Interested in SBC for Potential PC, What to Look At?

Hardware
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Specifically making this because I just saw the LTT video for the NexDock 2.

I think Samsung Dex is cool. I don’t want to ever use android again, but I think its cool. I also think any thing that is pluggable into that thing and then beomes extended by it… Honestly I see a billion uses for it. But the mention of a ras pi being hooked up to it made me curious about what machines would be good to use for a PC.

I will be the first to say I always over shoot my target. I have been using a pentium M laptop for a few weeks now and its made me realize I could really use anything, just save the other stuff for when I actually need it, get rid of it, or find a new use for it.

I am interested in an SBC as a PC for a few reasons:

  • Interested in non x86 platforms
  • Interested in learning new stuff
  • Want lower power consumption
  • Composite / HDMI / DP / VGA hookup
  • Performant GPU with open source drivers that won’t explode immediately

I need the PC to be capable of these few things:

  • Running Void Linux
  • Potentially run an android build on live hardware
  • Not taking half a day to compile an android build
  • Ok PS1 Emulation Performance
  • I heard Half Life 1 is on SBC’s now, if it could run that that’d be cool

I know theres a few users on here using SBC’s as PC’s. My main goal is to be able to set rigs up at one place to do compute work and basically take a terminal with me that has just enough oomph to do what I want it to do. @ThatGuyB and anyone else I hope you have advice XD

Bonus List:

  • Steam
  • VM’s
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It’s pretty hard to find something that ticks all the boxes due to one single reason: software support.

You could buy an Odroid or Pine64 board, but the software support is gonna be questionable at best. Rarely getting updates on the few supported distros. But you can find in both catalogues boards that match the CPU power of a Raspberry Pi and exceed it’s GPU power.

Or you could buy a Raspberry Pi that’s getting all the freaking distros available, constantly updated with new ones coming out every time usually with official support (like Void Linux that you were going for). But it’s lacking GPU power for sure. The Broadcom Videocore garbage doesen’t hold a candle to the MALI GPUs in other SBCs.

Also, to make usable desktop out of it SSD boot is almost mandatory. I’m even using one for my server Pi 4 and the difference is massive compared to booting off of a dicently fast micro SD card.
Regarding the Pi 4 overclocking is also crucial for it to run well enough as a desktop computer. So lower consumption compared to a PC, but you’re gonna pull around 12-15W pretty much all the time if you’re going at it.

Ain’t gonna happen chief, no matter the SBC you want to buy.

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Software wise, void. I’d just build it and not care. I’m working on a build server rn as is.

Build wise, rock pro? Anything faster than that? I jnow of a few performant ones, not many though.

I have an exp gdcvideo dock. Could I use that?

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Sure, if you want to mess with it my first point doesen’t really matter.

I think the Rock Pi 4 is the fastest. Also you don’t really need to know many of them because all the non Raspberry Pi boards that are worth looking at use either the RK3399 or the Amlogic S905x3.

Yes, but just like Jeff Geerling showed PCIe devices on ARM are very much a pain in the ass to make work, especially GPUs. But you’re a tinkerer at heart so you can succeed to make work cards through that interface.

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Odroid N2+ ; also get emmc - it can be nice and fast; Wayland works with bifrost and can get you 4k@60 8bit 4:4:4 over HDMI for desktop, also does h.264 and h.265 in hardware.

Unlike rpi4, AES is hardware accelerated.

Downsides: only 4G ram, no built-in wifi, no PCIe for random expansions.

You may be able to get something similar from khadas with an ML accelerator built-in.

There might be something faster coming up based on new rockchip stuff; ROCK5 Model B ; nobody has them yet, software support is likely a crapshoot still.

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Out of curiosity…… any powerpc ones?

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No powerpc.

Most SBC socs are intended for set top boxes, TVs, bluray players, car entertainment systems, maybe digital signage ads and that kind of stuff.

They’re usually “hand me down” designs from phone socs that are slightly adapted to use whatever manufacturing process phones used to use a few years back - but are now no longer power efficient enough for phones, or are too big to be competitive.

When you see bigger companies make SBCs with custom chips, it’s probably just leftovers from some kind of engineering exercise or part of some elaborate marketing campaign trying to tease engineers into using some of their products.

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As MetalizeYourBrain said, it comes down to software support. Thankfully Void is pretty easy to compile so long as you have a Linux distro that works on the SBC you want to run it on. But driver support, especially for the GPU has to be pretty good. It usually is for most stuff.

There are some advantages to going with RockPro64 or Odroid N2+, but to be honest, the software support for the RPi is just too good, especially from Void and Alpine.

The worst part for me is that no other SBC that I know of comes with 8 GB of RAM other than the RPi 4. 4 GB is very limiting for me, Firefox eats it all, then if I open thunderbird, it will start swapping like crazy, which I hate (or slow down things hard if I disable swap).

If you don’t get an SBC that has eMMC, an SSD is mandatory for a decent desktop experience. And if the SBC doesn’t have SATA, you need to find a USB caddy that has support for TRIM and SMART, otherwise you might trash your SSD.

>games
I couldn’t make prboom-plus, nor gzdoom to work on the Pi. prboom-plus is available in the void repo, but obviously it’s not patched for ARM, it doesn’t detect the RPi gpu drivers:

prboom-plus
M_LoadDefaults: Load system defaults.
 default file: /home/oddmin/.prboom-plus/prboom-plus.cfg
 found /usr/share/games/doom/prboom-plus.wad

PrBoom-Plus v2.5.1.4 (http://prboom-plus.sourceforge.net/)
I_SetAffinityMask: manual affinity mask is 1
Could not initialize SDL [No available video device]

I compiled gzdoom, but it doesn’t work either. I haven’t tried chocolate-doom though.

RPi4.

If you don’t want to compile Android, then definitely RPi4.

The RPi 4 has decent PS1 performance, but it’s not the best of the SBCs. You can run all but the most demanding titles at native res 60 fps IIRC.

Steam doesn’t have an ARM build. In fact, I believe Steam is still 32 bit, I don’t think it has been patched since Canonical removed 32 bit (multilib) support from x64 repo and OS builds back in 2019. But I could be wrong about that.

You don’t need VMs when LXD exists. It is even available in the void repo. And it can run void containers.

2022-01-21_02-01-1642725362
2022-01-21_02-01-16427253621920×1080 170 KB

Number 1 is a container running void-musl-aarch64, number 2 is another container running void-glibc-aarch64, number 3 is my Pi itself (host) listing the lxd containers and doing a neofetch.

You can obviously run VMs on the RPi, but they have to be ARM VMs. LXD also has support for that if you use the --vm argument. I personally wouldn’t try to run QEMU to emulate x86 on an ARM SBC though, but I believe it is possible.

If you want an SBC form factor, but still want x86, check out the DFI GHF51. It’s basicaly a Ryzen first gen APU SBC that draws about as much as the RPi from the wall. But it’s x86. Driver support should be fine. This one should give you access to Steam and other stuff.

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Yes, it is faster indeed. But I suggested the RockPi 4 because they asked if they could use a PCIe breakout board to a PCIe slot. That’s not available on the Odroid N2+.

But sure, if it’s pure performance the N2+ is one of the better SBC for both CPU and GPU computing.

I was about to suggest the Nvidia Jetson, but that’s a monster GPU with a pretty weak CPU on top, not worth for desktop use.

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You are not going to get around this in this lifetime on an affordable SBC.

With that said, I am a big fan of the Odroid-N2. they are passively cooled and are the fastest processing SBC that you can currently get. The peripheral IO is not the best (no onboard BT or WiFi) but you have a USB 3 Hub that goes to 4 ports.

IF you are willing to wait, Khadas has a VIM3 successor in the works.

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The VIM3 is the same Amlogic chop with faster clocks and toggle between USB3 or PCIe. The new VIM4 is supposed allow you to use both at the same time and may break the 4GiB RAM gap.

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I even forgot Khadas made SBCs. They’re so rare to see in the wild.
I guess it is the fastest indeed and allows for some flexibility. But I’m not convinced they’re for everyone and they’re expensive. The VIM3 Pro costs 139$, more than double of any other board and just as much as full Pi 4 8GB kit.

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Yeah, they are pretty expensive. I personally do not have one but I have used a VIM3L. I may bite the bullet on the VIM4. I would like to get into machine learning/processing/visualization and would really like to mess around with the NPU. There is a board coming from Radxa that may have an NPU, but RockChip makes me worry about how long before things get pseudo mainlined. At least the AmLogic stuff gets pretty quick mainline support and their out of tree kernels are usually only a few generation behind the LTS kernel.

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Wouldn’t a Nvidia Jetson work better for these applications? Beside messing with the NPU obviously. That seems to be a niche application.

Yeah, it takes them ages and rarely get decent long term support. They’re still struggling with kernel 5 support while the Pi is on the latest LTS Debian kernel.

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BLUF: I am a long-term BSD and GNU/Linux users and have personal and ideological issues with nVidia.

Maybe, but my issues with nVidia prevent me from purchasing their equipment. Besides that, their custom version of Ubuntu official support their hardware is lacking at best and then circles back around to my initial issues with nVidia.

It seems that they just will not make it easy for people to give them money without strings attached. They are essentially where M$ was in the mid aughts.

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If I had to get political for all the things big companies sell me I’d be living in the jungle, plain and simple.
I respect the morals, for sure. But it’s not for me putting up with these things too.

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That is fair, but it all boils down to, If you are going to sell me a dev kit or SDK, then let me do what I need to do and get out of my way. If you are going to gate keep and artificially restrict my ability to get stuff done, then I will vote with my wallet; which is what I have done and will continue doing.

If the nVidia boards work for you, then I would suggest them. Use the Best/Right tool for the job.

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