We did a bit of looking through the ODROID forums and apparently it’s quite possible to squeeze an impressive amount of performance out of these little single board computers, if you don’t mind them getting boiling hot.
Now, some people have taken pedestrian routes. It’s a low power single board computer after all. A bigger heatsink or a fan appears to be enough for most. [Micky] and a friend, however, decided this is a problem that can only be solved with a healthy bit of overengineering.
Using a water cooler meant for a full CPU, a modified chipset cooling block (meant for the North or South Bridge), a liberal application of plexiglass, and some thermal paste they manage to triple the cost of their computer set-up with this wonderfully overkill desk ornament.
Now it can do all the things a Raspberry Pi can do, faster and watercooled.
None of the links seem to show how much performance he’s actually getting out of this thing. The forum thread has assembled pictures and at one point the creator says he put his new “nanotechnology fluid” into the cooler, but that’s it. More info please?
Nanotech is often used for a nice sciency sounding buzzword along with the rented white coats in informercials to separate the gullible from extra cash. In automotive cooling, it usually refers to leak sealing preparations which do next to nothing for cooling ability and probably impair it slightly.
“Nanotechnology Fluid” sounds like water to me…..maybe with a ‘thermal enhancer additive’ (coolant)?
It might have colloidal (nano particle) silver or some other colloidal solid to inhibit microbial growth? But how much of a problem is that if you just buy a gallon of DIY water anyways?
It is going to be at least two and a half times the number crunching performance of a RPi3, when looking at the CPU alone in isolation (and totally ignoring the GPU).
https://paste.ee/p/5WTxK
Benchmarks to compare boards with different RAM, different GPU’s, and performance is not easy. The devil is in the details. I have an Odroid-XU4 and I do like it, but running it flat out at full throttle the default fan is like a leaf blower, and the CPU will still manage to hit 98 °C (208 F) with the supplied cooling hardware. I would even consider make it my desktop machine if only it had 4GiB RAM (or more) instead of 2GiB.
I was all gung ho about the Odroid earlier this year and was drooling, er, waiting for the March/April release…
Then I found out they were as UN-OpenSource as anybody.
How do you figure, it’s Amlogic that is “UN-OpenSource” not Hardkernel. Do the Internet a favor and research before posting false information about a perfectly good company.
Is odroid knowing using Arm logic? If so I think that was their point..
The root cause of the problem is that most of the CPU’s used in this space come from either mobile phones handsets or STB’s (set top boxes), and 99.999% of the sales are in that space. So with 0.001% of the sales the vendors want to release as little documentation as possible to secure their main sales area with, broken by design, security through obscurity. Instead they provide rarely updated binary blobs. And another reason for the ancient rotting blobs is because if the full documentation, especially for the GPU’s, was available then the manufacturer would be liable for providing free access to patented media codec.
There are no cheap high performance ARM cores with fully open documentation, especially for their GPU cores.
Here is my response to your challenge:
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
as useful as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvg0-NvadkM