Radxa ROCK 5B Blue Edition

Quite an interesting device

I'm playing with it for now. I want to use it as a development server for development via IPad. But I praise the eMMC and M.2 port. So the data is on the SSD and the system on the eMMC. Great combination!

Great SBC for building a DIY media server

I opted for the 32gb variant and paired with a 4tb NVME, 64gb emmc for the OS (Armbian in my case) as well as a few Radxa accessories like their fanless heat sink case (seen in the bottom left of the picture). The board itself is extremely fast after making the necessary OS tweaks to actually utilize the GPU & RAM. In my setup, I wanted to build a replacement for my old Raspberry Pi3 to act as a local file/download server as well something powerful enough to actually handle some media encoding. **One piece of advice for anyone else considering paring this board with the passive cooling case and an NVME drive… Make sure you get an NVME thermal pad (at least 3mm) to dissipate heat via the bottom of the case. I noticed a drop from 70°c to 55°c in my NVME as well as a drop of about 6-7°c on my CPU. Overall this is a great little setup that I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys tinkering with hardware & Linux. I’m glad I went with this Rock5b instead of the Raspberry Pi5

The product has arrived, Thanks