Here is why I am replacing my raspberry pi 4 nodes with this

Note: I have no relation with vendors of these products, I just own both products

We are witnessing a trend to use ARM CPUs in the desktop & server market.

As a homelabber, I recently decided to replace my intel servers with arm servers. Especially after Raspberry Pi 4, the 8Gb version has launched recently.

Initially, I have bought 3 Raspberry Pi 4s. I’ve installed ubuntu then enable KVM, so I can create my replicate my VM's in my homelab.

Each node cost £84.5, here are the details:

I noticed even though raspberry pi itself is cheap enough, it needs accessories. And they cost money too.

Since my workload is already virtualized, I thought, I can replace my Raspberry Pi cluster with any other device as long as it is aarch64 and runs KVM (preferably ubuntu)

Then, I discovered H96 max x3, which is an android tv box that comes with a price tag of £38. It has competitive specs compared to Raspberry Pi 4

Compared to Raspberry Pi 4, it comes with;

1. An internal heatsink
2. A Case
3. 64Gb emmc storage
4. 5W power supply
5. HDMI cable
6. remote control

In terms of performance, I can say they are same, and in some cases, H96 max x3 outperforms Raspberry Pi 4. (keep reading for more about benchmarking)

Here is a photo from its PCB

It also has VFD display, one can use it to display cpu load/temperature metrics. (see this github repo)

I have installed armbian on it. This part was a bit tricky, because armbian was not fully supporting Amlogic S905X3. But it was possible. I am planning another article on software part.

So it worked well for my homelab case. I am not using HDMI & Wifi & Bluetooth & GPU because my aim is running web services only.

Regarding performance comparison of these boards;

Warning: It is not easy to benchmark two different SoC’s, because each of them may target different applications / different markets. So I should warn this is not the best benchmark and even may include errors as well.

I was interested in the computational performance of these boards, they are cpu & ram & storage & ethernet. I am not interested in gpu/npu/wifi/audio…

I tried to do a rough comparison between the two boards.

CPU

• Raspberry pi 4 has BCM2711 with 4x Cortex A72 (1.5 Ghz)
• H96 max x3 has Amlogic S905X3 with 4x Cortex A55 (1.91Ghz)

Based on 7z benchmark’s they performed almost same overall. H96 Max X3 scored 4933 while Raspberry Pi 4 scored 5111. (Total Rating MIPS)

Just to compare, my intel i7–8550U scored 8500.

Cortex A72 is a more advanced CPU compared to Cortex A55, but Cortex A55 is a newer generation CPU and it is running in higher frequency.

Storage

I have used dd for benchmarking

• For Raspberry pi 4, I have used 64gb Samsung Evo plus microSD, I was able to reach 45 mb/s write performance
• H96 Max X3 has internal emmc chip, I was able to reach 145 mb/s write performance

Block size did minor effect on write performance. Numbers were almost same

Network

Both have a gigabit ethernet port, I was able transfer data at similar speeds on both of them, around 950+ Mbit/s. I have used plain iperf3 (tcp)

So according to performance per price I have found H96 Max X3 better than my Raspberry pi 4’s.

I think this year we will see more ARM-based SoCs, and I am hoping to find cheaper, power-efficient and cooler chips.

If you have such alternatives, I really would like to hear about them.

I am interested in computers, that is cheap, quiet and low power alternatives than this.

References

Amlogic S905X3 Specifications