I got this mini PC with only 50% PCB inside for less an 280,000 VND. And it renders 4K indeed, I checked the console and terminal on my 4K monitor. But the rest is rather discouraging:
- CPU Rockchip RK3229 with 4x Cortex-A7 (ARMv7-A) 32bit with 1.4 GHz
- RAM 1 GB DDR3
- HDD eMMC 8GB
- 100 MBit Ethernet adapter
At least it got some Armbian support. I installed it on February 4th, 2024 on the eMMC and it’s still running in February 2026! Cortex-A7 was actually used in the Raspberry Pi2.
2024-02-03 Real hardware
Above I stated the hardware values I could actually use. The box it came in claimed 16 GB RAM and 256 GB NVM, even the Android 7 kernel reported these values. But the hardware is just not there. Even the memory is a unique combination of DDR3 and eMMC in one chip that was once used in a Samsung Galaxy phone. Unsold parts seem to have a second life!
At least Rockchip is supporting the Linux community, so the CPU has good support. It was really easy to install Armbian, and handles most tasks fine within its limitations. It runs Python 3.11.2 and gcc 12.2.0. The prime benchmark in Python was executed more than 4x faster than the Raspberry Pi 1 I got 2013.
2025-05-11 Speed test in Python and Prime
The simple python program to test the speed of some other machines was also started on this little box. The first test were done very fast, even to 1,000,000 with the updated algorithm took 9.9 seconds. That’s 4.5x faster than the Raspberry Pi 1, is 8.8x faster than a ESP32 and 49x faster than a ESP8266 with 80MHz on Micropython. But the required time increases exponentially. It was 5 days later, on May 16, that the calculation to 2,147,483,647 was finished. And it took another 10 days to finish the calculation to 2E32-1: 4,294,967,295 after 894664.4 seconds or 10h8. Documented at GitHub. Speed in C? See below.
How about the Arduino Mega 2560 that was connected to the USB port and reporting the result over serial? Arduino C could be faster, and with 8 kByte of RAM there is no way that Python would run. Still, only one core, 8 bit an 16 MHz it took 598.9 seconds to calculate the primes with the same algorithm on the Mega - 60x slower. 1400 MHz vs. 16 MHz87x more, 32bit vs. 8 bit is 8x more but Python vs. C is at least 10x slower. Even confirmed with the rk3229.
2026-02-05 Update
The machine was running for a few months to be the power source and monitor for my Arduino MEGA 2560 running prime calculations (see here on GitHub) and getting the output over minicom. Logging in over ssh to get the latest data.
On 2026-02-01 I finally read out the data from the EEPROM: It took 2293885.75 seconds to calculate all primes until 1,000,000,000 calculated with the improved algorithm. With only 8 kByte of RAM the Mega has space for 3632 primes, so the largest is 33923. That’s enough to check the numbers until 1,150,769,929. It worked! 2293885.75 seconds is equal to 26 days.
The software update brought the system now to Armbian 25.11.2+ bookworm with a 6.1.63 LTS kernel. Armbian will probably continue to use Debain 12 (Bookworm) for a little while longer. Support until 2028 is planned.
Speed in C
The CPU was waiting for this. If it takes 10 days for Python to 2E32, how much faster would C be? To compile is rather easy: gcc prime_logging.c -o prime_logging -lm
Results: