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December 5, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Rikomagic DS08 – A Rockchip RK3588-powered 8K digital signage player with RTC and watchdog support

Rikomagic DS08 is a Rockchip RK3588-powered Android 13 digital signage player with 8K and 4K HDMI video outputs, RTC and watchdog support, and support for portrait and landscape orientation. It looks to be an update to the Rockchip RK3288-powered Rikikomagic DS02 introduced in 2020. The new model appears to have the same enclosure, but with a slightly different port layout, and much better specifications. Besides an octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC, the system ships with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB eMMC flash, and features a Gigabit Ethernet port, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, optional 4G LTE, and a few USB ports. Rikomagic DS08 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588 CPU – Octa-core 64-bit Armv8 SoC with 4x Cortex-A76 cores @ 2.4GHz, 4x Cortex-A55 cores @ 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G610 MP4 with support for OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.2, Vulkan 1.1 NPU – Up to 6 TOPS, supports INT4/INT8/INT16, compatible […]

September 7, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Beelink EQi13 Pro Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 24.04 on an Intel Core i5-13500H mini PC

Beelink EQi13 Pro mini PC review Ubuntu 24.04

We’ve already checked out the hardware of the Beelink EQi13 Pro in the first part of the review, and followed up with a detailed review of the Intel Core i5-13500H mini PC running Windows 11 Pro. We’ve now taken the time to test the Beelink EQi13 Pro with Ubuntu 24.04 to find out how well (or not) it performs on Linux. We will specifically report our experience testing features, running benchmarks, checking out the SSD and USB ports, evaluating Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 6 networking performance, and finally stress testing the mini PC, before measuring the fan noise and power consumption of the mini PC under Linux. Ubuntu 24.04 installation Since the plan is to install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS alongside Windows 11 in a dual-boot configuration, we shrank the Windows 11 partition to about half its size before inserting a USB drive prepared with the Ubuntu 24.04 ISO to start […]

September 5, 2025September 7, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Beelink EQi13 Pro Review – Part 2: A mid-range Intel Core i5-13500H mini PC tested with Windows 11 Pro

Beelink EQi13 Pro mini PC review windows 11

We’ve already checked out the specifications, gone through an unboxing and a teardown, and booted the Beelink EQi13 Pro mini PC to Windows 11 Pro in the first part of the review. Since then, we’ve had more time to test the Intel Core i5-13500H 12-core/16-thread Raptor Lake mini PC with Windows 11 Pro in detail. So we’ll now report our experience with features testing, benchmarks, Ethernet and WiFi performance evaluation, 4K and 8K YouTube video playback, and measurements of fan noise and power consumption for the Beelink EQi13 Pro mid-range mini PC. Software overview and features testing After performing all updates, the System->About window confirms the Beelink EQi13 Pro is equipped with an Intel Core i5-13500H CPU with 32GB RAM running Windows 11 Pro version 24H2, build 26100.2033. HWiNFO 64 utility provides more information about the Intel Core i5-13500H 12-core (4P+E) /16-thread (8P+8E) Raptor Lake-H processor, the AZW BQ motherboard, […]

August 25, 2025August 26, 2025 by Debashis Das - No Comments

Thin mini-ITX industrial motherboard features Intel Core Ultra 5 225H or Ultra 7 255H Arrow Lake-H SoC

Jetway MTX ARH1 Thin Mini ITX Industrial SBC

Jetway MTX-ARH1 is a thin Mini-ITX industrial motherboard powered by either an Intel Core Ultra 5 225H or Ultra 7 225H “Arrow Lake-H” SoC, and is a direct upgrade over the Meteor Lake-H-based MTX-MTH1. The new board also features faster 6400MHz DDR5 memory and conditional 8K display support. Other features mostly stay the same: up to 96GB DDR5 memory, quad display output, triple 2.5GbE networking via Intel I226 controllers, dual M.2 M-Key sockets, an M.2 B-Key with nano-SIM for 4G/5G, an M.2 E-Key with CNVi for WiFi/Bluetooth, plus a PCIe Gen5 x8 slot and SATA with RAID 0/1. There’s also support for watchdog timer, optional TPM 2.0, Realtek audio, USB 3.2 Gen2 and USB 2.0 (with headers), multiple COM ports, GPIO, I²C, and SMBus. These features make this board suitable for industrial PCs, edge AI, AIoT gateways, and multi-display systems. Jetway MTX-ARH1 specifications: Arrow Lake SoC (one or the other) […]

August 17, 2025August 17, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Testing a 30-meter fiber HDMI cable

When RUIPRO asked me to review an HDMI cable, I almost immediately deleted their email. After all, who wants to review a dumb HDMI cable? But I still took a look and noticed that their cable used optical fiber, and they sold HDMI cables up to 300 meters long on Amazon. My longest HDMI cable is about 1.5 meters long, so I got intrigued and asked for a 100-foot (30-meter) fiber HDMI cable for testing. RUIPRO fiber HDMI cable unboxing When I received the parcel, I got two boxes, so I thought there might be a receiver and a transmitter. But no, they must like me and sent two “8K detachable pure fiber HDMI cables”. The cables are said to be HDMI 2.1b compliant up to 8K resolution, and with support for future 10K and 12K resolutions. Other features listed include Dynamic HDR, eARC, uncompressed 8K60 Hz and 4K120 Hz, […]

August 11, 2025August 11, 2025 by Debashis Das - 16 Comments

Sipeed Maix4-HAT – A Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe AI module with up to 72 TOPS AI power, 4K video output

The Maix4-HAT is a compact AI HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5 built around the MAIX-IV core board, which includes AXERA’s AX650N/C octa-core Cortex-A55 CPU, SoC, delivering up to 72 TOPS (INT4) or 18 TOPS (INT8) with 8K video encode/decode support. It features 8 GB LPDDR4x RAM and 32 GB eMMC storage, as well as interfaces such as PCIe 2.0, HDMI 2.0a (4Kp60), USB 3.0, USB 2.0, multiple camera inputs, SPI LCD, I²C touch, speaker, and fan connectors. Designed for plug-and-play use with Raspberry Pi 5 and other boards, it accelerates Transformer-based models, making it ideal for space-constrained edge AI tasks in smart cameras, industrial inspection, and multimodal AI applications. Sipeed Maix4-HAT Specifications: SoC – AXera AX650N CPU – Octa-core Arm Cortex-A55 @ 1.7 GHz with NEON support NPU – 43.2 TOPS @ INT4, 10.8 TOPS @ INT8 with support for INT4, INT8, INT16, FP16, and FP32 inputs; Equivalent to NVIDIA […]

July 18, 2025July 23, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 57 Comments

Rockchip unveils RK3668 10-core Arm Cortex-A730/Cortex-A530 SoC with 16 TOPS NPU, RK182X LLM/VLM co-processor

The Rockchip Developer Conference 2025 (RKDC!2025) is now taking place in Fuzhou, China, with some interesting announcements such as the Rockchip RK3668 10-core Arm Cortex-A730/A530 processor with a 16 TOPS NPU and the RK182X RISC-V co-processor with support for up to 7B parameters LLM (large Language Model)or VLM (Vision Language Model). Rochchip RK3668 10-core Armv9 SoC Let’s have a look at the Rockchip RK3668 SoC, which looks quite similar to the RK3688 SoC unveiled last year, but with some differences. Preliminary Rockchip RK3668 specifications: CPU – 4x Cortex-A730 + 6x Cortex-A530 Armv9.3 cores delivering around 200K DMIPS; note: neither core has been announced by Arm yet GPU – Arm Magni GPU delivering up to 1-1.5 TFLOPS of performance AI accelerator – 16 TOPS RKNN-P3 NPU VPU – 8K 60 FPS video decoder ISP – AI-enhanced ISP supporting up to 8K @ 30 FPS Memory – LPDDR5/5x/6 up to 100 GB/s […]

July 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 24.04 on an Intel Core i7-1280P mini PC

GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition review performance ubuntu 24.04

We’ve already checked out GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC’s hardware with an unboxing and a teardown, and tested the Intel Core i7-1280P mini PC with Windows 11 Pro in detail in the second part of the review. We’ve now had time to test the Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC with Ubuntu 24.04, so we’ll report our experience with Linux in the third part of the review. We’ll specifically go through system information, test key features, benchmark the system and compare it against the earlier Mini IT12 “2023 Edition” powered by an Intel Core i7-12650H processor, because checking out storage and USB performance, WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE network performance, stress testing the mini PC, and finally measuring fan noise and power consumption. Ubuntu 24.04 installation We decided to install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS alongside Windows 11 in a dual-boot configuration, so we resized the Windows 11 partition by about […]