Trash-talk

Quote from balbes150

N2 is a slightly extended version of the usual TV box at an inflated price, and having a shitty cooling system, from which more problems than benefits and a number of other errors .

inflated price: much cheaper then anything in the same league
shitty cooling system: the coolest box ever even under heavy load
number of other errors:

Quote from balbes150

Unfortunately, HK has made a number of serious mistakes recently, after which I do not consider their products as a good option (the rejection of the N1 in favor of the firm's AML, etc.). N2 is a slightly extended version of the usual TV box at an inflated price, and having a shitty cooling system, from which more problems than benefits and a number of other errors .

Cough cough !!!

Talk about a Pinocchio post... why don't you exaggerate some more and see how long that nose of yours can grow !

Shitty cooling system hey ?

You could not be more wrong in regard to the Hardkernel N2's - AMLS922X cooling.

The thing barely gets above 40 degrees C during normal Kodi use - in fact it has the best passive cooling system of anything I've used - and that is quite a few different ARM based devices over the years inc. RK3399's.

That is what you get when a power efficient 12nm (SoC) manufacturing process is used.

And this is with everything running in Performance mode by default with the GPU and CPU clock's near Max.

I always see tkaiser saying how bad powering and coolling is done on most embedded boards. But for N2 he wrote:

Quote

this board with its solid powering method, great passive cooling setup, sufficient performance and great software support is a good basis for a lot of use cases.

And for the record: I do not own this device like most people also doesn't

balbes150 Please refrain from speaking about a device you don't have hands on experience with.

I can't compare it to the RK3399, as I don't have a box based on one of them.

I have a SBC based on another Rockchip, and the last time I tested it, it was pretty useless as a media player in all regards.

H264 video stuttered, HEVC video would lock up after 10 seconds of playback, no HDR support, etc.

The N2 doesn't heat up to 70C, the maximum temperature I've seen on mine was when I was playing H264 4K content with SW decoding (all cores at 100%), and it maxed out at about 42C, so if you have no idea what you're talking about, just don't, it doesn't sound good.

Regarding it not being good value for money, that also depends. Cheap Chinese boxes are often shipped with cheap, bad or fake hardware. Hardware which you can never get proper drivers for or get to work reliably (or at all). With HK, everything provided in the box just works, and it works well. Everything is high quality, and quality is not cheap, so there's a premium. You still don't know how much S922X boxes are going to cost, and keep in mind that some higher quality Chinese S912 boxes sold for well over $100.

I still don't understand why you fixate on the Kernel version, how old it is, or what GPU drivers it has. As long as it works well and fast, and it does work well, and it's also very fast, I personally don't care what version of kernel it is running on.

LE pushes towards Mainline kernel support, I can understand why, LE has to cover multiple different platforms, so it makes sense for you.

Not being able to run mainline LE on it doesn't make it a bad device or a bad buy.

lol... sorry i should not laugh but sometimes i can't help it...

Its easy for people that spend so much time working and becoming experts in their own little corner that is its easy to run into others that have different opinions about things, which is good as it helps sometimes make one see something that they may be missing.

personally i have nothing but respect for most on places like this as they are trying to provide and maintain solutions for a wide variety of devices rather then just any one specific device and man that is gotta be tough to keep in line for anyone let alone a group of people as personalities have a big influence in things that get said. (one reason i now keep to myself as i don't have the time to test, learn and play while worrying about social interaction).

i can see balbes point as i think price point is something that some see as a valid reason to choose one thing over another, but i can also see the other points as well but the how and why's of anyone particular maker and the decisions they make when creating a particular product will always be something that people debate, its a pointless debate that usually is mostly rooted in personal preferences as people start confusing issues without putting any real perspective on what there talking about.

doing the things i do and have done for many years i have spent considerable amounts of time looking at product construction and that includes working at levels that often involve de-capping chips (S912) and other board level techniques while trying to understand how things work at a hardware level so i tend to make my judgments and evaluations based on things like that.

Product Specs basically are just marketing bs as its usually just a list of things that something is CAPABLE of doing while most of know the reality of Capable and Actually doing are usually at the opposite ends of the spectrum which is easy to see in this box sport as pretty much off all the new products from both AML and Rockchip are running on crippled gpu stacks and without intervention by the community coders will in all likely hood stay the same way. So who is really better then the other... in my mind neither one when it comes to trying to make the argument at this level.

the real point in my opinion is this... NONE of them would really be anywhere without places like this and the others where community coders are actually creating REAL working software that pretty much none of the manufactures ever do as they hobble together something basic (canned android versions) and then start worrying about the next version with the newest chips and box appearance.

the bottom line is if you put things into perspective one can pretty much make a argument that any one box is better then the next which includes the growing sbc market. when the reality is that NONE of them provide anywhere near decent enough software for whatever box or board they are selling and are hugely leveraging on the places like this and the coders to finish off the products for them.

Quote from balbes150

Consider. N2 80 (empty Board) + 4 (case) + 30 (32GB emmc and recording adapter) + 8 (WiFi) + 6 (power supply) + 4 (remote control) + 40 shipping.

From where did you get those prices?

Empty board 63 (2GB) shipping 28. I don't need the rest.

It's clear that you don't know anything about N2.

boy you guys are like a dog with a bone that just refuses to let go. how does anyone know what another person really knows or don't know and if its his opinion then thats find as were all entitled to one. right or wrong. besides where you live and have to bring things in from can have a huge impact on what you think something costs. eg: the rockpro64 if i would have sourced from a canadian dealer was pretty much double what i paid compared to just buying it direct the plant. costs are always subject to where you live and exchange, shipping and duties.

people need solutions NOT insults based on personal opinions which always seems to get in between people when it comes to opposing views on a subject.

besides ts all BS anyways, anyone that has spent any amount of time in the sport already knows that both Rockchip and AML have already dumped boxes on the market in the last while that are running no where near their claimed spec's that either of them are running anywhere near what the specs claim and how anyone can logically make the jump that these new next gen SoC's are going to be any better when the older ones are still working on a mostly crippled gpu stack is just looking to argue for the sake of arguing.

does it really matter?... and you may be right with balbes maybe speaking about something he's not that familiar with but then again how many others are not guilty of having a opinion.

As someone that stays in the background on a lot of places this much i DO know, and that is balbes at least is someone that has proven himself with actual releases that a lot of people seem more then happy to make use of and insults are not something that makes one all fuzzy and warm and want to continue to give up their personal time by trying to help others. opinion or not, i think you guys should cut him some slack personally.

i'll crawl back into my hole now...

yo balbes, i have compiled your newest Libreelec for the rockprio64 and its looking not to shabby... still need more time to play but nice start.

Quote from balbes150

Consider. N2 80 (empty Board) + 4 (case) + 30 (32GB emmc and recording adapter) + 8 (WiFi) + 6 (power supply) + 4 (remote control) + 40 shipping. A total of more than 170. Soon there will be TV boxes on s922 and I have no doubt that their price is clearly not going to be so prohibitive. Or I can already take for this amount RK3399 with much more features (PCIe , support for video cameras, WoL, etc.), which will never be in N2. The funny thing is that rk3399 in real work, only 10-20% slower at maximum load. And given that in this topic, discussed LE (KODI), which is the most meager load, nor any benefits from a little more performance there. Much cheaper S905X2 easily replaces S922. Additional features of VPU\GPU-are now a minus, not a plus, because they have support only in closed legacy drivers from the kernel 3.14 (which are stuck in the kernel 4.9). And I don't see a lot of content that needs innovation from the G52. Regarding performance-I recommend to carefully study all the "tests" that were performed with N2 and if you are careful, you will see a lot of falsehood in them. Especially funny looks, the choice of the competitor with which to compare N2 - N1 does not exist. By the way, this is another reason why I would not rush to buy N2 - new owners of HK at any time can give an order to close this project (there is a sad experience with N1). It's funny to see the dilettantes talk about the cooling system. Under load, the chip temperature rises more than 70 degrees, this means that the radiator (which is idiotically located at the bottom and under the entire area of the motherboard) starts to work as a heater for the entire area of the motherboard. In which there are many metal conductors through which the entire structure and other components (memory, etc.) is actively heated. I.e., to heat themselves, it adds a good porchia heat from the processor. This clearly reduces their resource and overall performance. Probably this, N2 at the maximum load, shows acceleration at 10-20 % . Another problem, the heat that the components emit + additional heat from the lower radiator is "locked" in a plastic case, creating a greenhouse effect. Personally I have no desire to throw 170-180 and then spend time reworking mistakes constructors (remove the radiator and cover it from the motherboard insulating spacers and to invent how to add fan in this stupid design

I'm not interested in dealing with children.

You lost credibility when you said that plenty of cheaper TV boxes running S922x were just around the corner. The record of cheap TV boxes providing the sort of cooling offered by the N2 is about zero. At that point I stopped reading your ramblings. Cheap TV boxes will have zero cooling, zero software support and no high spec DAC. Your observations regarding the effectiveness of the cooler fly in the face of the actual real world experience of the many developers who are using pre-release samples who are reporting die temps of 40C when doing software decoding of netflix at 1080p quality.
Go bark up another tree before a rottweiler comes and bites your head off.

Shoog

buzzmarshall There are facts, there is guesswork and then there are @balbes150's opinions that are presented as facts. I don't know what motivates him to make these posts. He posted something similar on cnx-software the other day, in their N2 announcement. Just feels like he made it his mission to present the N2 in the worst light possible, regardless of what everybody else is saying.

IMHO, when developers who have the device in hand tell you that the N2 doesn't even come close to running hot, there's little room for "opinions". I'm not even going to comment on the attempts made to explain why the thermal solution is bad, because it's too ridiculous. It's enough to take a look at 2 pictures of the device to see how it is constructed, and to understand that there's no "heating" going on, and no greenhouse effect.
I'll be frank, I also raised an eyebrow when I first saw that the heatsink was mounted at the bottom, and I too had doubts about how well this sort of cooling solution will perform. But once I plugged it in and ran it for a while, all of those doubts disappeared. The N2 doesn't run hot, even under heavy load, that's fact, from experience. The way the heatsink is mounted to the CPU and RAM is excellent. There is direct contact between heatsink and chips, with proper thermal paste for TIM. There are no thermalpads here.
In addition, if the heatsink orientation bothers you THAT much, you can always just flip it over and carry on with your day.

I agree with you regarding pricing, in general. Everyone will have to decide for themselves how much they want to spend for their device, and what they are willing to pay for. The prices posted above do not coincide with what Hardkernel said the device would sell for. Obviously China will always be cheaper, as their shipping is almost always free. But then you sacrifice build and component quality, proper warranty and support. You will also have to wait 2-4 weeks (and sometimes more) for it to be delivered. So obviously everybody will decide what is best for them.

I can't comment on the GPU stacks. The performance of this device, with the current drivers in Kodi is excellent. The GUI is super smooth, everything loads many times faster than it does on my S905X devices. It easily handles SW 1080P Hi10P H264 decoding, it plays 1080P Netflix without breaking a sweat.

Quote from Shoog

You lost credibility when you said that plenty of cheaper TV boxes running S922x were just around the corner. The record of cheap TV boxes providing the sort of cooling offered by the N2 is about zero. Cheap TV boxes will have zero cooling, zero software support and no high spec DAC. Your observations regarding the effectiveness of the cooler fly in the face of the actual real world experience of the many developers who are using pre-release samples who are reporting die temps of 40C when doing software decoding of netflix at 1080p quality.

Shoog

I agree in that i doubt cheaper S922x boxes are around the corner as the existing S912 boxes are already overpriced here in Canada and the dealers will just use the new stuff as a way to over market and squueze the enduser price wise. maybe in other places in the world things are cheaper but here in Canada its the land of getting raped by the so called dealers.

The comment about zero cooling and software support is dead on, Cooling is always a good subject for debate and pretty much everyone from Apple to Microsoft and everyone in between has introduced products with poor cooling so i its kinda a given to not bother debating that issue on anything.

The only thing that i would be interested in seeing results on is at the actual wafer level of the newer SoC as sometimes going down in fab size sometimes leads to issue with a new product until its more mature. Ive already seen decapped / micrographed S912 and theres a lot of stuff on that wafer so seeing more on smaller will be interesting to see.

There's an ego thing going on here. Shame as it does diminish the other valuable contribution made.

Shoog

just come here after reading this post, is LibreELEC no longer doing releases for Hardkernel devices? I'm confused 😖

LE no longer releases anything for AMLogic chips officially. None of the Leia releases presented here are officially supported on the AML platform by LE. This is because of their policy with regard to only supporting hardware with Linux mainline support. There is nothing specific regarding Hardkernel hardware. This also applies to Rockchip hardware for exactly the same reason.

Shoog

So LE has stopped supporting Amlogic and Rockchip users? what should I use now CoreELEC?

Quote from Smurfette

So LE has stopped supporting Amlogic and Rockchip users? what should I use now CoreELEC?

If you have an amlogic box then your sw is CoreElec.

If you have RK then you have to wait (or just get rid of it).