Cool beans. Looking for a media/gaming TV project

Nice.

The 32 bit OS limit might not be that bad for a lot of users as well, having 4GB of disk cache can speed a lot of tasks up.

Does amuse me given how long we were told no-one needs a Pi with more than 1GB, and now this :D

DanceswithUnix
Nice.

The 32 bit OS limit might not be that bad for a lot of users as well, having 4GB of disk cache can speed a lot of tasks up.

Does amuse me given how long we were told no-one needs a Pi with more than 1GB, and now this :D

£75 is definitely starting to push into the territory of some of the Atom based mini-ITX motherboards:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-J3455B-ITX-2DDR3-M-ITX-Mainboard/dp/B01M7OUO62/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=atom+itx&qid=1590674642&sr=8-3

CAT-THE-FIFTH
£75 is definitely starting to push into the territory of some of the Atom based mini-ITX motherboards:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-J3455B-ITX-2DDR3-M-ITX-Mainboard/dp/B01M7OUO62/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=atom+itx&qid=1590674642&sr=8-3

Indeed it is but the gpio etc. make up for it….

I bet each is about the same speed as well knowing how poor atoms are in real life

3dcandy
Indeed it is but the gpio etc. make up for it….

I bet each is about the same speed as well knowing how poor atoms are in real life

The newer atoms are 60-70% the speed of a core at the same clock, much better than before. The J3450 listed is a pretty quick CPU for media - also includes a pretty recent media stack including high bit depth H265 and Atmos/DTS-X bitstreaming.

gagaga
The newer atoms are 60-70% the speed of a core at the same clock, much better than before. The J3450 listed is a pretty quick CPU for media - also includes a pretty recent media stack including high bit depth H265 and Atmos/DTS-X bitstreaming.

I was being ironic…

They're not really aimed at the same market though are they. I mean even I wouldn't buy a Pi as a media centre really - a cheap android tv box would do the job, though I might buy an Atom board to run a nas

3dcandy

gagaga
The newer atoms are 60-70% the speed of a core at the same clock, much better than before. The J3450 listed is a pretty quick CPU for media - also includes a pretty recent media stack including high bit depth H265 and Atmos/DTS-X bitstreaming.

I was being ironic…

They're not really aimed at the same market though are they. I mean even I wouldn't buy a Pi as a media centre really - a cheap android tv box would do the job, though I might buy an Atom board to run a nas

Depends. I have no trust in the android boxes being on my network, and no desire for the illegal side of it. I also need proper 23/24p and HD audio bitstream audio that seems to be a bit hit and miss.

All my media players are atom NUCs running LibreElec currently - have a Pi4 to try it out but by the time you've added a decent case and IR capabilities i'm spending a few hours of time to save £20-30 so not worth it for me.

gagaga
Depends. I have no trust in the android boxes being on my network, and no desire for the illegal side of it. I also need proper 23/24p and HD audio bitstream audio that seems to be a bit hit and miss.

All my media players are atom NUCs running LibreElec currently - have a Pi4 to try it out but by the time you've added a decent case and IR capabilities i'm spending a few hours of time to save £20-30 so not worth it for me.

No issues here with a really cheap (under £30) android box though most of what we throw at it is 1080p30 or 1080p60 as our projector is only 1080p. HD audio is a bit worse out to the Onkyo amp but that's moot as iplayer is only still stuck on 2 channel audio

CAT-THE-FIFTH
£75 is definitely starting to push into the territory of some of the Atom based mini-ITX motherboards:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-J3455B-ITX-2DDR3-M-ITX-Mainboard/dp/B01M7OUO62/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=atom+itx&qid=1590674642&sr=8-3

In the opposite direction, I really wish something like the Pi was available in an ITX form factor, complete with a PCIe slot given most of these chips do have PCIe connectivity even if electrically it was only x2 or x4.

Atom chips leave me quite cold. Not as useful/convenient for media as a cheap Chromecast, not powerful enough for a home NAS once you start putting some virtual machines on there (I'm looking to upgrade to something like a Ryzen 3100 as Jira is a bit laggy on my current Excavator based quad core).

I don't get why the A320 ITX boards are so expensive. You can get uATX A320 boards for about £45, at that sort of price you can put an Athlon 3000G on there and get a very usable 4 thread machine for not much more than the Atom, so that's the direction we went at work for cheap PCs.

But none of these PC boards are things that I would bolt onto the side of my 3D printer to network control it, I use a Pi for that.

In my last job I was only allowed to run Windows on my company laptop, so for a while I was using a Pi 3 as my main desktop machine. I was hitting the 1GB ram limit, one of these would actually have worked rather well.

Edit: I'm aware of the LattePanda board, but they are stupidly expensive. Same Atom CPU & memory spec I think as my daughter's Asus Transformer Windows tablet that hardly gets used as it is too slow. https://www.amazon.co.uk/LattePanda-2G-32GB-Development-product/dp/B01GJF72DC/

Seems more of a quick money grab - £40 to get an extra 4GB of RAM. It seems with every iteration,they are just pushing the price higher and higher. At this rate,you could probably add a bit extra and get a reasonable ARM powered smartphone,with faster cores such as the A73 derived Kyro 260. Then you have Chromecasts,etc.

The RPi made sense when it was a cheap thing under £40….but once it starts moving closer to £100,I don't see the point especially with an SOC which isn't even that new,and very low clocked too.

The new generation Atoms are a very different core from the old Asus Transformer tablets. They moved to a core with out of order execution(latest is a 3 wide core),with clockspeeds closer to 3GHZ,etc and they actually implemented integrated graphics which had proper media decoding.

I don't see the point of a £75 RPi,when I would rather use one of those Atom motherboards or even something else.It does not even have a SATA connector either,unless you use an adaptor. For around £10 to £15 more,you can Atom based motherboards which are passively cooled,have dual GbE,4 SATA,etc. H110 mini-ITX motherboards are under £70 and there are plenty of secondhand CPUs you can use.

Also AM4 mini-ITX motherboards are getting even worse in price.

The latest B550I Strix from Asus is around £220,which is a £70 increase over the B450I Strix. A520 mini-ITX motherboards are probably going to be £100+ once B450 supplies run out.

CAT-THE-FIFTH
The RPi made sense when it was a cheap thing under £40….

£33.90 gets you a Pi 4 with 2GB of ram at Pimoroni, vs a bargain £23.40 for the Pi 3 with 1GB of ram which now mainly makes sense if you want lower power consumption and don't need the performance. The A73 is more energy efficient, but for performance you want an A72. Really, these are an awesome board.

The Atom in that transformer and the LattePanda is the Z8350 which is out of order. I think there have been a few generations of Asus Transformer now, and ours isn't *that* old.

The £20 more for 4GB more RAM (compared to the 4 GB model) is the same price scan charges for a 4GB SODIMM. This is a substantially cheaper option than an atom based MITX system - toss in an £8 PSU, £5 case and a £10 SD card and the pi is good to go; whereas the atom system needs a MITX case, full ATX PSU, RAM, and something to boot off.

For a home user wanting more grunt than a pi4, I'd recommend a second hand prebuilt system - ~£50 for a pentium, or ~£100 gets you an old-ish i5 on ebay. That'll run rings around any atom (out of order or not), and putting in a 1030 or RX 550 to handle media decoding would probably come in around the same price as the full MITX atom based system

Xlucine
The £20 more for 4GB more RAM (compared to the 4 GB model) is the same price scan charges for a 4GB SODIMM. This is a substantially cheaper option than an atom based MITX system - toss in an £8 PSU, £5 case and a £10 SD card and the pi is good to go; whereas the atom system needs a MITX case, full ATX PSU, RAM, and something to boot off.

For a home user wanting more grunt than a pi4, I'd recommend a second hand prebuilt system - ~£50 for a pentium, or ~£100 gets you an old-ish i5 on ebay. That'll run rings around any atom (out of order or not), and putting in a 1030 or RX 550 to handle media decoding would probably come in around the same price as the full MITX atom based system

But at the cost of far higher power useage….

DanceswithUnix
In the opposite direction, I really wish something like the Pi was available in an ITX form factor, complete with a PCIe slot given most of these chips do have PCIe connectivity even if electrically it was only x2 or x4.

I am using a RockPro64 board

https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

It has a PCIe x4 slot, which I am using to mount an M.2 SSD, which works very nicely.

I have read on the forums that you can't use the PCIe slot for a graphics card because there is a limit on how much RAM on the PCIe card that can be accessed from the host.

chrestomanci
I have read on the forums that you can't use the PCIe slot for a graphics card because there is a limit on how much RAM on the PCIe card that can be accessed from the host.

Yeah I just Googled that. Very odd that it doesn't allow enough space to map the card, that should be a fairly arbitrary software limit, but if the Rockchip is a closed source boot loader then it might be hard to work around that.