Last week-end, I finally received TP-Link TL-WDR7500 router (Chinese variant of Arched C7) router, so I could complete my review of Nagrace HPH NT-V6 including 802.11ac Wi-Fi. I’ve already listed the specifications, and taken a few pictures of the device and the board, and today I’ll focus on the test results. I’ll start by giving my first impressions, going through the user interface and settings, before testing video playback, as well as benchmarking networking, storage and overall system performance, playing some games, and testing most hardware features of this mini PC. First Boot, Settings and First Impressions A simple infrared remote control is provided with the device, and I’ve quickly tried it by inserting two AAA batteries, and it works fine, but for the rest of testing I switched to Mele F10 Deluxe air mouse to control the device, as it’s much more user friendly than any IR remote. Before […]
Performance Comparison of Amlogic S805 and S802 Processors
Amlogic S805 is a quad core Cortex A5 processor for entry levels Android media players, S802 is a quad core processor with faster Cortex A9 cores clocked @ 2.0 GHz, and S812 is an upcoming upgrade of S802 with HEVC/H.265 hardware video decoding, and Gigabit Ethernet support. I’ve already written about the features differences between AML8726-MX, S802, S805, and S812, but since I now have some devices I can make direct comparison between S802 and S805. It’s quite clear on paper than S802 should be significantly faster than S805, so the only question to answer is by how much, but I’ve been asked to do it, and it could be a fun exercise. The hardware devices used for the comparison are two Android media players: EM6Q-MXQ for S805 and Probox2 EX for S802, and I used the results from three Android benchmarks: Antutu 5.1, Vellamo 3.x, and 3Dmark Ice Storm […]
A80 OptimusBoard Development Board Pictures and Benchmarks
A80 OptimusBoard is a development board featuring the latest AllWinner A80 SoC with 8 ARM Cortex A15/A7 cores in big.LITTLE configuration, and a PowerVR GC6230 GPU. Availability was announced about 2 weeks ago for $345, but partially thanks to reader comments on CNX Software, Merrii Technology decided to lower the price to $169 (and $50+ for shipping) to stay competitive against similar boards such as Hardkernel ODROID-XU3. I’ve now received a sample for evaluation. I won’t go again through the specs, but today I’ll take a few pictures of the board, and provide benchmark results to compare them to the ones I got with Rockchip RK3288. Normally, I would also play with the SDK provided with the board, but sadly (and amazingly), there’s currently no such SDK for A80 OptimusBoard, except a leaked Linux SDK which failed to build with recent tools and operating systems. A80 OptimusBoard Pictures I’ve received […]
Intel Atom Z3580 MooreField SoC Shown to Outperform Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 in Graphics Benchmark
This is not exactly an independent benchmark, as Intel provided the results showing an Intel Atom Z3580 SoC with PowerVR G6430 @ 533 MHz outperform a Snapdragon 801 with Adreno 330 GPU @ 578 MHz (Galaxy S5) in FutureMark’s 3DMark benchmark by 20997 to 18144, or a little over 15%. We’ve seen several CPU benchmarks before where Intel often has a edge over ARM based solution, but the previous generation with Intel Graphics was a bit weak on the graphics side, and this test seems to confirm, the new Intel smartphone SoC should provide very good graphics performance. It appears Atom Z3580 might have also outperformed Snapdragon 805 with Adreno 420, as Anandtech reported an overall score of 19,698 in 3Dmarks with Qualcomm Snpadragon S805 mobile development platform (MDP), and noticed it was not the most GPU intensive test there is. So it’s still possible the higher score found on Intel’s […]
Intel Bay Trail Z3700 Series Overview, Benchmarks, Hardware, Documentation and Linux Support
After seeing the discussion about ARM vs x86 (Bay trail) for the future Dragon Pyra open source game console, I’ve realized many people, including myself, do not know about the different resources available to develop hardware and software for Intel Bay Trail SoCs for tablets such as Atom Z3740 and Z3770, so I decided to have a look. Intel Atom Bay Trail Z3700 Series Overview Intel Z3600 series and Z3700 series are respectively dual core and quad core Bay Trail-T SoCs for Android and Windows 8 tablets. There are 4 quad core models: Z3740, Z3740D, Z3770, and Z3770D, and 2 dual core processors: Z3680 and Z3680D. The dual core versions are reserved for Android only, and there’s no product page on Intel for now, so I’ll focus this post on Z3700 series only. I have no idea what the “D” in Z3740D is for, except it;’s not related to Desktop, […]