I own an H2, and I strongly suggest them as middle ground between a PC and an (SBC) ARM. One of the main advantages is support, both in terms of applications (some programs may not yet compile on ARM), and kernel (although (some) ARM SBC can run with a stock kernel, it's advices to run a specific kernel to run optimally). The H2 also run impressively cool, and I suppose the H3 does, as well.
Note though, that RPis have never been the most price effective ARM solution, as Hardkernel has always had more powerful and/or cheaper alternatives. Their current N2+ is probably both more powerful and cheaper than the equivalent RPi.
I was an early adopter of Hardkernel's Odroids, for better (size, performance:cost) and for worse (longevity).
This looks like a winner in every way.
x86_64 for longevity and support, tested with Ubuntu $latest LTS
decent CPU, better than Raspberry Pi
RAM up to 64GB, two SO-DIMM slots, up to 32GB per slot
M.2 NVMe storage
2 x 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports
2 x SATA 3.0 ports
Intel UHD Graphics, HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 video outputs
> Supports i2c, UART, USB, and hopefully manual pin control too.
From the set of pins provided I wouldn't get any hopes up for manual pin control. All pins are single-function, USB pins are almost never switchable (because they're high-speed analog-ish PHY functions), and UART & I2C are not GPIO-capable functions on most x86 platforms.
Almost 8 years ago I bought their older model, Intense PC, to use it as our living-room "multimedia" machine even since. It's running Linux (currently latest Mint), without any problems all these years, including zero driver problems (a rarity among other Linux systems I've used). And of course no noisy fans since it has none, its passive cooling is really good.
Nice unit, I tried to buy similar as a home router using the Odroid $47 4 x 2.5G daughter board. Sadly the chip shortage killed the H2 plus off.
However there's now a zillion celeron+6x2.5G units out there cheap, see https://www.servethehome.com/category/networking/ for variants with N6005, i7-1165G7, N5095, and similar with 4 or 6 2.5G ports.
If you want an ARM variant, this one has 1G + 2x2.5G:
As others have pointed out, the value prop of these boards is running thin. STH covers a bunch of similar products, and this is a tough sell at $165. You can find many similar jasper lake router boards with 4x 2.5 Gbe in a similar price range, but they'll come in a proper case with a power supply.
Topton isn't shipping though. Latest order we made was 2months ago and it was promptly marked as "shipped" but not actually shipped. Customer support just says "please wait dear" and nothing else.
Those products you mention will also never reveive any BIOS or firmware updates (including critical security). Speaking from experience with units from 18/19.
Hardkernel with their community engagement is a different story.
I do see the value prop here. Just wished this board supported being driven from 12V but I guess you cant get everything eh
>Those products you mention will also never reveive any BIOS or firmware updates (including critical security)
I sort of agree with this, but the bios story is pretty bad everywhere. The good thing about the generic topton type boards is that one can, in principle, run coreboot on them. The protectli ones are similar in spirit. I think there is/was some effort to crowdfund coreboot development for one of these.
Edit: Also, the word on the forums is that topton is just a reseller. CWWK is the odm/oem. You can try ordering from them on aliexpress.
Specifically, here's their review of a couple of N5105 based ones (which are probably the most sensible choice for most applications). [1][2] TLDR: KingNovy and Topton from AliExpress are pretty good and going barebones is a better deal.
I don't really understand why that means the Odroid-H3 is a "tough sell", though. It's quite a bit cheaper than both of the boards mentioned in that review, even after you add a case and power supply.
I've found several 4-port N5105 systems (which are barebones, so BYO DDR4 and NVMe at about $100 add'l for 2x8GB and 512GB) for around $145 [1] shipped on Aliexpress. I also found a Core i3-1115G4 based one for $195 shipped [2], which I've personally decided to order. The i3-1115G4 is nearly twice as fast as the N5105 [3] and this is the first I've seen something with it available for less than $300. The iGPU is excellent for the price point too [4].
So comparing the N5105 system linked vs the Odroid-H3+, you save about $40 AND get a case with enough thermal mass to passively cool it AND two more 2.5Gbe ports.
But the Odroid-H3+ has a significantly more powerful N6005 processor. A better comparison would be to the lower-end Odroid-H3, which has an N5105 and is only $129.
After all these years I still can't believe the Pi 4 has no low power mode and uses like 2 W when completely shut down. Like seriously how can you mess up so badly.
'Fewer components', yadda yadda, and on the other hand they manage to include a full headphone jack that's completely unusable due to induced noise... just sigh
I haven't seen a corrupted SD card on an SBC in, well since at least 2015. I guess it's possible under heavy read/write but I've not experienced it and I tinker with the stuff at least a couple times a year.
Really? My Pi managed to corrupt two 128gb cards in 2 years or so. It absolutely happens. I was running light web apps with less than 10 users, hence minimal writes, especially for cards this big
Yes. I buy my SD cards from B&H to try and minimize chances of getting counterfit product. I have never had a corrupted card that I can recall, and I just unplug them.
To reduce wear and tear you can set temporary storage to /dev/shm, point the application setting for cache there. TMPDIR is one environment variable for this kind of thing. The distros for SBCs should optimize for ramdisk.
As someone else mentioned it's 1-9W not 1.9W for the H3 and H3+.
I don't particularly trust the numbers, generally the N6005 runs hotter than the N5105, which makes sense since it's the same process and largely the same chip with more GPU EUs.
ServeTheHome mentions VERY similar boxes (same CPUs) "At idle, we saw between 10-12W depending on single versus double SODIMM configurations. Maximum power consumption hit just over 30W. Both at idle and at maximum, this is significantly higher than the J4125, but one also gets more performance, so there is a clear trade-off. At the top end, adding ~5W over the N5105 was unexpected based on similar TDPs."
On the N5105 (they reviewed at least two) "Power was not a winning point of this solution. At idle, we saw between 10-12W depending on single versus double SODIMM configurations. Maximum power consumption hit 24.5W even with the Topton configured (512GB/16GB) unit. There is clearly room to go up from there. This is a lot higher on both idle and maximum power consumption than the Celeron J4125 that we looked at previously."
I suspect that H3/H3+ numbers are on the DC side with an eMMC module, a single DDR4 SO-DIMM of the lowest capacity, with the most aggressive power management settings, and nothing else attached. 1.9w idle is plausible but not what people are going to see with a realistic running configuration measured from the AC end.
If this can replace the laptop I am running as plex server and with the current price of electricity of the UK, it could pay itself pack in less than five months...
Word of caution to anyone thinking of using this for pfsense: the realtek 2.5G drivers are not included in the pfsense image and have to be installed manually. A real pain if you don't have easy access to another freebsd machine.
In my experience Realtek network cards often leave a lot to be desired when used in a routing / firewalling / always on environment. I specifically make sure NICs are Intel based when configuring systems.
For the 2.5 Gbe NICs, apparently the Intel ones were also shit. They went through four revisions of I225-V to fix some issues. The latest intel one is I226-V which incorporates the previous fixes.
The Jasper chip should be able to be used with hypervisors as it has VT-x and VT-d. Wish they listed the chipset for the Ethernet however, as VMware 7.x/8.x only supports a limited number (unlike 6.x which allowed community drivers). You might be able to host a handful of small low IO/CPU VMs on this.
EDIT: Found the block diagram and these are Realtek RTL8125B. Not compatible with ESXi 7/8.. can use under 6.7 but I believe that's out of support now :/
I bought one of these to play with xcp-ng, but I didn’t do enough research or I’d have known that there’s problems with jasper lake, and they won’t have a working release till end of year.
Anybody still waiting on the intel 820 linux drivers?
The odroid-h3 looks like a nice kit, but lack of expandability and obsolete onboard components (wifi, video, sound, etc) were always better served with expansion options for all of the components and peripherals, especially for those raised with desktop computing.
The prices of some sbc's are reasonable, but the stink about soldered CPU's from a decade or so ago still holds true.
I remember getting a gigabyte mobo with the 479 cpu in the early 2000's and rocked that kit for a decade as an HTPC, router and general use PC. Just popped in a quad nic, video card or used the default onboard components for basic browsing/word processing.
Some PCIe slots for expansion takes the mitx (and smaller) designs much further. Case form factors have seen their own evolution, but internal PCIe to external PCIe enclosure would rock in 2022. Especially at some of the pricepoints.
Its just easier to install linux supported components/hardware for the best experience.
I was planning to use Raspberry Pi (which is badly low on stock these days) as my home router with various docker images running but when I figured not all docker images support Arm architecture, I went to look for x86 equivalent and this looked just like what I wanted having dual ethernet not having have to have USB ethernet added which is quite rare.
I had to use DisplayPort instead of HDMI to get the display working and had to use a third party dkms module for officially sold USB Wifi dongle for Ubuntu 22.04 but otherwise it seems to be running good without a gotcha at about 50c or so without a fan.
It costed about $300 including shipping but considering I can get rid of a cloud server that keeps costing me, it'll even out soon enough.
Geekbench gave about 700 single core score which isn't bad for a device that can sit on a palm and having installed Nvme SSD, the disk speed can be quite fast.
Yah, its cool, but as mentioned in the pi thread, there are a pile of these jasper lake nuc's available via large retailers for $100-200, some better some worse, but in most cases they come with ram, storage, case and powersupply for those prices.
Not just gigabit or 100 mbit Ethernet ports either but 2.5 gbps and Realtek at that (ironically people have been complaining more about Intel NICs than Realtek recently but that’s anecdotal still IMO). There’s also other factors like GPIO pins as well. This is a board better suited for relatively higher performance and power efficient embedded projects by far than what most OEMs will produce.
> ironically people have been complaining more about Intel NICs than Realtek recently but that’s anecdotal still IMO
I'm not sure if Realtek is getting better, I've heard a lot of issues with Intel 2.5G nics; people say some revs of the hardware are unusable at 2.5G (but do work fine at 1G). Personally, I've only got good things to say about Intel 1 and 10G nics I've worked with.
For me, Realtek 1G works ok until it doesn't, it's possible to overwelm the hardware with traffic and then you get bad behavior --- queues get stuck or seem to get stuck and the queue processing doesn't always fully reset when you tell it to --- this can lead to wild writes, following descriptors that the OS thought were dead. Sometimes better results with Realtek's drivers than open source drivers, but they frob the hardware with crypticly named defines, and I've seen them send pause frames (which nobody wants) with no way to disable. On one machine, using Realtek's drivers results in immediate kernel panics, so it's not universally great. The interrupt design is poor anyway --- MSI-X dates from 2002, they could have used a separate irq for rx, tx, and misc, rather than a single interrupt and a status register. But that might be ok if the status register worked properly. It's too easy to have timing issues when poking the status register and then you don't get interrupts you should. I haven't touched their 2.5g hardware, hopefully they fixed some stuff.
Anecdotally I just upgraded my Server with hand-me-downs from my Desktop including a main board with integrated Intel NIC.
I couldn't get the NIC to work on Ubuntu or Windows Server 2019.
I will see if I can dig up the part number but iircc Intel just stopped supporting quite a few product lines including a line of NICs for integration into main boards. So perhaps that's where all the reports are coming from?
I was surprised because I assumed the NIC would just work because it was Intel.
Generally not all of those. They do come with a case, active cooling, ~~far better graphics performance, and fewer software headaches due to being amd64 instead of aarch64 though~~ nevermind, forgot that this is jasper lake too.
Adding the H3+, power supply, fan and case to the cart reveals a total of ~180 USD, that's a pretty good price for what you get. I agree that the graphics might not be the best in class, but it's also not the worst. Overall I feel like it's a pretty neat price.
If you lower the ram/ssd you can find them for $120 or so, some also have the dual 2.5G adapters, and as the link up thread shows its possible for ~200 to even get them with 4+ 2.5G links.
Granted a lot of these are "deals" rather than MSRP, but right now the "deals" seem to be the normal state of affairs, although it was mentioned that they have been slightly cheaper in the past couple weeks.
That is pretty respectable. But, this is a $165 board, so it seems kind of niche compared to a small PC motherboard at around half the price, unless I'm way out of date.
I actually had an ODroid H2 that failed maybe 6 months ago (not by any fault of its own really, it was installed in a "difficult" environment and probably got much hotter than was reasonable). I went shopping around for a newer replacement and was surprised to find that the market of very small, e.g. nano-ITX embedded motherboards has basically dried up and at that point it was very difficult to find something that was even comparable with the H2 at the same price point. Much of what I was seeing were $150 boards with very old Celeron chips that underperformed the H2 (due to being older designs mostly, but still being manufactured). I think ARM adoption is large enough that there's not much of a market for x86 embedded boards that isn't heavy equipment that's very price insensitive, and even then the fact that most of the options are built around 9 year old processors suggests that this market might be mostly legacy products.
You could probably save a bit of money, but I would guess not more than $40 or so, by buying a motherboard and socketed processor separately, a more conventional PC setup. But these usually aren't readily amenable to completely passive cooling which is an important criteria for me (and off the shelf passive coolers for even modest TDPs are expensive on their own), and it's also hard (maybe impossible?) to find the dual network interfaces in a setup that would come in below $165.
In my case I ended up going with a NUC and external RAID controller/drive enclosure but it was an appreciably more costly setup-admittedly for a much higher end processor, but I think I ended up at around $500 before buying drives for the external enclosure which of course ended up as the largest cost.
The application is a video surveillance NVR, I wanted x86 as the commercial software is Windows-based and not built for ARM. 2.5GbE network interfaces were not important (the bottleneck would be the archival spinning drives well before that), but dual network interfaces were as the existing setup was based on a dedicated surveillance switch running off the second interface of the NVR and I like that this is a simple setup with fewer configuration points than a VLAN hosted on the core switch (there's a reason most commercial appliance NVRs are set up this same way).
In addition to the sibling comment, form factor is an advantage, for those looking for a small machine (Mini ITX != Nano ITX; the H* are actually even smaller than Nano-ITX).
Hardkernel produces several very interesting boxes for H2 (I suppose also for the H3); I think there were 5 or 6 at the time, for different use cases. There was a very small one that fitted two 2.5" SSDs. They're all ugly, low quality, and tedious to assemble, but they're very small and relatively cheap.
Definitely looks better than the H2, although I suspect that it's the same material and construction design as the H3.
Nothing to complain - one builds them (hopefully) once in years.
I hope though, that they corrected the flaws; the design of the case supporting two 2.5" disks was severely flawed, since there was no space for the connectors, and one had to let them partially hang outside the box. It was also surprisingly awkard to build.
Wow, this is 80% as fast as my decade-old gaming PC. Now, if only it had a PCIe slot that I could plug a discrete GPU into, I could cut our electricity bill by a few percent.
Edit: A sibling comment suggests looking at bee-link. It's definitely slower than my gaming PC, but it is getting close with integrated graphics, and is in a comparable price bracket to a hypothetical O-Droid-H3 with a PCIe slot:
Bee-link GTR6 6900HX: $539. incl. board + cpu + integrated GPU + case
O-Droid-H3: $465 ($165 + $300 Radeon RX 6600xt). incl. board + cpu + incompatible PCIe video card
Hardkernel folks make some pretty amazing products. My home server is built on top of Odroid-HC2 coupled with a 3.5” HDD, and I feel that was some of the best $70 I ever spent. The whole thing is tiny, fanless, and it only consumes 2 Wh on average. I only wish it had hardware video encoding capabilities.
About two years ago I bought Lenovo M715 for my mom for about 300 USD. It included 8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD, case, mouse and keyboard.l, not to mention support and warranty. Its' AMD 2200G CPU is 20% better in CPU Mark test.
Besides the ODROID-Hn series, what other single-board computers have dual ethernet? Very few, AFAICT. For router use-case, the alternatives suggested (buy an older NUC, for instance) don't work.
Look around at STH forums. There are a bunch of jasperlake products with 4x or 6x 2.5 Gbe. This is one such seller: www.loksing.com.cn . You can also find them on aliexpress.
Nice recommendation. An example I found is barebones N5105 system with 4x 2.5 Gbe for ~$163 shipped. [1] I could source 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 SO-DIMM (using dual-channel is important) and 512GB M.2 NVMe for about $100 additional.
Oh nice, those are a good deal. Looks like the cheapest board with RK3588S announced yet, and with all that ethernet to boot! Those were just launched a couple of days ago, looks like. [1][2]
Why wouldn’t a NUC work? I have a fanless Zoltac with dual nics. I use it as a media PC , but presumably it would work fine as a router. A cursory glance at Zoltac’s page shows they still produce a variety of new configurations.
Who cares just about plain HW specs? Nowadays I also expect the info on whether it supports UEFI booting, whether the firmware gets updates (and if fwupd or not), and if mainline Linux can boot and from what version.
Too often these products have a limited lifetime (and are too hard to use) due to lack of the above.
I'm running the H3+ right now and I can tell you that I'm booting plain UEFI with a plain Arch Linux and no special stuff required at all. The firmware received 2 updates so far in 3 months.
Note though, that RPis have never been the most price effective ARM solution, as Hardkernel has always had more powerful and/or cheaper alternatives. Their current N2+ is probably both more powerful and cheaper than the equivalent RPi.