Last Updated on April 18, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Jean-Luc Aufranc
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.
Jean-Luc Aufranc did also a very detailed study about the power consumption about the Raspberry Pi zero 2 w, which we found very interesting:
That is how we became interested in the reviews about SBC’s of Jean-Luc Aufranc.
The ODROID-XU4Q was reviewed by Jean-Luc Aufranc and is available in Switzerland (but not the Raspberry Pi 4 and zero w2, and the Orange Pi5 not yet as well). These are two main reasons why we are interested in this device:
If you don’t have time to watch the 20-minutes video, basically considering the costs of the board, and 2GB RAM, I’m pleasantly surprised by the performance of the board with accelerated 3D graphics working well in demos and some webGL demos, H.264 hardware decoding in Kodi and FFmpeg working well up to 1080p, and Youtube up to 720p, fast program load times thanks to the eMMC flash module, and decent multi-tasking ability.
For the latter however, you must be aware of the 2GB RAM limitation, as if the memory is almost full (and virtual memory is not enabled), the system will still run, but very very slowly, almost as it had hung. Once I close one or two programs it run normally again. Some webGL application are not working well (e.g. Google Experiments), but I was told it could because they may be based on OpenGL instead of OpenGL ES. Youtube works well up to 720p in Chromium, but you can also select 1080p, but don’t – just don’t – do it as video will not be smooth. The worst experience in my little test was with Candy Crush Saga which took about 2 minutes 30 seconds to load the game and one level, but once you’ve started playing all is well. I was told it’s because of complex HTML5 code. In the past I played the game on Intel Bay Trail systems with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage, and it loaded reasonably fast, but it’s not directly comparable, as the game was still based on Adobe Flash at the time.
All in all Ubuntu 18.04 on ODROID-XU4Q board was a fairly satisfying experience, despite some performance issues with Candy Crush Saga, in most cases the system performed well and reliably with fast programs loading times, H.264 hardware video coding, 3D graphics acceleration for OpenGL ES (3.1), and most features working as expected. As we’ve seen there are limitations, but this is to be expected for a low cost board.