can see the m4 came ahead of the rock pi by a decent amount in the final benchmark was 3dmark sling shot the Asus tinkerer board would not finish this one this uses OpenGL 3.2 as you can see the rock PI and the m4 just aren't great at OpenGL 3.2 every one of these RK $33.99 boards claim that they can do 4k 60fps smoothly while it is true not every single codecs gonna work fine so you've got to find what's gonna work these are my go-to tests here this is a 4k mp4 30fps video this is Big Buck Bunny seems to be handling it pretty well we'll move over to 60 in a second now as long as it sounds on here this video is gonna play fine so this board is gonna handle 30 FPS 4k video playback pretty good with most codecs that are supported with the CPU let's move over to 60 and see what happens I've never really been able to get any of these arm Basinger board computers to play this file properly and that's the problem I always run into the audio desync it'll actually even skip whole parts of the video and then we'll just get real choppy while I'm here I'm gonna go ahead and test another 4k video this is 120 megabits 4k uhd HEV C 10 bit MKV you looks pretty smooth no stuttering no skipping I've actually had really good luck with the arcade $33.99 and files just like this seems to handle them fine as for YouTube 4k video playback I just can't get it to set at 4k keep getting this error here so I got to go to 1080p and forget about Netflix 4k it has to be a certified device to even get that version of Netflix to install on something like this that's just another thing to think about when you're looking for like a media playback device but if you just need 1080p something like this is gonna work fine we have zero dropped frames and it looks great native Android gaming seems to work fine here this is asphalt 8 unfortunately I could not get asphalt 9 to install it was incompatible with this device from the Play Store I could have side-loaded it but I have tested it before on RK $33.99 hardware it does run but it's not the best if you want to play the rockstar games from the Play Store like bully and grand theft auto they're gonna work you might have to set it to medium Minecrafts gonna work fine on here and even pub G does at low settings but I really wouldn't recommend it it's not a great experience either tried some Dreamcast emulation with raycast the standalone version and retroarch it runs better in the reek a standalone here but it's still very choppy this is Sonic Adventure 2 definitely not at full speed I also went ahead and tried Marvel vs. Capcom 2 you take a look at the top left hand corner we're at about 30 FPS 33 we should be at 60 you can really feel the lag here here's some n64 emulation this is double-oh-seven Goldeneye I am using moopan 64 fc+ from the Google Play Store now this is one of the harder games to emulate correctly it's not doing a bad job but it's not stand up like I've seen in some other boards this board will handle easier to emulate n64 games like waverace Mario Kart Super Mario 64 there's a ton of games that are gonna be playable on here and then you're gonna run into a few like this that are just a bit laggy and the final emulator I tested was PSP using the standalone version of ppsspp this is Tekken dark resurrection 2x resolution and as you can see it's handling it just fine so there are a ton of PSP games that are gonna work perfectly on this board and you're gonna run into some like God of War Chains of Olympus Killzone midnight club that just aren't gonna run well on this thing God of War Chains of Olympus 1x resolution all the speed hacks on this is as low as I can set this and we're only at about 25 fps should be at 60 so overall I mean it performed like I expected it to these are K $33.99 boards aren't much different between each other and there are a lot of them out there right now this chip isn't a new chip to hit the market it's been out for a little while and I expected performance to dramatically increase over the time it's been out and I just really haven't seen it of course this is more powerful than the CPU in the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but with the Raspberry Pi we have the backing of the community everybody's got a pie everybody's doing something for it and that's why the Raspberry Pi is just one of the best single board computers out there if you're interested in purchasing one of these are just learning more about it I'm gonna leave a link in the description to the official website you can check out everything you need to there and definitely keep an eye on the channel because I do have kind of an arc a $33.99 shootout coming up very shortly I got a lot of these boards and I kind of just want to get down to which is the best one out there right now I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up to date and like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna be taking a look at the red AXA rock pi 4b now as you can see it looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi and I'm pretty sure that's what they were going for here they make a few different models of this with different Ram sizes and the price varies now I haven't been able to find a price for just the board itself only the kits they include the power supply case heatsink and your USB type-c cable for power for the one gigabyte kit $64 but I have heard rumor that the one gigabyte variant without any extras is around 40 bucks the two gigabyte kit is 74 and the 4 gigabyte kit is $90 now you got to remember if you're in the United States this is shipping from China I have no clue how much they're gonna charge you shipping so you might want to factor that in on top also recently a lot of these manufacturers have been releasing boards just like this not the same form factor but with the same CPU the rockchip $33.99 on paper the CPU should be pretty powerful but I have yet to see somebody come out with some really good software that supports everything that this chip is capable of the closest thing we have right now is Android and I know a lot of people get these single board computers to run like a Linux desktop on it I have not had any luck with any of the boards that I own which is at nine right now nine of these arcade $33.99 boards sitting on my desk right now and I have not had a great experience with any of them running a Linux desktop now if you want to run a headless Linux server or something like that be my guess is gonna work fine but we don't have acceleration on the desktop you tube acceleration unless you do a lot of configuration then some stuffs not gonna work in one area and it's gonna work better in the other it's been a mess with the arcade $33.99 but I wanted to take a look at this one here because it is the exact same form factor as a Raspberry Pi 3 on the right we have the PI 3 on the left we have the rock pi 4 be theoretically the rock pie should fit in any case that the Raspberry Pi 3 can fit in but you got to remember this thing generates a lot more heat than the pi does and it doesn't use micro USB it actually uses USB type-c which is a bit wider so there is a little bit of modification you may have to do the model of the rock pi that I have here is the 2 gigabyte version I also got the USB type-c charger case and heatsink I'm gonna go ahead and throw it together then we're gonna go over the specs and test this thing out sometimes I really enjoy these acrylic cases and then sometimes they're just a little bulky but this is necessary for the heatsink on the bottom I have tested a lot of these $33.99 s and I can tell you it needs a heatsink if you want maximum performance out of this chip you better keep it cool so for the CPU in this thing we have the rockchip rk3288 for the GPU is the Mallee t 860 mp4 it's a four core GPU already talked about the different models with different Ram sizes so we'll move to storage it does have a micro SD card slot an emmc module slot and an MDOT two connector on the bottom for MDOT two SSDs 802 11 AC Wi-Fi it does two point four or five gigahertz Gigabit LAN with power over ethernet and bluetooth 5.0 two USB 3.0 ports two USB 2.0 ports 40 GPIO laid out just like the Raspberry Pi and MIP ICSI Tulane camera connector as for operating systems in this video I'm going to be testing out their Android TV version but they do offer a few others on the website and there's more to come so with all that out of the way I'm ready to get into some testing here I want to see if this performs any better than the last arcade $33.99 board that I tested alright so here we are guys nice-looking Android TV interface here when I originally tested this they did not have Google Play I tried installing it it wouldn't work but the newer builds do have Google Play and they do work fine first thing I want to do here is go into i-264 so obviously we have that Rockchip $33.99 two gigabytes of ram and supposedly it is ddr4 for a 53 cores at 1.4 to a 72 cores at 1.8 and we have a screen resolution of 1920 by 1080 with that Mally t8 64 core GPU this will do up to opengl 3.2 Android version 7.1.2 this is new gig so I've already run a bunch of tests here and we're gonna go over a couple benchmarks versus some of these other arcade $33.99 towards NVIDIA shield and the tinker board just to kind of get an idea of how this thing does perform overall it's pretty snappy and like I mentioned I have tested a lot of Linux desktop builds for these RK $33.99 boards and they're just not great if you want to run Linux on something like this make sure it's like a Linux server or a headless setup desktops are not good here there's no acceleration unless you do some crazy configuration and it's just not a great experience for an average user Android on the other hand works really well the first benchmark Iran was Geekbench for at the very top we have the rock pi/4 that's the board we're using right now right underneath there we have the nano PI m4 it has the same exact chip and it actually has two gigabytes of ddr3 then the Asus tinkerer board and finally at the very bottom I went ahead and threw in the Nvidia shield Android TV since we're using Android here it's really hard not to think about the shield it goes on sale all the time for a hundred and thirty bucks and it's actually my favorite TV device to use geek bench multi-core the m4 still nudged ahead by a little bit now this could have to do with cooling the m4 does have a bigger heatsink on it and maybe throwing a fan on this thing will net better performance but I wanted to keep it stock straight out of the box to see what we got but if we take a look at that shield score it's ahead of everything onto some GPU benchmarks this is GFX bench this is using OpenGL 2.0 t-rex on-screen rock PI and the Nano PI m4 were right there with each other unfortunately the Asus tinker board did not finish and again you just can't deny the performance of the shield 3dmark ice storm extreme now you won't see a score here for the shield because every time I run the extreme version it just says maxed out as I was running this I was sure that the rock pi was gonna score right around with the m4 scored now I know these are lower scores and today's standards for newer Android phones so every little bit helps here and as you can see the m4 came ahead of the rock pi by a decent amount in the final benchmark was 3dmark sling shot the Asus tinkerer board would not finish this one this uses OpenGL 3.2 as you can see the rock PI and the m4 just aren't great at OpenGL 3.2 every one of these RK $33.99 boards claim that they can do 4k 60fps smoothly while it is true not every single codecs gonna work fine so you've got to find what's gonna work these are my go-to tests here this is a 4k mp4 30fps video this is Big Buck Bunny seems to be handling it pretty well we'll move over to 60 in a second now as long as it sounds on here this video is gonna play fine so this board is gonna handle 30 FPS 4k video playback pretty good with most codecs that are supported with the CPU let's move over to 60 and see what happens I've never really been able to get any of these arm Basinger board computers to play this file properly and that's the problem I always run into the audio desync it'll actually even skip whole parts of the video and then we'll just get real choppy while I'm here I'm gonna go ahead and test another 4k video this is 120 megabits 4k uhd HEV C 10 bit MKV you looks pretty smooth no stuttering no skipping I've actually had really good luck with the arcade $33.99 and files just like this seems to handle them fine as for YouTube 4k video playback I just can't get it to set at 4k keep getting this error here so I got to go to 1080p and forget about Netflix 4k it has to be a certified device to even get that version of Netflix to install on something like this that's just another thing to think about when you're looking for like a media playback device but if you just need 1080p something like this is gonna work fine we have zero dropped frames and it looks great native Android gaming seems to work fine here this is asphalt 8 unfortunately I could not get asphalt 9 to install it was incompatible with this device from the Play Store I could have side-loaded it but I have tested it before on RK $33.99 hardware it does run but it's not the best if you want to play the rockstar games from the Play Store like bully and grand theft auto they're gonna work you might have to set it to medium Minecrafts gonna work fine on here and even pub G does at low settings but I really wouldn't recommend it it's not a great experience either tried some Dreamcast emulation with raycast the standalone version and retroarch it runs better in the reek a standalone here but it's still very choppy this is Sonic Adventure 2 definitely not at full speed I also went ahead and tried Marvel vs. Capcom 2 you take a look at the top left hand corner we're at about 30 FPS 33 we should be at 60 you can really feel the lag here here's some n64 emulation this is double-oh-seven Goldeneye I am using moopan 64 fc+ from the Google Play Store now this is one of the harder games to emulate correctly it's not doing a bad job but it's not stand up like I've seen in some other boards this board will handle easier to emulate n64 games like waverace Mario Kart Super Mario 64 there's a ton of games that are gonna be playable on here and then you're gonna run into a few like this that are just a bit laggy and the final emulator I tested was PSP using the standalone version of ppsspp this is Tekken dark resurrection 2x resolution and as you can see it's handling it just fine so there are a ton of PSP games that are gonna work perfectly on this board and you're gonna run into some like God of War Chains of Olympus Killzone midnight club that just aren't gonna run well on this thing God of War Chains of Olympus 1x resolution all the speed hacks on this is as low as I can set this and we're only at about 25 fps should be at 60 so overall I mean it performed like I expected it to these are K $33.99 boards aren't much different between each other and there are a lot of them out there right now this chip isn't a new chip to hit the market it's been out for a little while and I expected performance to dramatically increase over the time it's been out and I just really haven't seen it of course this is more powerful than the CPU in the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but with the Raspberry Pi we have the backing of the community everybody's got a pie everybody's doing something for it and that's why the Raspberry Pi is just one of the best single board computers out there if you're interested in purchasing one of these are just learning more about it I'm gonna leave a link in the description to the official website you can check out everything you need to there and definitely keep an eye on the channel because I do have kind of an arc a $33.99 shootout coming up very shortly I got a lot of these boards and I kind of just want to get down to which is the best one out there right now I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up to date and like always thanks for watching\n"