Bad first experience with rock64. Performs worse than my pi :(

[Arglebargle]

Hi All,

I got a rock64 (4G) thinking it would be an upgrade to my raspberry pi 2 B v1.1 . However I was surprised to discover that it performed worse than my pi.

My experience so far has been:

With raspberry pi:
- install rasbpian
- install ubeify (a wrapper around omxplayer) to use the pi as a media player. the gui kinda sucks but it can handle 1080p no sweat and works well with my 4k tv
- firefox / iceweasel is slow and can't be used for youtube.

The pi was easy to setup. There were literally no extra steps other than flashing my sd card with raspbian and running the ubeify install script.

With rock64
- wanted to do a custom install of debian (thought this was possible) but couldn't because bios wouldn't show up on hdmi without an os
- installed armbian image on to my sd card (debian 9)
- firefox behaves not much better than raspberry pi. youtube incredibly and not usable
- video incredibly choppy with vlc
- attempted to use ubeify (omxplayer) and performance much worse than my pi. Video stutters and stalls.


What gives? I thought the rock64 was a more powerful computer and could do what my pi did but better (i.e. so I could use firefox and vlc on it no sweat).
Also the rock64 runs hot too. The aluminum case feels warm vs the pi which seems to manage power better.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I know I'm not the first to attempt this, but finding information on how to get a lightweight computer for multimedia purposes hasn't given many useful results to me.

-ekg

Well, this is disappointing to read. I have a Pi3b+ and reading the specs of 4gb instead of 1gb and a usb3 port, I just ordered this yesterday. I figured it would be a substantial performance boost.
So, how is their return policy

Check the post above yours and follow the directions. The Rock64 is an incredibly capable hobbyist board, but you have to actually do a little work to set it up. The Pi is easier to get working out of the box, but with about 10 extra minutes of setup the Rock64 utterly destroys the Pi in any performance contest.