Best hardware

Hello guys,

Just looking for a general idea what you think is the best hardware to run RISC OS on? Maybe this topic has been discussed before but I couldn’t really find anything or nothing recent at least. I do have two Pi’s which work somewhat well but ideally a more ‘professional’ solution would be nicer, possibly thinking about picking up one of those Pi-Ceed Top monitors or a Element-14 Desktop case with the mSATA expansion board.

-Jay

The best hardware is the Pi3. Because it is extremely cheap, and the CPU is comparatively fast. Its GPU can easily output 4K video.

But oh dear, it is ARMv8 so compatibility is not as good as with the ARMv7 solutions, and I/O is slow (either via USB, or integrated SD-card, and only 100 MBit/s Ethernet).

So the best hardware is the ARMX6. It is not so cheap, but its GPU can also output 4K video and it has fast I/O – Gigabit Ethernet as well as S-ATA to connect your speedy SSD.

But oh dear, it only has one S-ATA port and the CPU is not exactly high speed (Cortex-A9, 1 GHz).

So the best hardware is the Titanium. It is not so cheap, but it has fast I/O – Gigabit Ethernet and no less than four S-ATA ports. And its CPU is by far the fastest in RISC OS land (Cortex-A15, 1.5 GHz). And it is dual-head capable!

But oh dear, while being dual-head, its single head GPU capabilities are rather limited and it cannot even output QHD.

So the best hardware…depends on what you want and need!

Good points. It’s actually nice to know there’s a few more choices than I initially thought. You’re right. Depends on my needs.

I have two Pi’s which work somewhat well but ideally a more ‘professional’ solution would be nice

The Pi is very professional. and works perfectly. Very stable.

Think you’ve missed my point John. It’s what I said after that, I’m talking about an actual setup similar to a conventional desktop PC.

you’ve missed my point John. It’s what I said after that, I’m talking about an actual setup similar to a conventional desktop PC.

There are a number of very nice cases for the Pi, and many can be fastened to the back of a monitor giving a very useful setup similar to a desktop PC; but without using any desk apace.

I have a Crucial SSD Drive on my primary Pi and all of the cabling is nicely secured (out of site) on the back of an HDMI monitor.

If you’re looking for a “desktop computer” rather than a pi-type setup (although as John says, you can put a Pi in a box too), you probably want to be looking at our (R-Comp Interactive) ARMX6 or TiMachine products. You can find info at http://www.armini.co.uk/ In the interest of fairness, CJE Micros also offer competing products.

To my knowledge, by far the most popular of the desktop computers is our ARMX6 unit (it has sold more than any of its previous models combined) – it has been on the market longer than the TiMachine, but offers (as Steffen said) a nice all-round package at a middle-of-the-road price. The TiMachine represents more performance, and we’ve worked to do some nice stuff with the dual monitor capabilities (inc 2 outputs into one higher-resolution screen), but to maximise the benefit there means the biggest spend.

So, a lot is going to depend what your budget is. We regularly release tested OS and other updates/upgrades for both ARMX6 and TiMachine – the former had a major update last week, whilst the TiMachine saw upgrades a month or so back. For example, the latest ARMX6 one included support for 3840×1600 super-wide displays, BASIC with hardware VFP support, and RAM performance improvements. The last TiMachine updates also focused on allowing higher monitor resolutions on supported displays, and well as enhancing the dual-monitor experience. We also run our own community support services for our machine owners and so on.

The Pi has the advantage of its price, and that alone is enough to win it quite a following, but you’ll find most of the developers and serious users running on ARMX6 or Titanium-based hardware. Basically, if you’re looking to dip your toe in, start with a Pi. If you’re already familiar with RISC OS and know you’ll enjoy it, it may be worth looking at one of the higher spec machines.

Note – I’ve not listed much in the way of tech specs because Steffen has already covered that.

RPi, ARMX6 support HDMIAudio, Titanium not.
On Titanium you can start Linux from RISC OS and with rootfs on SATA HD it is fast enough for the most things.
For the other you have to change the card.

USB Audio with a resolution greater than 16 bit has problems on a pi.

Audio with a resolution greater than 16bit has problems on my ears!

Jay: lots of useful and relevant stuff above, but you might also like to look at http://www.svrsig.org/HowTo.htm which also discusses and compares the various RISC OS hardware options.