ROCK PI X MODEL B Win10 In-tel Atom x5-Z8300 (4GB RAM & 32G EMMC) Single Board Computer

Product Information

Graphics: Device-1: Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000/J3xxx/N3xxx Integrated Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel Status LED(Blue): indicate the BIOS or OS running status, when the Blue LED is on, the BIOS is running, when the OS is running the Blue LED is off. When the OS is shutdown, the Blue LED is on again but dimmer than green LED.

To get the WiFi to work on Windows the NVRAM file ‘4345r6nvram.txt’ from MINIX’s Z83-4 WiFi drivers had to be copied to ‘C:\Windows\System32\drivers’. Active Scene: 0x000002112B1E1380 "C:\Program Files\CinebenchR20\resource\modules\cinebench\cpu\cpu.c4d" SoC – Intel Atom x5-Z8350 “Cherry Trail” quad-core processor @ 1.44 GHz / 1.92 GHz (Turbo) with Intel Gen8 HD graphics @ 500 MHz further demonstrating that given the room temperature was only 23°C without airflow over the heat sink it was no longer effective.

What OSes can the Rock Pi X Run? 

I’m going to start to cheat a little here, as it is supposed to be a list of 5 single board computers, I’ll just a family of boards from AAEON here, namely the “UP the bridge family” that ranges from the Raspberry Pi-sized UP board initially introduced in 2015 with a Cherry Trail processor, to the mid-range UP Squared series for AI & IoT applications with more expansion capabilities, and the higher-end UP Xtreme if even more powerful, yet low power processor, culminating with the UP Xtreme i11 Tiger Lake SBC. Note: We don't suggest using a 5V only USB C power adapter. The board may boot but it will cause stability issue once the system load rises.

I also observed excessive thermal CPU throttling as the board did not have any cooling. While discussing the Ethernet issue with Radxa they offered a replacement unit with 128GB storage and a heat sink together with an appropriate power supply. Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000/J3xxx/N3xxx Series Power Management Controller [8086:22dc] (rev 36) Loaded_Plugins = advanced render ca cinebench colorchoosergui expressiontag mkmodeler model mograph nbp newman objects shader sky sla xpressocore xtensions resources: irq:167 memory:90000000-90ffffff memory:80000000-8fffffff ioport:f000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

When reviewing mini PCs I typically look at their performance under both Windows and Linux so I decided to review using a dual-boot of Windows 10 version 20H2 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS point release 1 and test with a selection of commonly used Windows benchmarks and/or equivalents for Linux together with Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu. Additionally, I used ‘Phoronix Test Suite’ to benchmark the same set of tests on both Windows and Ubuntu for comparison purposes. On Ubuntu, I also compile the v5.4 Linux kernel using the default config as a test of performance. I then set the CPU Scaling Governor to ‘performance’ and ran some Linux benchmarks for which the majority of the results are text-based but the graphical ones included:

Expansion – 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header with 6x GPIOs, 2x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 1x PCM/I2S, 1x SPDIF, 2x PWM, 1x ADC, and power signals (5V, 3.3V and GND) If the power adapter is PD/QC compatible, the USB power cable must support USB data communication(USB 2.0 or 3.0) between the board and the power adapter, or the power adapter will not output desired voltage wanted by the board. For Ubuntu, the WiFi and Bluetooth drivers were extracted from MINIX’s Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ISO and respun into an installable ISO using ‘ isorespin.sh‘. SoC – I ntel Atom x5-Z8350 “Cherry Trail” quad-core processor @ 1.44 GHz / 1.92 GHz (Turbo) with Intel Gen8 HD graphics @ 500 MHzISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000/J3xxx/N3xxx Series PCU [8086:229c] (rev 36) Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 07) Graphics_card = Vendor: Intel, renderer: Intel(R) HD Graphics 400, version: 3.2.0 - Build 20.19.15.4549 (20.19.15.4549) capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation