Odroid-H3
hardkernel.com
hardkernel.com
Note though, that RPis have never been the most price effective ARM solution, as Hardkernel has always had more powerful and/or cheaper alternatives. Their current N2+ is probably both more powerful and cheaper than the equivalent RPi.
This looks like a winner in every way.
x86_64 for longevity and support, tested with Ubuntu $latest LTS
decent CPU, better than Raspberry Pi
RAM up to 64GB, two SO-DIMM slots, up to 32GB per slot
M.2 NVMe storage
2 x 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports
2 x SATA 3.0 ports
Intel UHD Graphics, HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 video outputsSupports i2c, UART, USB, and hopefully manual pin control too. That's already miles ahead of a NUC in terms of interfacing.
From the set of pins provided I wouldn't get any hopes up for manual pin control. All pins are single-function, USB pins are almost never switchable (because they're high-speed analog-ish PHY functions), and UART & I2C are not GPIO-capable functions on most x86 platforms.
I'm not sure if this is a common/repeat thing, but for mine I need to maintain a build of the Realtek kernel modules out of tree
If I try to use the discovered/automatic/inline driver... it'll drop out if I try to saturate the link.
It's only when I blacklist this module and compile/use the one from Realtek that it works reliably
edit: This has been consistent through about a year of Fedora kernel releases, for what it's worth -- rather leading edge.
It's quite odd, this is with Fedora -- the current/latest release for about the past year (34 through 36).
It's seen quite a healthy number of 5.x kernels, but every time I try to go without I reluctantly have to build it again
It'll work fine, for a time, but when I really put stress on that link it'll drop
Edit: This is trained at multi-gig too -- going to a 10GbE Mikrotik switch.
I haven't tried testing reliability at 1G -- it's probably better, but I'd like the speed... I still have yet to try a 6.y kernel on it
Seeing they have a kernel PPA makes me suspect too that there's some patchwork going on, where I'm using vanilla Fedora kernels
When I say build it, I really mean allow dkms to function
I run on an unmodified 18.04 though (kernel v5.4), so I think that the support has been also added in a more recent 18.04 LTS patch version.
I'd be curious to know if you're connected at 1 or 2.5G, and if 2.5, how it does if held at that level for about a minute
An iperf3 test or two is usually enough to make it drop until I reboot
Where with the compiled module it's rock solid
The distro drivers (and/or) kernel drivers, are almost always garbage. Also make sure the NIC firmware is up to date.
Care to provide any rationale?
> The distro drivers (and/or) kernel drivers, are almost always garbage.
My experience is the exact opposite, vendor drivers are almost always garbage, and the kernel drivers just work.
For some vendors or kernels, certainly
However, this completely disregards the work companies like Intel and AMD do to upstream their drivers, or the leagues of individual maintainers
In many cases there is no difference, the driver in the kernel is the upstream one
Nvidia has been a notable exception, but they're slowly improving by going (partially?) open source
Realtek specifically has problems due to their shared driver core. For example, it often can't reliably tell the difference between an r8125 and r8169
https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/
https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/fitlet2-specificati...
Almost 8 years ago I bought their older model, Intense PC, to use it as our living-room "multimedia" machine even since. It's running Linux (currently latest Mint), without any problems all these years, including zero driver problems (a rarity among other Linux systems I've used). And of course no noisy fans since it has none, its passive cooling is really good.
However there's now a zillion celeron+6x2.5G units out there cheap, see https://www.servethehome.com/category/networking/ for variants with N6005, i7-1165G7, N5095, and similar with 4 or 6 2.5G ports.
If you want an ARM variant, this one has 1G + 2x2.5G:
https://liliputing.com/nanopi-r6s-is-a-single-board-pc-with-...
They review half a dozen of them or so. Most with the N4000, N5000, and N6000 under $200.
1: https://www.servethehome.com/two-fanless-intel-celeron-n5105-4x-2-5gbe-options-reviewed/
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUuaAPG0PxUSo comparing the N5105 system linked vs the Odroid-H3+, you save about $40 AND get a case with enough thermal mass to passively cool it AND two more 2.5Gbe ports.
1: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004225099067.html
2: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004514115494.html
3: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3877vs4412/Intel-i3-1115G4-vs-Intel-Celeron-N5105
4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox06ZbPhhQA https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004225099067.html
Since Aliexpress, based on what I read, ships from China, the Hardkernel shop is a valid comparison; in the Hardkernel website:
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/
129$ + case - 2 ethernet, and 175$, are in the same ballpark.
Note that the H* don't need any extra cooling. The heatsink provided is enough (I've wasted money on a fan that ended up never spinning).
STH is a review website and YouTube channel that reviews a lot of prosumer and enterprise grade equipment.
Those products you mention will also never reveive any BIOS or firmware updates (including critical security). Speaking from experience with units from 18/19.
Hardkernel with their community engagement is a different story.
I do see the value prop here. Just wished this board supported being driven from 12V but I guess you cant get everything eh
The 12V or higher is required only for the 12V rail used power 3.5” SATA drives directly from the board.
I sort of agree with this, but the bios story is pretty bad everywhere. The good thing about the generic topton type boards is that one can, in principle, run coreboot on them. The protectli ones are similar in spirit. I think there is/was some effort to crowdfund coreboot development for one of these.
Edit: Also, the word on the forums is that topton is just a reseller. CWWK is the odm/oem. You can try ordering from them on aliexpress.
> Power consumption: IDLE : ≃1.9W
Better idle power than a Raspberry Pi 4 plus it has functioning suspend modes.
Hard to say though.
'Fewer components', yadda yadda, and on the other hand they manage to include a full headphone jack that's completely unusable due to induced noise... just sigh
I don't particularly trust the numbers, generally the N6005 runs hotter than the N5105, which makes sense since it's the same process and largely the same chip with more GPU EUs.
ServeTheHome mentions VERY similar boxes (same CPUs) "At idle, we saw between 10-12W depending on single versus double SODIMM configurations. Maximum power consumption hit just over 30W. Both at idle and at maximum, this is significantly higher than the J4125, but one also gets more performance, so there is a clear trade-off. At the top end, adding ~5W over the N5105 was unexpected based on similar TDPs."
On the N5105 (they reviewed at least two) "Power was not a winning point of this solution. At idle, we saw between 10-12W depending on single versus double SODIMM configurations. Maximum power consumption hit 24.5W even with the Topton configured (512GB/16GB) unit. There is clearly room to go up from there. This is a lot higher on both idle and maximum power consumption than the Celeron J4125 that we looked at previously."
EDIT: Found the block diagram and these are Realtek RTL8125B. Not compatible with ESXi 7/8.. can use under 6.7 but I believe that's out of support now :/
Refers to the H2 so unsure if it also applies to the H3.
The odroid-h3 looks like a nice kit, but lack of expandability and obsolete onboard components (wifi, video, sound, etc) were always better served with expansion options for all of the components and peripherals, especially for those raised with desktop computing.
The prices of some sbc's are reasonable, but the stink about soldered CPU's from a decade or so ago still holds true.
I remember getting a gigabyte mobo with the 479 cpu in the early 2000's and rocked that kit for a decade as an HTPC, router and general use PC. Just popped in a quad nic, video card or used the default onboard components for basic browsing/word processing.
Some PCIe slots for expansion takes the mitx (and smaller) designs much further. Case form factors have seen their own evolution, but internal PCIe to external PCIe enclosure would rock in 2022. Especially at some of the pricepoints.
Its just easier to install linux supported components/hardware for the best experience.
I was planning to use Raspberry Pi (which is badly low on stock these days) as my home router with various docker images running but when I figured not all docker images support Arm architecture, I went to look for x86 equivalent and this looked just like what I wanted having dual ethernet not having have to have USB ethernet added which is quite rare.
I had to use DisplayPort instead of HDMI to get the display working and had to use a third party dkms module for officially sold USB Wifi dongle for Ubuntu 22.04 but otherwise it seems to be running good without a gotcha at about 50c or so without a fan.
It costed about $300 including shipping but considering I can get rid of a cloud server that keeps costing me, it'll even out soon enough.
Geekbench gave about 700 single core score which isn't bad for a device that can sit on a palm and having installed Nvme SSD, the disk speed can be quite fast.
The n6005 on the H3+ could easily handle 3-4+ 4K encodes as a media server with the eGPU too.
It's pretty much my ideal hardware for that use case so I'm probably in for one.
There is a similarish SBC called Zimaboard
https://shop.zimaboard.com/collections/diyyourrouter/product...
How does it compare with the 832 model (N3450, 8GB RAM, 2X 1GB Ethernet, 2 Sata ports, PCIe 4x slot).
for example, search for beelink.
For me, this almost looks like an instant buy.
I couldn't get the NIC to work on Ubuntu or Windows Server 2019.
I will see if I can dig up the part number but iircc Intel just stopped supporting quite a few product lines including a line of NICs for integration into main boards. So perhaps that's where all the reports are coming from?
I was surprised because I assumed the NIC would just work because it was Intel.
* It's an Intel I219-V chip
I'm not sure if Realtek is getting better, I've heard a lot of issues with Intel 2.5G nics; people say some revs of the hardware are unusable at 2.5G (but do work fine at 1G). Personally, I've only got good things to say about Intel 1 and 10G nics I've worked with.
For me, Realtek 1G works ok until it doesn't, it's possible to overwelm the hardware with traffic and then you get bad behavior --- queues get stuck or seem to get stuck and the queue processing doesn't always fully reset when you tell it to --- this can lead to wild writes, following descriptors that the OS thought were dead. Sometimes better results with Realtek's drivers than open source drivers, but they frob the hardware with crypticly named defines, and I've seen them send pause frames (which nobody wants) with no way to disable. On one machine, using Realtek's drivers results in immediate kernel panics, so it's not universally great. The interrupt design is poor anyway --- MSI-X dates from 2002, they could have used a separate irq for rx, tx, and misc, rather than a single interrupt and a status register. But that might be ok if the status register worked properly. It's too easy to have timing issues when poking the status register and then you don't get interrupts you should. I haven't touched their 2.5g hardware, hopefully they fixed some stuff.
(16G ram, dual nic, 512G ssd) for $190 right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Processor-Beelink-Computer-Support-Di...
If you lower the ram/ssd you can find them for $120 or so, some also have the dual 2.5G adapters, and as the link up thread shows its possible for ~200 to even get them with 4+ 2.5G links.
Granted a lot of these are "deals" rather than MSRP, but right now the "deals" seem to be the normal state of affairs, although it was mentioned that they have been slightly cheaper in the past couple weeks.
There's a fair number at: https://www.servethehome.com/category/networking/
That is pretty respectable. But, this is a $165 board, so it seems kind of niche compared to a small PC motherboard at around half the price, unless I'm way out of date.
Hardkernel produces several very interesting boxes for H2 (I suppose also for the H3); I think there were 5 or 6 at the time, for different use cases. There was a very small one that fitted two 2.5" SSDs. They're all ugly, low quality, and tedious to assemble, but they're very small and relatively cheap.
Nothing to complain - one builds them (hopefully) once in years.
I hope though, that they corrected the flaws; the design of the case supporting two 2.5" disks was severely flawed, since there was no space for the connectors, and one had to let them partially hang outside the box. It was also surprisingly awkard to build.
You could probably save a bit of money, but I would guess not more than $40 or so, by buying a motherboard and socketed processor separately, a more conventional PC setup. But these usually aren't readily amenable to completely passive cooling which is an important criteria for me (and off the shelf passive coolers for even modest TDPs are expensive on their own), and it's also hard (maybe impossible?) to find the dual network interfaces in a setup that would come in below $165.
In my case I ended up going with a NUC and external RAID controller/drive enclosure but it was an appreciably more costly setup-admittedly for a much higher end processor, but I think I ended up at around $500 before buying drives for the external enclosure which of course ended up as the largest cost.
The application is a video surveillance NVR, I wanted x86 as the commercial software is Windows-based and not built for ARM. 2.5GbE network interfaces were not important (the bottleneck would be the archival spinning drives well before that), but dual network interfaces were as the existing setup was based on a dedicated surveillance switch running off the second interface of the NVR and I like that this is a simple setup with fewer configuration points than a VLAN hosted on the core switch (there's a reason most commercial appliance NVRs are set up this same way).
Edit: A sibling comment suggests looking at bee-link. It's definitely slower than my gaming PC, but it is getting close with integrated graphics, and is in a comparable price bracket to a hypothetical O-Droid-H3 with a PCIe slot:
Bee-link GTR6 6900HX: $539. incl. board + cpu + integrated GPU + case
O-Droid-H3: $465 ($165 + $300 Radeon RX 6600xt). incl. board + cpu + incompatible PCIe video card
https://www.bee-link.com/catalog/product/index?id=383
It'd be within a factor of two of the old upgraded desktop and the H3 + discrete GPU, but in a much slicker package:
https://howmanyfps.com/en-de/graphics-cards/comparisons/amd-...
https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...
Besides the ODROID-Hn series, what other single-board computers have dual ethernet? Very few, AFAICT. For router use-case, the alternatives suggested (buy an older NUC, for instance) don't work.
1: https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=287Double the ram, faster CPU, and double the price.
1: https://liliputing.com/nanopi-r6s-is-a-single-board-pc-with-rk3588s-8gb-ram-and-three-ethernet-ports-for-119/
2: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/28/nanopi-r6s-rockchip-rk3588s-router-mini-pc-dual-2-5gbe-gbe-hdmi-2-1/ 1: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003744743799.htmlWould you consider USB Ethernet adapters for the second port? Those cost about $15 (1 gigabit)
Too often these products have a limited lifetime (and are too hard to use) due to lack of the above.