Initial Impressions (with CM4-108000)

uConsole
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This review is going to be short for now because I just got time to tinker it for less than a day. But I’ll be updating should there be anything new.

1. The wait:

I ordered my unit(Silver, wifi only, CM4 Lite, without core ) on May 19th 2024, and received it on July 12th, so all together less than 2 months of waiting.
I wouldn’t say it is ideal but I have waited longer for orders from AliExpress so nothing to complain about.

If you want to receive your unit faster, go for the non-core version!

2. The Assembling

Not challenging for me. Everything was clearly stated. Excepted that I riped off the glued seal on the speaker. But other than that, nothing else worth mentioning. I am confident that anyone would be able to assemble it.

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But I did notice that the back doesn’t fit perfectly. You can see a gap between. Maybe it is the thermal pad, maybe it is just the case itself. But it shouldn’t be a problem, I guess…

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You can actually fit some A4 paper into the gap

3. The Actual Use

3.1 the Processing Power Test

I flashed the Stock Raspberry pi OS and also the Bookworm OS (which is a new experience for me) and I have to say I like the RBP OS better. It is actually easier to use than I expected. This would be a good start for Linux, but I am a rookie to Linux, so what do I know.

I don’t know anything that can run a bench mark so I managed to do it in a different way:

I’ll let it calculate all prime numbers between 1 and 100,000 in the most stupid way ever and see how long it takes

My laptop runs windows 11 on an Intel i7 10750H processor and it takes around 30 seconds.

And for the uconsole, which has a CM4 lite 108000 core and a 64gb A1 V10 SD card(I don’t know if V30 card would make a difference), it takes around 2 minutes. Meanwhile, the CPU use is around 90%. Overall, it is quite impressive.

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3.2 the Display
The display is really good, and bright enough to use under the sun. I am really satisfied with it, except that it is quite small

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I will be updating should there be anything new.

Peace :v:

Update:
4. Benchmarks
I used Geekbench 6 to run the benchmark on CPU and compared that with my 4-year old budget gaming laptop and the result is as follow:

Pi CM4:

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Laptop: MSI GF63 thin with i7 10750H and gtx1650 max-q on Extreme Performance Mode

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It takes significantly longer to process and the terminal recognize the chipset as BCM2835, which I Googled and it says this is a KERNEL issue, but is normal.

Battery Life
For my use case, which is watching YouTube, learning Python on VS Code, and check Reddit and etc, for maximum brightness(I do this under the sun), the battery lasts about 4 hours.

Batteries are 2 protrcted cells with capacity of 3500mh each, made by Ansmann(My friend gave this for me as a gift).

Anyway, this is for now and I’ll keep updating.

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Hmm, I’m thinking your “benchmark” only covers raw compute. Might I suggest using Geekbench or Phoronix?

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@mterencelao Thanks! I would be sure to update that once I get used to installing softwares on termiņals…

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I don’t know the methodology of Fido’s Pi Charts on the RPi Forums, but it’s been a fair comparison of what to expect from them IMO.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=227177&start=525

Since the Computer Module 4 and 4B are two processors separated by a common board, I wagered they would be a similar outcome. (In most tasks, will meet or exceed a Core 2 Duo or AMD A6, but the Intel N100 beats it handily.)

For the cost, still worth it. Even with the A4 pocket bonus, it still feels sturdier than most laptops $100 higher in price.

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@uninventive Thanks, pal, that’s good to know.

Maybe this is just for me, but I wouldn’t worry too much about performance because, first of all, I don’t play the latest AAA games.

And low performance would prevent me from multitasking, whichi always leads to browsing social media and YouTube…

My cushion still uses an ancient desktop with Intel core 2 duo e8400 running windows 7 with HDD instead of SSD. Yesterday I tried it and I have to say it is still usable. You can basically do daily tasks like office, emails and etc.

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About display - are you using display’s native resolution? I found that the standard RaspbianOS display is almost useless to me - UI elements and fonts are too small for my eyes

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@RandomDIY Yes, I am using the default resolution, since i only use VS Code and Chromium, I’ll just zoom the window and it is fine at 2x and 3x for VS Code and 150% for Chromium

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The default resolution is 1280x720 if I’m not mistaken. This should allow for slightly better performance than you’d get with higher resolution.
As far as linux goes, you can go pretty lightweight in terms of system resource usage. I’m gonna make a few assumptions here, but I believe the clockworkpi is based on raspberry pi os, which itself is based on debian. By default it ships with LXDE which is fully featured desktop environment - once you know your way around, you’ll realize that a lot of work can be done within terminal on it’s own - for example, instead of VSCode, there’s neovim which while rather barebone out of the box, can be turned into fully fledged IDE with just a couple edits in your config file. There’s calcure for your calendar and task management needs. abook as a contact book, mpd combined with ncmpcpp for your music player and ID3 tag editing, lf as your file manager, newsboat to subscribe to RSS feeds, mpv as video player. These are just an example of apps I personally use on daily basis.
Eventually you’ll realize that you don’t need a fully fledged desktop environment and will be able to custom-tailor your experience by making an environment of your own - tiling window managers are quite popular especially on r/unixporn posts - more often than not, these people use one of the window managers such as dwm, i3 hyprland, awesomewm or sway combined with a bar app such as polybar or waybar. There are a lot of options out there.
Now some of these packages might not be available in the main repository and trying to install them with sudo apt install might throw an error. In these cases you have several options - install and enable flatpaks, install nix package manager, see if it’s available as .appimage or learn to build from source. I’m currently messing around my raspberry pi5 finding out what’s possible and what’s not, though in case of uConsole, things might be different - can’t wait to get my hands on mine and see what the little thing is capable of.

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In my messing about, I learned it’s not a 1280x720 display, it’s a 720x1280 display turned on its side. Noticed this when some apps face sideways on Full Screen mode that don’t honor the desktop rotation setting (270 degrees).

Other giveaway, vertical tearing on fast scroll. Screen tearing is a common artifact in LCDs, which is not noticed outside of gaming for most users because the tearing is horizontal (a “motion rip” appears when moving left to right) instead of vertical (the same rip from up to down). Why Vertical Sync is turned on for most games by default, helps to minimize that appearance.

(Not a complaint, an observation. Most phones and small screens under 10" diag. employ this technique.)

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Hmmm, I see you’re using the official images. Actually, that is a bug exclusive to the Clockwork images. and they’re highly unlikely to fix that. Add to it the fact that the kernel is woefully outdated.

You may be able to resolve that issue by installing a more recent kernel here.

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Thanks for your info. Just received mine and realized there is a forum.

I overclocked the cm4 to 1.8ghz so I assume the benchmark would be slightly better, but I haven’t ran it yet.

Just the screen is hurting my eyes., specially when I use it indoors.

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You can turn down the brightness, right? [Fn] + [ , ] (down) / [ . ] (up)

And what distro are you on?

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I am using stock OS that comes with the package.

The thing about the brightness is that it is still too bright for me at the lowest.

I don’t like the sun. I live in the basement and don’t go out very often so it could just be me. But wearing a pair of sunglasses and using it at the peak brightness is fine for me.

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I’m not sure how low the stock OSes backlight got but i know on my bookworm image it gets real low. if you have a spare SD card give it a spin.

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Brightness is actually controlled by passing values to /sys/class/backlight/backlight@0/brightness
max brightness can be found out by
cat /sys/class/backlight/backlight@0/max_brightness
it’s 9. Minimal is 0, it actually turns it off, so, actual minimal one is 1:
echo "1" > /sys/class/backlight/backlight@0/brightness

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@u0d7i @Rex Thanks, I’ll sure try it out!

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Random musing - why is the concentration of Jesse so high in this forum? I’ve never experienced this before.

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Usually they’re Mikes.

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My Chinese name is Lau Kim Fat. So naturally, my English name is Kim.
But after browsing this forum, I decided to join the ‘Legion of Jesse’.

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I find that hilarious :joy:.

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