Review Radxa X4 Review: The Raspberry Pi Alternative

[Admin]

Another board attempts to take the Raspberry Pi’s throne, and while the Radxa X4 is close, it just misses the coronation.

Radxa X4 Review: The Raspberry Pi Alternative : Read more

 

[chrsphr]

I grabbed one of these to add as a proxmox node. Got the advantage of being an x86 system so I can extended my existing proxmox system, but small enough to be powered by PoE.
It's also got pretty good video hardware encoding/decoding, for the size, I think.
Either way, a fun little toy and an interesting change from ARM boards

 

[Devoteicon]

Cons​

• Needs more power

"Tim Taylor grunt"

 

[ryann]

Most PC's player got tips for using Intel CPU: BIOS can set the PL1 to improve CPU performance, and c-state enable will make cpu running over 3Ghz. just make sure CPU cooling has margin.
It can be regarded as an additional performance, of course it also requires more power.

 

[bit_user]

The Raspberry Pi form factor is seen as the ideal and it has been aped by many different boards since it was revised back in 2014.

Disagree. Its main benefit is that it packs lots of features in the smallest space. However, it's really not ideal for use cases like ultra-mini desktops, where it would be better to have a more NUC-like arrangement of connectors on the front and back edges, only. For this sort of thing, the Pi's size also poses challenges for cooling and having things like M.2 slots, which the Pi 5 could only do by adding an extra carrier board. The external antenna and RTC battery further make the case that this is an inappropriate form factor.

Furthermore, there are standard form factors, like nano-ITX and min-STX that would provide us with a broader array of cases, if more Pi competitors would actually use them.

how will the change of form factor impact the performance of the N100?

If they put an active cooler on it, like the Pi 5 can use, then it would be fine.

This is pretty much an Intel desktop PC in an SBC form factor.

No, it's a laptop SoC that can be found in many Chromebook-class machines.

The included cooling pads work ok

In my experience, thermal pads have been a disaster with the more powerful N97. The biggest cooling upgrade I made was to remove the spacers and replace the thermal pad with good quality heatsink TIM.

The fan is always on, and always at 100%. There is no PWM speed control.

That's really unfortunate, as is their decision to go with a non-standard fan header. The SoC is capable of idling at a couple Watts but can boost at up to 25 W.

I think the "stress test" used to measure that temperature of 62 C is not very stressful. As I've said in other articles, written by Les Pounder, you can't just fire up stress-ng without paying attention to what stress test it's running, as some of them hardly stress the CPU at all. Try --cpu-method=fft.

Ubuntu 24.04 ran smoothly, even playing back a 1080p60 YouTube video with only a few dropped frames.

Because, last I checked, browsers are still using software decoding (would be nice if you actually said anything about how you tested it).

If you use something that supports Intel's hardware decoder, like VLC, then I think it should even do 4k/60 AV1 playback.

The N100 has a top speed of 3.4 GHz, but during our time with the board we never managed to hit that high. At best when running a y-cruncher stress test we saw 3 GHz for around five seconds, the CPU then dropped down to 2.1 GHz for all cores.

That's because you don't understand what you're trying to measure. I'm having a bit of trouble finding the multi-core frequency limits for the N100, but the limit of 3.4 GHz only applies to a single core. Basically, as soon as another core is doing anything, it can drop to the 2-core frequency limit. The 4-core limit is much lower, still.

No matter how high your power limits or how good your cooling, a N100 will never run 2 or 4 cores at 3.4 GHz. This is baked right into the firmware and you can't change or override it.

We went into the BIOS but could not find a reliable means to up the power to the CPU, noting that Intel states that the N100 is a 6W chip, so there isn’t much more power that we can provide.

What you want is this:

https://github.com/horshack-dpreview/setPL
​

It works fine on my N97 (Ubuntu 24.04). You just need to be sure you have the prerequisites installed. The settings will revert to the manufacturer's defaults, after a reboot. When you run the script, it prints the old values for PL1 & PL2, so you can see what they were set to.

If you need a cheap x86 PC to control makerspace machinery like laser cutters, CNC tools or to act as cheap Windows machines, then the Radxa X4 will do the job. Robotics and machine learning projects will benefit from the extra CPU horsepower, if you can unlock its full potential.

These use cases generally fall in the category of where you'd wan ]in-band ECC. The ODROID-H4 series provide that as a BIOS option (more on that, later).

My take:
This board is an absolute bargain! That said, if you really want an Alder Lake-N that's done right, and you don't mind a bit larger (almost NUC) form factor, then the ODROID-H4 series is the one you want. It's still a good value for money (better than Latte Panda Mu), but supports a full 80 mm M.2 drive (with more lanes than the Latte Panda), supports up to 48 GB DDR5, and lets you choose between the more powerful N97 and N305 SoCs.

The only two things lacking from the ODROID-H4 are built-in wifi and GPIO. Both can be added via USB, however. Another big plus is that it has a mini-ITX adapter kit, enabling you to put it in any mini-ITX case (but not Thin mini-ITX!). The plus and ultra versions also have SATA x4.

 

[bit_user]

Cons​

• Needs more power

I think it's not the power, but the cooling that's inadequate.

That said, it'd be interesting to know how the manufacturer configured the PL1/PL2 values. I assume PL1 is the standard 6W, but the real question is what they did with PL2. The stock value for that SoC is 25 W, which shows just how hungry those little Gracemont cores + the 24 EU iGPU can get!

The good news is that you should be able to hack a decent heatsink onto it and use the script mentioned in my above post to make it perform as good as any N100 out there! Just be sure to use either a copper heatsink or at least a copper shim between the die and the heatsink, if it's not copper. The tiny Gracemont cores have major hotspotting issues, especially for single-core and dual-core boosting scenarios.

 

[bit_user]

c-state enable will make cpu running over 3Ghz. just make sure CPU cooling has margin.

As far as I'm aware, disabling C-state will not raise the upper limits. I'm pretty sure C-state is just about letting the CPU clock down, during periods of low-load. If you disable C-state, then it will limit your ability to boost, because that will increase the average power consumption and eat into the headroom normally used by the turbo algorithm.

As far as I'm aware, there's simply to way to exceed the baked-in core vs. frequency limits of the SoC. That counts as overclocking and these SoCs don't allow it.

It can be regarded as an additional performance, of course it also requires more power.

The performance discrepancy vs. the Latte Panda Mu comes down to one of two things (or both):

• lower default PL2
• thermal throttling

Although they showed thermal data for the "stress test", they didn't show it for Geek bench, which is where we saw the big performance discrepancy. That's a shame, especially because Geek Bench was almost certainly more stressful than what they had tried to do for a "stress test".