The best SBC out there? Graphics?
 

I hope this thread keeps getting updated by people who read more than I do.

When I bought my RazPi 4, it was probably the best SBC out there at reasonable money. It had 4 A-72 arm 64bit cores, and offered 2x4k displays @60Hz. That was a trap, because their "approved" OS performed well in graphics, but every other distro sucked and is flat out playing 1 hdmi monitor, never mind 2 4k monitors. I gather the closed source driver is not being released. (Thank you, Broadcom - not!).

Now, it seems the Orange Pi 5 might be best, but I have no idea about graphics Further, the A-72 is not a hyperthreaded core, so it's 1 core, 1 thread. The Orange Pi again has high graphics spec. I haven't heard of a driver for whatever Mali GPU it has.

Am I alone in wanting community GPU drivers? I'll take Nvidia's way. But a graphics driver will be a big component of my next sbc.

I saw a review of the Rock 5 B but have no recent hands-on experience with anything myself. It's been difficult lately to find much of anything in stock, especially anything newish.

What use-cases are you considering the board for? Normally I would expect the presence of graphic chips to be a liablity and would use other means like the serial connections.

the word best is meaningless. There is no best sbc. You need to specify what are you looking for and what would be the ideal solution for that particular issue. But in general there is no best (Oh, I almost forget, the best sbc is mine).

The RPi4 is a decent ARM SBC, but I've returned to using regular computers in the form of thin clients, low power consumption, which was one reason for using an SBC in the first place, (& their size), but I won't be bothering with SBCs again, these thin clients work amazingly well as low powered desktop computers. :)

Most, if not all, will be able to display 2 monitors at high resolutions.

Check out this website, if interested - https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Linux/

Where-as I will continue to use them and buy them, because my use case is different. I hook mine up to 'do things' with hardware. GPIO is important. Most all run headless and access via SSH or a serial cable. More power than I'll need for some time in these little boards :) .

So to paraphrase a previous post, if you have a particular application in mind, then find the 'best' SBC for 'that' purpose or find another solution altogether. There is no 'best' for all applications. No such thing!

Even desktops, there is no 'best'. There is always a compromise. I don't care about 'power' usage (to a point), so I buy best I can afford (I can't afford to buy the 'best best' -- so I compromise)... My desktop is a 5900X with a decent middle of the road Graphics Card. Runs almost 24x7. Someone else may think power usage is a big deal, and looking for 'best' watts per performance for his/her application where 'somewhat good' performance is acceptable for X watts of power....

'Best' was certainly a silly word to use. Apologies.

I'm using my SBC as a networked media box. So the requirements in my case are:

• Small physically.
• Fanless if at all possible (My RazPi has a fanless Flirc case).
• Graphics enough to drive a hdmi-1.0 monitor without sweating even on awkward videos.
• Zoom use (Arm runs zoom-86_64 for linux under box64, a wine-like thing).
• I/O:Keyboard & mouse webcam. SSD or NVME pls. I have contempt for sdcards.
• Low power consumption.
• Must network.

Target price is under €300 all in. My current RazPi 4 w/4G is overclocked to 2Ghz. The cpu is flat out playing a 1080 video, swapping out on the earliest (therefore smallest) zoom my meetings allow me to run, and posting onscreen bellyaches about how the cpu can't cope. Kernel is 6.1.3.

My information is that you can overclock the RazPi 4 to ~2.2 Ghz, but it gets iffy and speculative after that, and how high you get depends on the individual board. I'm not usually an overclocker.

So my next buy if the Pi died tomorrow would be an Orange Pi 5, if I could be assured of available drivers without having to swallow some sucky systemd based OS.