Announcing the ROCK 5C: Power, Performance, and Versatility for Just $30

How much power will be needed? 3A? 5A?
Is that FPC connector so much cheaper than m.2?

That would really be fantastic.
Good OS images and up-to-date software are all that’s needed for your boards to be almost perfect :slight_smile:

Edit: Oh, and also placing an M.2. key M 2230 slot in place of the ribbon connector for PCI-E.
That wold be perfect.

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I would love to move everything to Launchpad and follow the official Ubuntu build system like the Raspberry Pi 4/5. However, Canonical provides little documentation, which makes research and development very slow. One major problem is that Ubuntu is becoming bloated with software and snaps. Both of these combined can make the desktop Operating System image over 2GB in size, running into GitHub’s artifact limit.

I do not have much time right now to spend on research, but If I make any progress using the official Ubuntu build system I’ll document the entire process and ensure it’s public, it will be a good development resource.

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can’t wait to upgrade my 5A. What is the difference between RK3588S from 5A and RK3588S2 from 5C?
The soldered Wifi is also very nice!

Reposting the S vs S2 comparisons here. No performance upgrade.


ROCK 5C requires 3A if not using NVMe HAT. The FPC connector and M.2 connector costs almost the same, but the Pi PCIe HAT ecosystem is good, that’s why we want to use it.

@dominik I believe you will want 5B+ instead of 5C. 5C / 5C Lite is mostly for project users. For home/desktop usage, we have 5B+ and 5 ITX. If you think those cost are high, we will consider introduce 5D, 5C in 5B form factor with similar price range as 5C.

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Oh my God. You’re just spitting that hardware left and right. Haha.
I love those ideas though.

By the way - will there be board refreshes with memory upgrades to LPDDR5 at some point?
Or is maybe LPDDR5 not worth the additional cost and availability problems?

How will the case or adapter be for rock pi 5c?

Currently 5B+ and 5 ITX upgrades LPDDR5, the benefit of LPDDR5 is faster freq and larger capacity, 32GB supply is not an issue. LPDDR4x 32GB supply is not plenty.

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For the case, we are designing something like this:

The ports side can be changed to support other models.

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What do you call the “5B+”? Is it just the 32GB version of 5B?

5B+ is the upgrade version of 5B, improved some feedbacks from the community:

  1. LPDDR4x -> LPDDR5
  2. WiFI 6 on board
  3. M.2 E Key -> M.2 B Key for 4G modules
  4. 2x M.2 M Key for the dual SSD or one SSD and one other M.2 device
  5. HDMI input changes to type A port, the bigger one
  6. Dual type C, one for power input and one for full function USB C
  7. More competitive price…
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Sounds purfct, Can You share some dates when we can expect announcement and how pcie lanes would be split (2x2 for m-keys + 1x1 for e-key?)?

Will the first port be electrically connected as 4x and either through overlay or some other detection be able to switch to 2x 2x?

That looks good !!

Sorry for the off-top, but “is” or “will be”? I don’t see it anywhere.

I am curious if the decoders are dual core, since it is 8k i think it must be dual core, but u never know, rockchip is like a box of chocolate

@hipboi any news about rk3528 based rock 3 or something? I am more interested low ower, low cpu , high media capable things…

Better than the current Rock 5B ?

This is quite off-topic, for RK3528, we have two SBCs:

  • ROCK 2A, which is Pi form factor, with Pi PCIe connector and USB 3 mux, starting at 15$ with 1GB ram and WiFi 6/BT5
  • Radxa E20C, dual GbE router with RK3528, openWRT is running
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yes, 5B+ is better than the current 5B. I think our advertising words would be “the best SBC just got better”.

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