With all the problems around here, my suggestion is dont buy one. You are rolling the dice on getting a dud.
Doubts about Rock 5b - before buy questions
16g has slower ram than the 8gb. another way for Radxa to screw you.
Ooh I did not know this. But even so this compared to my raspberry pi 4 8 GB + m.2 NGFF(SATA) (Through USB 3.0) has for me personally been a much better investment. I noticed the speed immediately.
Anyways good luck searching for another SBC as all of us should have a SBC at home even if it is for the sake of blocking advertisement let alone preventing our children ending up on p*rn websites by DNS blocking.
OMG, the amount of BS spread here gets worse every day.
All three RAM variants perform exactly identical since the exact memory timings live in a boot BLOB that does CPU and DRAM initialization and uses same timings for all Rock 5B out there regardless which LPDDR chips are soldered to which.
The memory controller clocks the DRAM at either 528, 1068, 1560 or 2112 MHz regardless of what the modules are capable of as such 4GB, 8GB and 16GB perform exactly identical wrt to memory as long as same settings are used.
This is an 8GB Rock 5B: http://ix.io/4bMe
This is a 16GB Rock 5B: http://ix.io/4qab
Memory performance identical since both run with performance DMC governor and the RAM is clocked at 2112 MHz all the time (see tinymembench and ramlat numbers).
If memory performance differs that’s because there’s something called DMC (Rockchip’s Dynamic Memory Interface) and with different settings different boards appear as performing different. You might want to search for ‘dmc’ here in my review.
Ah, ok, you’re just trolling intentionally.
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Do NOT patronize me, jerk. You can take a leap into the lake.
I have seen this speed concern reported more than once. I have seen board images, its quite clear if you look. Its real, perhaps not the ones you have seen but i have seen it.
2nd the company IS trash. I was screwed, many others were too. if you had 1/2 a brain you would see the troubles people have have with their trash board, and that Radxa does not give a flying F about it. If they were not 1/2 way across the planet id have flown out to shove this trash down their throats. yes, its only a 150 bucks ( for me, who knows the total amount ) but its the principle of it. I am sick of companies like this, and people like you defending them.
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The guy from the lake is back !
Havent u gone away already? Last I checked you had a floating board sailing on some lake…
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i think you have me confused with someone else.
For anyone else reading this: this guy has absolutely no clue what he’s babbling about 
In this Android e-waste world we’re in memory timings are almost always defined in a boot BLOB and are the same for every RAM module of same type the board maker solders to whatever board. They only change when the BLOB will be exchanged and a new u-boot version gets flashed to devices/storage.
See this for example: https://github.com/armbian/rkbin/commit/2127fafee98adf3b55b367a8208ba5e368e661da (LPDDR4 still at 2112 MHz but LPDDR5 able to be clocked at up to 2736 MHz so once Radxa will do Rock 5B variants with 8GB LPDDR5 they are slightly faster than a 16GB LPDDR4 variant for sure).
As such it doesn’t matter if Radxa might have sourced faster specced LPDDR4 chips for the 8GB variant than for the 16GB variant since they all operate ‘below spec’ clocked at 2112 MHz max to provide some safety headroom.
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Too bad it requires 15 characters.
All i have to say to you is 5 : F-off
EDIT: And im over this forum and arrogant assholes like you. My advice stands to the others: the product is a piece of shit, the company is a piece of shit, and buy at your own risk.
Dont agree with my advice, which comes from first hand experience of their piss poor product and zero response? Fuck off and die, literally…
Yeah … the kiddo from the lake is def back… if u hate this so much why do u persist? Theres other options outside radxa … wont make u smarter… u will stay the same cunt but at least with a smile on your face.
In case you havent understood this yet… you are not the majority who cant run Rock 5B. Plenty of us can are happy and keep in development… so… ask yourself why are you so helpless? Why do u keep on trashing what u dont understand instead of colaborating and learning?
F- u as well.
I do happen to know what i am doing. I got sent a screwed up board, it is simple as that. Most responsible companies would step up and take the crap back, but no, not these people. Its called basic customer service and supporting your customers, i’m sure even someone as stupid as you have heard of that ( and i wont even get into the PD issues they dont seem to want to deal with. Again, crap company, crap support. My advice to all is avoid these jokers )
Time to block notices from this PoS forum and all you ignorant fanboys.
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Simply leave the forum rather than spewing baseless claims. Insulting people and Radxa doesn’t help either. Stating that you’ve heard other people says something or you saw something doesn’t help, especially when you have not presented anything to back up those claims. You are just looking like a fool, and cluttering the forum with your nonsense.
Of course in theory its not the raw cost of the dev board that is the deciding factor. They are just that, dev boards so you can work on making a product. Not reall meant to be ‘the’ product on their own. You design your own board and buy the components you need after you do your dev work.
These do have GPIO and those x86 boxes dont, and lower power requirements being ARM. Plus the chip does have a decent NPU, while x86 does not . So while i agree with you from a raw cost for a ‘end user’ view, that really isn’t the intended market.
Lets see i have made one thread, commented on perhaps 2 others speaking from my personal experience with this crap product and company ( which is highly appropriate in this thread asking about if they should buy it. ) and that is cluttering? Freaking moron. people like you is why i’m now responding the way i am now. You deserve zero respect. So you get zero from me.
I do not need to back up any claim to you, you are insignificant. And as long as i am pissing people off for being honest perhaps i should stay. I can continue to try to steer some people away from the product, spend their money with a better company.
I have seen those, and they are not ‘new’ ( tho one of the most affordable for experimenters ), but not sure that is a true replacement for having native GPIO in a product.
Maybe if you wouldn’t call everyone around “morons” people would take you more seriously, how is that for an idea?
Only the ones that deserve it.
@anon18393145 It may serve you better if you try to leave emotion out of your sentiments while communicating with others who don’t agree with you. That said, I can understand where you are coming from. I received a good board(no issues for me) from Radxa. 16g variant, I did the preorder so I received mine beginning of December. The software support at this stage is not good that is just the truth. Coming from Raspberry Pi with vast and robust community that makes everything easy or Khadas with their fabulous oowow bootloader, dealing with Radxa has been a learning experience for me. I have no idea why my board has been working flawlessly with a 5v 3a rpi4 power supply regardless of the peripherals I have connected. 1tb nvme ssd etc. Also , some of the folks on this thread are clearly very knowledgeable. Yes I’ve gone back and forth a little with these bubble heads so I can understand your frustration. Find the value(if any) in what these folks say and disregard the arrogance. Good day.
Grab a powermeter and you know why. Since the power requirements are moderate.
Reality isn’t affected by people pulling random BS like ‘At a minimum you need to draw 4A @ 5v probably just to get it up’ out of their arse. But this ‘community’ here is affected if such BS does not get corrected since community members get the false impression they need a much more beefy power supply and then end up probably with one (of the many!) USB PD power bricks that result in troubles since USB PD negotiation fails. At this very moment any ‘dumb’ power source (12V preferred since anything at 5V makes no sense once exceeding 3A/15W since Ohm’s law still is valid) is trouble free by definition unlike USB PD.
Same with other BS like ‘16GB boards suffer from slower memory access than 8GB variant’. This will end up in community members making buying decisions based on desinformation. And it really doesn’t matter for which reason someone spreads BS, it’s only about calling it BS to stop desinformation.
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You can see in other threads i have commented on that I do, until they start tossing crap at me, like happened here … “you are just trolling” for example. “you dont know what you are talking about” “you are so and so”… At that point, screw them, they get what they dish.
I do fully agree about the software, and did not expect mature software when i first got this board, as mine was perhaps the first batch that went out ( or at least 2nd )… Its a fairly new chip ( at least when the bard was designed, today its not ) but i do expect at least basic functionality, like being able to boot… and Radxa dropping the ball on PD, which is pretty much industry standard, and seemingly not caring, was really unacceptable. ( and i did go the extra mile trying everything suggested, including flashing and trying every image for months until i was blue in the face, and even getting their ‘approved’ powersuppy, from them… before i thru the towel in )
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