SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing, teardown, and first boot

SpacemiT has sent me a K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit for review. It’s based on the K3 Pico-ITX motherboard with the SpacemiT K3 16-core RISC-V Edge AI processor housed in a compatible chassis.

I’ll start the review with an unboxing, a teardown, and a first boot to the pre-installed Bianbu OS. In the second part of the review, I’ll perform feature testing and run several benchmarks (see early K3 benchmarks for reference) to evaluate the status of the software and performance of the system.

SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit unboxing

I received a kit in a retail package reading “RISC-V AI CPI K3 RVA23 Profile Chip” and a UGREEN USB-C dock with a few USB-A ports, HDMI output, and 100W USB PD support. The dock will make perfect sense once we connect the system for our first boot.

I was initially expecting a Pico-ITX SBC, so I was a little surprised to see a complete system/mini PC instead. It ships with a USB debug cable, a screwdriver, and a sheet in Chinese with two QR codes, one of which points to the user guide (available in English).

The front features a power button with LED and a 3.5mm audio jack.

Most ports are on the rear panel: 10GbE SFP+ cage, Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, four USB 2.0 ports, a USB OTG Type-C port, and a USB Type-C port with DisplayPort Alt. mode and USB PD for power.

K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit teardown

Since the kit comes with a screwdriver, it’s clearly designed to be opened. We can do so by loosening the four screws on the bottom of the enclosure.

The bottom cover comes off easily, and we can access the “SpacemiT MUSE_Pico-ITX” board. As a side note, one of the screws for M.2 slots was roaming freely in the case, so I had to put it back into place…

The main reason for people to open the case is to make use of the M.2 Key-M 2280 (PCIe Gen3 x4) slot for NVMe SSD or other module, or the M.2 B-Key 2242/3052 (PCIe Gen2 x2 + USB 2.0) socket and Nano SIM card for 4G LTE or 5G cellular connectivity.  RTI01 and RTI02 “Real-Time Expansion” connectors on the right might also be useful, but I’ve yet to find an expansion board for these…

Another reason is to connect the serial console for debugging. The Tx, Rx, and GND text above corresponds to the pinout of the 3-pin header. The documentation does not mention anything about the cable itself, so I might have mixed up the color of the wires above. I’ll check this in detail in the second part of the second. There’s also a 2-pin connector next to it for 12V DC power input.

I loosened four more screws and disconnected the System, Audio, and Battery (RTC) cables to take out the board. It didn’t come off that easily, and most people won’t need to do that since there’s no purpose for it, except to check the hardware or move the board to another chassis.

We’ll find all the main chips on this side. The SpacemiT K3 SoC (grey), a Winbond W25064JWSIQ flash (64 Mbit), what should be a 128GB UFS chip (Kingston UFS128-TY7B under the small thermal pad), two 8GB Rayson RS2G32LO5D4FDB-31BT LPDDR4x for 16GB of RAM, RealTek RTL8127ATF 10GbE and RTL8211F GbE controllers, a Slimport ANX7447 USB Type-C crosspoint switch, and an AU4562B step-down regulator.

The cooling solution is a heatsink with a PWM-controlled fan. We’ll also notice the RTC battery and WiFi/Bluetooth antennas placement in the photo below.

First boot to Bianbu OS

Let’s reassemble everything to boot the mini PC.  If you own a monitor with USB PD power output, then a single USB-C cable can carry power and video to the K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit. If not, another option is to use a 12V power supply and connect it to the internal 2-pin connector, but this requires opening the chassis.  So instead, I used the provided UGREEN USB-C dock to connect the power (65W USB-C adapter for Khadas Mind 2), and connect an HDMI display (Eazeye Radiant 15-6-inch Transflective LCD). I also added an RF dongle for a keyboard and mouse combo. I was greeted with the Bianbu OS setup wizard in Chinese, and but I could easily change that to English in two clicks.

I went through the setup wizard to set the timezone, keyboard layout, and create a user. Once done, we are asked to reboot the system.

I could login just fine, and quickly checked the system monitor showing the eight application cores, and eight AI cores.

I had no network connection at this stage, so I connected the K3 Pico-ITX to my WiFi 6 router and could browse the web normally using the pre-installed Chromium web browser.

Finally, I connected to the system over SSH to check system info with inxi:

Everything seems to be properly detected, including the 16 RISC-V cores clocked up to 2.2 GHz, TY7B-128 UFS storage, 16GB of RAM, 10GbE networking, RealTek RTL8852BE  WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 module, and more. The idle temperature seems a little high at 65°C, so that’s something I’ll have to keep an eye on.

That will be all for today. It’s my first SBC with a Realtek RTL8127, and the second will be the ODROID-H5. Since the K3 Pico-ITX SBC comes with an SFP+ cage, I’ll need to purchase an SFP+ to RJ45 adapter for testing 10 Gbps Ethernet before the second part of the review.  In the second part of the review, I’ll run some benchmarks, the headless ones we’ve all done remotely, plus some others requiring a display, and test all/most features to check out what works and what doesn’t with Bianbu 4.0 OS.

I’d like to thank SpacemiT for sending the K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit for review. I have no idea where to buy the exact “K3 Pico-ITX Chassis Kit” I have received for review. SpacemiT relies on a range of distributors such as Banana Pi and Sipeed for the K3 Pico-ITX SBC ($399 for the 16GB/128GB model). The closest option to the “Chassis Kit” is the Milk-V Jupiter 2 with a Pico-ITX chassis using two external antennas. It sells for $575 for the 32GB RAM/256GB UFS version, as the 16GB/128GB model is out of stock.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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