Odroid U3 - What to expect ?

[Darksoul71]

Fellow archers,

I am in need of a new ARM-based low-power system with more computing power than my existing Raspi.
The more I read, the more I am unsure what system to use. For now my Raspi was used for HD videos via XBMC, "mass-downloading" Youtube videos, recording DVB-S2 videos and as simple NAS.

Unfortunately the Raspi is not fast enough to run XBMC plus doing something else in the background. Also the bad, flakey USB implementation has caused a lot of corrupted DVB-S2 recordings as I found out lately after spending a huge amount of time experimenting.

Currently either the ODROID U3 or the Banana Pi are on my radar. So here are my questions to you experienced users:
- Are the kernel sources available unter arch to build my own kernel drivers ? This is important since my DVB-S2 device comes from DVBSky and thus is not directly supported from the V4L maintree.
- Does video acceleration work on the Odroid U3 for 720p and 1080p h264 videos ?
- What performance can one expect from an Odroid U3 as "PC" when running a graphical desktop ? I am not thinking about anything wild. More like reading e-mails, surfing the web, watching some youtube videos or listening to MP3s.

Edit: I just found that x86-based arch has some packages for my DVBSky box:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/media-build-dvbsky/

For me DVB-support is a mandatory feature

TIA,
D$

[Enverex]

The U3 works well as a desktop replacement. I often had 5 or so IDEs open, several notepad style programs and a browser with a dozen or so tabs open at once when I was using it for development on a robot I was building. The only time it seemed a little sluggish compared to a desktop was on crazy complicated web-pages, but that's likely a 2D rendering issue rather than a hardware issue. I kept forgetting I wasn't using a full desktop.

A quad core A9 is going to be considerably faster than a dual core A7, which is something to remember.

I couldn't get XBMC to work though when I was using Arch on it. Not sure if anything has changed in the many months since I last used it.

[Darksoul71]

Thanks for your reply !

Unfortunately I am currently on a budget. So I shifted my plans a bit towards the future. Also I am not shure anymore if the Bananapi might not be the better option because it both has a SATA interface as well as a 1GBit NIC.

XBMC would be still nice

[AlexisTM]

Dear,

I tried Odroid U3 and I'm working (now) on the XU3 lite. Each works well but you should add a cooler on the Odroid-U3 because it heats too much without.

I prefer the XU3-lite for :
* 4 USB2.0
* 1 USB3.0
* Case included
* Heatsink ventilator included
* eMMC 5.0 (vs 4.5 for the U3)

If you want to replace your desktop, consider to buy an eMMC, I had a µSD on the U3 (15 mo/s read) , it was so much slower than this eMMC (150mo/s read). For every uses the U3 will do the job.

[Darksoul71]

@AlexisTM:
Thanks a lot for your reply ! I am aware of possible heat issues with the Odroid U3 and would add an active heatsink when buying it. The XU3-Lite looks interesting but also costs a lot more than the Ordoid (~ 130€). I also agree on the eMMC since even faster SD cards usually are still a lot slower than eMMC cards and also often wear out quite quickly if you access them a lot. On my Raspi the first SD card died quite quickly.