Reviews - Page 43 of 119 - CNX Software

January 9, 2020January 9, 2020 by Karl Johnson - 9 Comments

Virtual Desktop and Oculus Quest Tips & Tricks

Hey, Karl here. I wanted to share some experimenting I did with the Oculus Quest we purchased as a family gift for Christmas. One of the features I was looking forward to was wirelessly streaming VR games from my PC. It is not officially supported by Oculus but Virtual Desktop allows you to do this. Virtual Desktop is an app that can be purchased through the Oculus store. Unfortunately, there are a couple of steps that need to be taken to stream VR to the headset. Oculus forced VD to remove the emulated VR feature in its official store version. Once it is purchased you can then sideload the emulated VR version through Side Quest. Side Quest is a simple tool that makes sideloading apps easy and has a bunch of demo and games that aren’t in the Oculus store. The instructions are easy to follow on the Side Quest […]

December 26, 2019April 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Zidoo M9 Mini PC Review – Part 1: Unboxing & Teardown

Over the years, Zidoo has made TV boxes for the consumer market, and digital signage players for businesses. The recently announced Zidoo M9 aims at both markets, plus other applications such as IoT, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Zidoo M9 is either sold as a board or a complete TV box reference design with a case, as it exposes all the usual ports of a TV with HDMI, USB, and Ethernet. But you can do more with internal connectors for cameras, PCIe interfaces, SIM card slot, MPI DSI and eDP connectors, and so on. The company has sent me a review sample, so let’s first check out the accessories provided with the box, and have a look into the hardware design today, before testing the Android firmware in the second part of the review. Zidoo M9 Unboxing The package makes it clear Zidoo M9 “mini PC” looks like a TV box, […]

December 21, 2019February 29, 2020 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 5 Comments

Beelink T45 Review with Windows and Linux, and Tweaking BIOS Power Limits

[Update December 23, 2019: We’ve been informed by Beelink that the T45 has been updated to the 6W Celeron N4200 processor instead, and the system is now cooled with a fan. The model reviewed in this post is the fanless version with a 10W Intel J4250 processor, which was never sold] [Update January 30, 2020: We’ve now posted a review of the new model at Beelink Gemini T45 Pentium N4200 Mini PC Review] Beelink have further extended their ‘Gemini’ range of mini PCs by adding the T45. This is a passively cooled mini PC that is effectively a companion to the J45 as it again uses the slightly older Apollo Lake Intel Pentium J4205 CPU which is a quad-core 4-thread 1.50 GHz processor boosting to 2.60 GHz with Intel’s HD Graphics 505. Although the T45 is a ‘NUC’ style mini PC physically consisting of a 119 x 119 x 17.7 […]

December 14, 2019December 14, 2019 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 9 Comments

Ubuntu 18.04 on Beelink Gemini J45 Mini PC (Fix and Review)

When I recently reviewed the Beelink J45 (aka Beelink Gemini J), a mini PC that uses the slightly older Intel Apollo Lake Pentium J4205 processor, whilst Windows 10 Pro ran fine it was unsuitable for Ubuntu because after installation the system became unstable and problems were encountered when running anything that loaded the system. The main issue was that when connected via wired-ethernet performing a command like ‘sudo apt upgrade’ would cause the ethernet to drop after which only a reboot would restore the connection. At the time it, was unclear what the cause was however a solution to the issue was posted by ‘gambetta’ on the Beelink forum. Basically it consists of installing the r8168 module which is the Linux device driver released for RealTek RTL8168B/8111B, RTL8168C/8111C, RTL8168CP/8111CP, RTL8168D/8111D, RTL8168DP/8111DP and RTL8168E/8111E Gigabit Ethernet controllers with PCI-Express interface. To paraphrase the ‘README.Debian’ file, you use ‘r8168-dkms because the in-kernel […]

December 12, 2019 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 1 Comment

A Look at Ubuntu on MINIX NEO G41V-4 and J50C-4 Mini PCs

MINIX Technology Limited recently released two new Gemini Lake mini PCs running Windows 10 Pro namely the MINIX NEO J50C-4 actively-cooled mini PC with an Intel Pentium Silver J5005 processor and the MINIX NEO G41V-4 fanless mini PC powered by an Intel Celeron N4100 processor. Whilst each mini PC comes with 64GB of eMMC with pre-installed Windows 10 Pro together with 4GB of RAM they also support the addition of an optional 2280 M.2 drive and the MINIX NEO J50C-4 allows optional memory upgrades. Prior to testing their performance under Ubuntu, I established a comparison baseline by updating Windows to version 1903 and then running my standard set of benchmarking tools first with the default configuration of each mini PC and then repeated having installed the official MINIX 2280 M.2 240GB drives for each device together with adding an extra 4GB RAM to the MINIX NEO J50C-4. The results can […]

December 9, 2019December 10, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Testing NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit with and without Fan

A few weeks ago I received NVIDIA Jetson Nano for review together with 52Pi ICE Tower cooling fan which Seeed Studio included in the package, and yesterday I wrote a getting started guide showing how to setup the board, and play with inference samples leveraging the board’s AI capabilities. I’ll now test the board with the stock heatsink in both 5W and 10W modes, and see if thermal throttling does occur, and then I’ll fit the tower cooling fan to find out if we can extract more performance that way and how much lower the CPU temperature is. Jetson Nano Stress Tests with Stock Heatsink Let’s install SBC-Bench testing utility,

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/master/sbc-bench.sh
chmod +x sbc-bench.sh

1 2	wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/master/sbc-bench.sh chmod +x sbc-bench.sh

check it’s properly installed,

sudo ./sbc-bench.sh -m
Time        CPU    load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq   Temp
15:05:06:  922MHz  0.05   5%   1%   2%   0%   0%   0%  35.0°C
15:05:11:  922MHz  0.13   3%   1%   1%   0%   0%   0%  35.0°C
15:05:16:  922MHz  0.12   3%   1%   1%   0%   0%   0%  34.8°C

sudo ./sbc-bench.sh -m

Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp

15:05:06: 922MHz 0.05 5% 1% 2% 0% 0% 0% 35.0°C

15:05:11: 922MHz 0.13 3% 1% 1% 0% 0% 0% 35.0°C

15:05:16: 922MHz 0.12 3% 1% 1% 0% 0% 0% 34.8°C

and run it in 5W mode:

sudo nvpmodel -m 1

sudo ./sbc-bench

sbc-bench v0.6.9

Memory performance:
memcpy: 3685.3 MB/s 
memset: 8555.4 MB/s 

7-zip total scores (3 consecutive runs): 2877,2885,2854

OpenSSL results:
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes  16384 bytes
aes-128-cbc     284837.64k   525113.11k   639412.05k   706251.09k   728449.02k   729841.66k
aes-128-cbc     284316.13k   525028.93k   634287.70k   704675.84k   728088.58k   728973.31k
aes-192-cbc     262002.90k   458230.17k   544725.93k   588999.68k   604075.35k   604607.83k
aes-192-cbc     261583.66k   458583.96k   538986.92k   588138.84k   602303.15k   604067.16k
aes-256-cbc     247370.60k   405101.35k   466444.29k   501432.32k   512816.47k   513370.79k
aes-256-cbc     247650.51k   405270.40k   469783.72k   502266.54k   513187.84k   512977.58k

Full results uploaded to http://ix.io/23rg. Please check the log for anomalies (e.g. swapping
or throttling happenend) and otherwise share this URL.

sudo nvpmodel -m 1

sudo ./sbc-bench

sbc-bench v0.6.9

Memory performance:

memcpy: 3685.3 MB/s

memset: 8555.4 MB/s

7-zip total scores (3 consecutive runs): 2877,2885,2854

OpenSSL results:

type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes 16384 bytes

aes-128-cbc 284837.64k 525113.11k 639412.05k 706251.09k 728449.02k 729841.66k

aes-128-cbc 284316.13k 525028.93k 634287.70k 704675.84k 728088.58k 728973.31k

aes-192-cbc 262002.90k 458230.17k 544725.93k 588999.68k 604075.35k 604607.83k

aes-192-cbc 261583.66k 458583.96k 538986.92k 588138.84k 602303.15k 604067.16k

aes-256-cbc 247370.60k 405101.35k 466444.29k 501432.32k 512816.47k 513370.79k

aes-256-cbc 247650.51k 405270.40k 469783.72k 502266.54k 513187.84k 512977.58k

Full results uploaded to http://ix.io/23rg. Please check the log for anomalies (e.g. swapping

or throttling happenend) and otherwise share this URL.

The temperature never went over 44.5°C, and no throttling occurred. tegrastats during 7-zip multi-core test:

CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@43.5C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52.5C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2567 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1549/912
RAM 1211/3956MB (lfb 515x4MB) SWAP 0/1978MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@44C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2568 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1549/912
RAM 1239/3956MB (lfb 508x4MB) SWAP 0/1978MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@44C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52.5C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2569 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1549/913
RAM 1265/3956MB (lfb 502x4MB) SWAP 0/1978MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@43.5C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52.5C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2571 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1510/914

CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@43.5C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52.5C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2567 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1549/912

RAM 1211/3956MB (lfb 515x4MB) SWAP 0/1978MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@44C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2568 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1549/912

RAM 1239/3956MB (lfb 508x4MB) SWAP 0/1978MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@44C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52.5C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2569 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1549/913

RAM 1265/3956MB (lfb 502x4MB) SWAP 0/1978MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [100%@1428,100%@1428,off,off] EMC_FREQ 3%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@41.5C CPU@43.5C PMIC@100C GPU@43.5C AO@52.5C thermal@43.5C POM_5V_IN 3348/2571 POM_5V_GPU 0/0 POM_5V_CPU 1510/914

Only two Cortex-A57 cores are used even under load, and power […]

December 7, 2019June 25, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

AI inference using Images, RTSP Video Stream on NVIDIA Jetson Nano Devkit

Last month I received NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit together with 52Pi ICE Tower Cooling Fan, and the main goal was to compare the performance of the board with the stock heatsink or 52Pi heatsink + fan combo. But the stock heatsink does a very good job of cooling the board, and typical CPU stress tests do not make the processor throttle at all. So I had to stress the GPU as well, as it takes some efforts to set it up all, so I’ll report my experience configuring the board, and running AI test programs including running objects detection on an RTSP video stream. Setting up NVIDIA Jetson Nano Board Preparing the board is very much like you’d do with other SBC’s such as the Raspberry Pi, and NVIDIA has a nicely put getting started guide, so I won’t go into too many details here. To summarize: Download the […]

November 25, 2019August 25, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

MINIX NEO G41V-4 Mini PC Review – Part 2: Windows 10 Pro

MINIX NEO G41V-4 is the latest mini PC from the Hong Kong-based company, and this time they’ve gone fanless with a new design that should allow proper cooling with a large heatsink, plenty of ventilation holes on the top, as well as a dust-resistant meshing to present dust from entering inside the enclosure. I’ve now had time to review the fanless mini PC, and I’ll report my experience with Windows 10 Pro, while Ian did his part with Ubuntu 18.04. Switching to Windows 10 Boot from SSD I had installed the optional 240GB SSD in the first part of the review. It offers an easy way to get more storage and performance, and you don’t need to reinstall Windows 10 Pro since it’s already installed in the SSD. You just need to change some settings in the BIOS as explained in the user manual. To be on the safe side, […]