NicoD

Release info:
https://www.armbian.com/newsflash/armbian-20-11-tamandua/
 
Downloads:
https://www.armbian.com/download/
 

It most of the times means a replacement has been installed and this package isn't needed anymore. You'll often have that on a fresh install after doing update/upgrade, or from installing and removing many programs.
So you get packages that aren't used by anything. So it gives you the message it may be removed with autoremove.
If everything works, don't care about it.

Donations reached the goal. 
To everybody who helped. Big thank you. This will be well used. I've seen the server and it's a monster.

Next goal maybe different desktop implementations, with GPU and maybe VPU if possible. Who could we hire? What cost?
 
But before that there's already enough new things coming soon. And the server will be in good use or that.

From the whole team. Thank you.
NicoD

It's mainline Focal 5.8 with panfrost. @Salvador Liébana did build the image. I'm just a messenger spreading the word.
His team is behind TwisterOS for the Raspberry Pi. They've got tons of portable apps to make life easy for noobs to experienced user. Will be an amzazig addition to armbian.
This is a preview of what's to come for more SBCs. Certainly when panfrost is ready for Odroid N2/N2+

They've got a whole club on Discord for every project of the group. A lot happens there. 
@Salvador Liébana Is it possible to write a build script for your image that makes use of ours.(write down all yours steps) Then it will take a big load of your back in the long time.
You then always are along with armbian changes. And maybe later we can merge this to te desktop project. Then you can build it all without having to set up something manually. I hate to see too much forks. People better work all together to improve that what we build. Cheers.

I am also very happy that we manage to cover this purchase together in so little no time. This was also a live test of our crowdfunding system. It works surprisingly well and we will certainly use it for our other projects in the future.
 
As you already noticed, server was already purchased and is currently under evaluation. This upcoming release will already be build on it. We already built few nightly builds and speed bump from aging dual xeon is hard to describe  
 
Thank you all for showing us support!
 

Paypal donations and forum donations are not synchronised even paypal user would be the same  Sorting those things is yet another project, but at the project location it will remain at sight who supported server purchase. 

Donations reached the goal. 
To everybody who helped. Big thank you. This will be well used. I've seen the server and it's a monster.

Next goal maybe different desktop implementations, with GPU and maybe VPU if possible. Who could we hire? What cost?
 
But before that there's already enough new things coming soon. And the server will be in good use or that.

From the whole team. Thank you.
NicoD

Here my instruction video on how to install Armbian Reforged and set it up. 
 

Armbian Reforged has been released. Here my video on how to install it and set it up on your RK3399 device.

Here again the download link : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gQtgWz2pH2TX9Qs_bcDU9zn7w4edfcVf/view?fbclid=IwAR0SRSC8M_1_qm825n4Bd7bqjLmO30qTpFo73qQQga-TC_LRuc2BVFcGzKU
Enjoy

thanks for the post nico! well, with rk3399 across all.my team we will.make some severe changes on this armbian build. we will move to xfce abd rebrand the build as TwisterOS armbian. the idea would be to start with RK3399, then S922x, not only N2 bc they are competitors arising and also bc you know I don't like N2. cheers! 

They probably don't have the knowledge on how to keep their build up to date and improve on it.
Building a basic image that boots vs a well working image with most features working. That's a big difference.

They've always been the worst student in the class when it comes to software support. While selling like 2nd most I believe after Raspberry.
 
Having such bad reputation software wise did bring Armbian to a higher level.
So you might say we need them as much as they need us.

I don't know what that is with Xunlong and Sinovoip. They seem to have good board designer. But the worst sales and software teams.
http://www.orangepi.org/
Orange Pi™ is a trademark of the Shenzhen Xunlong Software CO They protect their trademarks. Now wouldn't you think a sofware company could write, hmm, maybe software... for their own products???

I do like that BPi/Sinovoip now has found its own niche in the marked.
But no other company has spammed my YT channel and mail boxes as much. While wanting to make free advertisement on my channel, but not wanting to support me with one of their products. I'll never review BPi again. Ungrateful.
http://www.banana-pi.org/
Our engineering team is comprised of both experienced and innovative engineers to design and produce the best PCB possible. Our parent company SinoVoip and Foxconn has extensive connections with various large SoC and chipset manufactures to bring you the best technologies available. Our warm and professional service team will communicate with you and offer help and assistance throughout your project with us. Those first 2 lines I could agree upon. The last one....

Hi all.
I wanted to put some light on the fact that you now can run some x86 Windows and Linux programs and games on the RK3399 with Box86.

I have a topic about it in my lonely "Gaming on ARM club"
I've made a preview video about it last week.
I've done some further tests. It is just amazing. Plays way better than the RPi4. Tho not yet as many things work.
@Salvador Liébana made prebuild images with Box86 preinstalled, and with many other emulators.

You can download it here : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gQtgWz2pH2TX9Qs_bcDU9zn7w4edfcVf/view?fbclid=IwAR0SRSC8M_1_qm825n4Bd7bqjLmO30qTpFo73qQQga-TC_LRuc2BVFcGzKU

Has been tested on many RK3399 devices.

After burning on the SD-card/eMMC. Set /boot/armbianEnv.txt to point to the correct .dtb file.
On first boot change the user password and the root password. Default password is 123456
 
passwd Type default password 123456 and 2x your new password sudo passwd Type user password and 2x new root password Update and upgrade
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade Then update Box86
Applications -> Emulators -> Update Box86

For HDMI sound you might need to disable the other audio device since it always defaults to it on reboot.
Volume control -> Configuration -> disable the one that's not HDMI audio

With M4/M4V2 you might need to set the governor to performance. Otherwise it is unstable. Be sure to use heatsink + fan to keep it cool. Or clock it lower with big cores for lower temperatures.
Best to use "sudo armbian-config", you can also set your locales with it.
Or set manually by changing /etc/default/cpufrequtils

To start a windows program or game
wine program.exe For Linux x86 something like
wine start.sh
You can switch Windows versions if something doesn't work. For older games/programs for example Windows 98, newer XP...
To do this go to Applications -> Emulators -> Wine Configuration

You can also mount virtual drives there.

Not only is this amazing to be able to play your favorite old games n an RK3399.
It can also be a way to replace old x86 machines running legacy x86 software.
So this really is "a game changer" for ARM.

Now this works I can't wait to see this working on the Odroid N2/N2+. But for that we'll have to be a bit more patient.

Cheers.

Thanks so much for posting your videos.  I recently picked up a number of Rock64 1-GB SBCs off Amazon for $8-$15 (they were used as part of a security monitoring platform that seems to be dumping inventory).  I'm just getting started building simple home sensor and monitoring projects.  Your Armbian tutorials and insights have been extremely helpful.  

Hi all.
@Werner and I have been working on an instruction video on how to install Armbian headless on your SBC.
Here it is.
Greetings,
NicoD

I got my hands on a "Set 9" Orange Pi Lite + GC2035 camera a while back and I've finally been able to put together a self-contained object detection device using Tensorflow, without sending any image data outside for processing.

Basically, its a python Flask application that captures frames from the camera using a GStreamer pipeline. It runs them through a Tensorflow object detection model and spits out the same frame with extra metadata about objects it found, and renders a box around them. Using all four cores of the H2 it can do about 2-3 fps. The app keeps track of the count of all object types it has seen and exposes the metrics in prometheus format, for easy creation of graphs of what it sees over time with Grafana
 


I'll explain some of the more interesting aspects of how I got this to work here in case anyone else wants to try to get some use out of this very inexpensive hardware, and I am grateful to the many posts on this forum that helped me along the way!

Use a 3.4 kernel with custom GC2035 driver

Don't bother with anything new - the GC2035 was hopeless on any newer builds of Armbian I tried. The driver available at https://github.com/avafinger/gc2035.git provided far better image quality. After installing the updated GC2035, I run the following to get the camera up and running:
 
sudo sunxi-pio -m "PG11<1><0><1><1>" sudo modprobe gc2035 hres=1 sudo modprobe vfe_v4l2  
Install Tensorflow lite runtime
 
Google provides a tensorflow runtime as a binary wheel built for python 3.5 armv7. When pip installing, expect it to take 20 minutes or so as it will need to compile numpy (the apt repo version isn't recent enough)
 
wget https://github.com/google-coral/pycoral/releases/download/release-frogfish/tflite_runtime-2.5.0-cp35-cp35m-linux_armv7l.whl sudo -H pip3 install tflite_runtime-2.5.0-cp35-cp35m-linux_armv7l.whl  

Build opencv for python 3.5 bindings

This was something I tried everything I could to avoid, but I just could not get the colour conversion from the YUV format of the GC2035 to an RGB image using anything else I found online, so I was dependent on a single color-conversion utility function.
 
To build the 3.4.12 version for use with python (grab lunch - takes about 1.5 hours :-O )

 
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/atomic/local -DSOFTFP=ON \ -DBUILD_TESTS=OFF -D BUILD_PERF_TESTS=OFF -D BUILD_opencv_python2=0 \ -D BUILD_opencv_python3=1 -D WITH_GSTREAMER=ON \ -D PYTHON3_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/python3.5 .. make -j 4 make install # Check that ~/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages should now have the cv2 shlib export PYTHONPATH=/home/atomic/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages  
 
Build gstreamer plugin for Cedar H264 encoder
 
This is required to get a working gstreamer pipeline for the video feed:
git clone https://github.com/gtalusan/gst-plugin-cedar ./autogen.sh sudo make install # When trying against a pipc I had to copy into .local to get gstreamer to recognise it cp /usr/local/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgst* ~/.local/share/gstreamer-1.0/plugins/ # Confirm that plugin is installed: gst-inspect-1.0 cedar_h264enc  
Processing images
 
The full app source is on github, but the more interesting parts that took me some time to figure out were about getting python to cooperate with gstreamer:
 
Frames from the camera arrive to python at the end of the pipeline as an appsink. The Gstreamer pipeline I configured via python was:
 
src = Gst.ElementFactory.make("v4l2src") src.set_property("device", "/dev/video0") src.set_property("do-timestamp", 1) filt = Gst.ElementFactory.make("capsfilter") filt.set_property("caps", Gst.caps_from_string("video/x-raw,format=NV12,width=800,height=600,framerate=12/1")) p1 = Gst.ElementFactory.make("cedar_h264enc") p2 = Gst.ElementFactory.make("h264parse") p3 = Gst.ElementFactory.make("rtph264pay") p3.set_property("config-interval", 1) p3.set_property("pt", 96) p4 = Gst.ElementFactory.make("rtph264depay") p5 = Gst.ElementFactory.make("avdec_h264") sink = Gst.ElementFactory.make("appsink", "sink") pipeline_elements = [src, filt, p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, sink] sink.set_property("max-buffers", 10) sink.set_property('emit-signals', True) sink.set_property('sync', False) sink.connect("new-sample", on_buffer, sink)
This pipeline definition causes a callback on_buffer to be called every time a frame is emitted from the camera:

 
def on_buffer(sink: GstApp.AppSink, data: typing.Any) -> Gst.FlowReturn: # Sample will be a 800x900 byte array in a very frustrating YUV420 format sample = sink.emit("pull-sample") # Gst.Sample ... conversion to numpy array # rgb is now in a format that Pillow can easily work with # These two calls are what you compiled opencv for 1.5 hours for :-D rgb = cv2.cvtColor(img_arr, cv2.COLOR_YUV2BGR_I420) rgb = cv2.cvtColor(rgb, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB)
Once you have a nice pillow RGB image, it's easy to pass this into a Tensorflow model, and there is tons of material on the web for how you can do things like that. For fast but not so accurate detection, I used the ssdlite_mobilenet_v2_coco pretrained model, which can handle about 0.5 frames per second per core of the H2 Allwinner CPU.
 
There are some problems I still have to work out. Occasionally the video stream stalls and I haven't figured out how to recover from this without restarting the app completely. The way frame data is passed around tensorflow worker processes is probably not ideal and needs to be cleaned up, but it does allow me to get much better throughput using all four cores.
 
For more details, including a detailed build script, the full source is here:
https://github.com/atomic77/opilite-object-detect

Okay, another use case. This one will bring some surprises.
 
Let us imagine we want to compile natively armhf/arm64 binaries. Like, for example, making the new Armbian multimedia packages that we will announce very soon
 
In this case, the Threadripper will be in clear disadvantage, since it needs to virtualize the ARM CPU through Qemu. But, will it be able to make up with core count and sheer processing power? Here are the numbers. We will compare the Threadripper with the Ampere ARM server, and with my highly optimized Odroid XU4 (good cooling and slight overclock).
 
First, a single thread 7-zip bench (Decompressing MIPS, higher is better):
$ 7z b -mmt1 Threadripper (native amd64): 4793 Threadripper (emulating armhf): 1529 Ampere ARM server (native armhf): 2889 Odroid XU4 (native armhf): 2160 As you can see, the single-core performance of the Threadripper is reduced to 1/3 of its natiive performance when emulating through Qemu, leaving it well below the Odroid XU4 and the Ampere.
 
Now, a real-world use case: let us compile our customized version of Kodi for armhf (compilation time, lower is better):
$ time cmake --build . -- -j$(nproc --all) Threadripper (emulating armhf): 18m9.696s Ampere (native armhf): 5m50.033s Odroid XU4 (native armhf): 45m50.711s The 32-core ARM server beats here the 64C/128T AMD server for more than three times shorter compile time. And Odroid XU4 gets just slightly above double the compile time of the AMD. If we factor in power consumption, it becomes very clear that compiling in an emulated environment is very suboptimal.
 
Now, we must remember that for building Armbian images we don't emulate, but instead cross-compile. In that case, the AMD is working natively, and that is another story. In that case, the AMD has absolutely no match with the ARM server, or anything else I ever tested. We will probably post numbers about this in some other opportunity.

Hi all. 
I again had the pleasure of working with an amazing server. This time the AMD Threadripper 3990X, 64-cores and 128 threads.
After last week working on a 32-core ARM server I thought I had seen performance.

This is again not comparable with anything before.
 
I again got private SSH access. So I opened 3 terminals. One with HTop, another to check sensors. And the 3th to execute my benchmarks.
First thing I saw were the 128-threads. Being used to seeing 6, this was almost unbelievable.

With light loads it turbo's up to 4.3Ghz. All cores maxed out @ 3Ghz while consuming 400W.
Reaching a single core 7zip decompression score of 4545MIPS @ 4.3Ghz.
The Ampere 32-core ARM server at 3.3Ghz reached 2763.
This again shows the Ampere server doesn't use high performance cores. It doesn't perform great per clock.

Coming soon is a benchmark of an AWS server. This uses high performance cores based on the ARM N1 cores. A derivative of the A76.
This reaches 3393. This clocked at only 2.5Ghz. So this does perform better per clock. Do know this is comparing peers with bananas(don't want to confuse with apples).

And scoring 391809MIPS with 7zip multi-core decompression with default settings.

Then with an overclock to 3.9Ghz all cores it consumed +600W. With a 7zip decompression score of 433702MIPS
This is again so many levels better than the Ampere 32-core ARM server which got 85975MIPS. 32-cores of the AWS graviton2 does 110628.
So this AMD server is up to 5 x more powerful when overclocked, than the Ampere 32-core server. Consuming 6 x as much. 
With normal configuration they both perform almost as well in performance/watt.

In idle the Threadripper sonsumed 100W, what is a lot for doing nothing.
The 32-core ARM server only consumed a bit more than 100W maxed out. And about 20W in idle.

The BMW Blender benchmark, which takes 29m23s on the fastest ARM SBC the Odroid N2+. The Ampere ARM server did it in 8m27s.
For the Threadripper this was a way too light load, it did it in 30s. 

Even when doing this render 10 x after each other it didn't raise the temperatures much. The maximum I've seen was 50C.

To try a heavier load I downloaded the Barber Shop Blender render. This was 6912 tiles to render. But again the Threadripper wasn't impressed by this load. 2m18s79. The AWS with 32-cores (of 64) done this in 8m28s. So this ARM server does compete well per clock for a floating point task with TR.

ARM may be great, but AMD is mighty. Intel does not have anything to compete with this. Certainly not performance/watt. 
It was a pleasure benchmarking this server. 
I learned a lot, like that I need to find better tools for these amazing machines.  
 
The specs of this monster :
 
ASRock Rack TRX40D8-2N2T AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990x 256GB memory (8 x 32Gb) ECC 2 x 1TB PCI 4.0 Nvme SSD Water Cooling  
The specs of the Threadripper 3990x
 
64-cores 128-threads AMD64 Zen2 Matisse 2.9Ghz - 4.3Ghz 4-channel DDR4-3200 MHz 256GB RAM 88 lanes PCIe4 TSMC's 7nm process node 280W - +400W 32 KB L1 per core (64x) 64 x 512 KB L2 256 MB L3 cache shared
You can see my full review video here, greetings.
NicoD

 

Hi all. 
I again had the pleasure of working with an amazing server. This time the AMD Threadripper 3990X, 64-cores and 128 threads.
After last week working on a 32-core ARM server I thought I had seen performance.

This is again not comparable with anything before.
 
I again got private SSH access. So I opened 3 terminals. One with HTop, another to check sensors. And the 3th to execute my benchmarks.
First thing I saw were the 128-threads. Being used to seeing 6, this was almost unbelievable.

With light loads it turbo's up to 4.3Ghz. All cores maxed out @ 3Ghz while consuming 400W.
Reaching a single core 7zip decompression score of 4545MIPS @ 4.3Ghz.
The Ampere 32-core ARM server at 3.3Ghz reached 2763.
This again shows the Ampere server doesn't use high performance cores. It doesn't perform great per clock.

Coming soon is a benchmark of an AWS server. This uses high performance cores based on the ARM N1 cores. A derivative of the A76.
This reaches 3393. This clocked at only 2.5Ghz. So this does perform better per clock. Do know this is comparing peers with bananas(don't want to confuse with apples).

And scoring 391809MIPS with 7zip multi-core decompression with default settings.

Then with an overclock to 3.9Ghz all cores it consumed +600W. With a 7zip decompression score of 433702MIPS
This is again so many levels better than the Ampere 32-core ARM server which got 85975MIPS. 32-cores of the AWS graviton2 does 110628.
So this AMD server is up to 5 x more powerful when overclocked, than the Ampere 32-core server. Consuming 6 x as much. 
With normal configuration they both perform almost as well in performance/watt.

In idle the Threadripper sonsumed 100W, what is a lot for doing nothing.
The 32-core ARM server only consumed a bit more than 100W maxed out. And about 20W in idle.

The BMW Blender benchmark, which takes 29m23s on the fastest ARM SBC the Odroid N2+. The Ampere ARM server did it in 8m27s.
For the Threadripper this was a way too light load, it did it in 30s. 

Even when doing this render 10 x after each other it didn't raise the temperatures much. The maximum I've seen was 50C.

To try a heavier load I downloaded the Barber Shop Blender render. This was 6912 tiles to render. But again the Threadripper wasn't impressed by this load. 2m18s79. The AWS with 32-cores (of 64) done this in 8m28s. So this ARM server does compete well per clock for a floating point task with TR.

ARM may be great, but AMD is mighty. Intel does not have anything to compete with this. Certainly not performance/watt. 
It was a pleasure benchmarking this server. 
I learned a lot, like that I need to find better tools for these amazing machines.  
 
The specs of this monster :
 
ASRock Rack TRX40D8-2N2T AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990x 256GB memory (8 x 32Gb) ECC 2 x 1TB PCI 4.0 Nvme SSD Water Cooling  
The specs of the Threadripper 3990x
 
64-cores 128-threads AMD64 Zen2 Matisse 2.9Ghz - 4.3Ghz 4-channel DDR4-3200 MHz 256GB RAM 88 lanes PCIe4 TSMC's 7nm process node 280W - +400W 32 KB L1 per core (64x) 64 x 512 KB L2 256 MB L3 cache shared
You can see my full review video here, greetings.
NicoD

 

Hi all.
For my next camping trip I've bought a big USB3 2.4G/5G wifi antenna with the rtl88x2bu chip to have better camping wifi reception.
It didn't work out of the box in Armbian. I've installed it on all my images manually.
Question is if this driver can be baked into Armbian? It would save me a lot of work. And maybe many others too?
 
 
For others who need this driver:
Go to : sudo armbian-config -> software -> install headers
Download the zip file : https://github.com/cilynx/rtl88x2BU_WiFi_linux_v5.3.1_27678.20180430_COEX20180427-5959
Unzip
You'll also need to install dkms :  sudo apt install dkms
Then follow the instructions in the readme file in the rtl88... folder
cd rtl88x2BU_WiFi_linux_v5.3.1_27678.20180430_COEX20180427-5959 VER=$(sed -n 's/\PACKAGE_VERSION="\(.*\)"/\1/p' dkms.conf) sudo rsync -rvhP ./ /usr/src/rtl88x2bu-${VER} sudo dkms add -m rtl88x2bu -v ${VER} sudo dkms build -m rtl88x2bu -v ${VER} sudo dkms install -m rtl88x2bu -v ${VER} sudo modprobe 88x2bu  

That's supported too. You need to change the files extlinux.conf and uenv.ini to make them point to the correct .dtb file(look into dtb folder) for the vim3 with a311d. Works great. I'm running it on an ssd. Greetings.

Hi all. 
I again had the pleasure of working with an amazing server. This time the AMD Threadripper 3990X, 64-cores and 128 threads.
After last week working on a 32-core ARM server I thought I had seen performance.

This is again not comparable with anything before.
 
I again got private SSH access. So I opened 3 terminals. One with HTop, another to check sensors. And the 3th to execute my benchmarks.
First thing I saw were the 128-threads. Being used to seeing 6, this was almost unbelievable.

With light loads it turbo's up to 4.3Ghz. All cores maxed out @ 3Ghz while consuming 400W.
Reaching a single core 7zip decompression score of 4545MIPS @ 4.3Ghz.
The Ampere 32-core ARM server at 3.3Ghz reached 2763.
This again shows the Ampere server doesn't use high performance cores. It doesn't perform great per clock.

Coming soon is a benchmark of an AWS server. This uses high performance cores based on the ARM N1 cores. A derivative of the A76.
This reaches 3393. This clocked at only 2.5Ghz. So this does perform better per clock. Do know this is comparing peers with bananas(don't want to confuse with apples).

And scoring 391809MIPS with 7zip multi-core decompression with default settings.

Then with an overclock to 3.9Ghz all cores it consumed +600W. With a 7zip decompression score of 433702MIPS
This is again so many levels better than the Ampere 32-core ARM server which got 85975MIPS. 32-cores of the AWS graviton2 does 110628.
So this AMD server is up to 5 x more powerful when overclocked, than the Ampere 32-core server. Consuming 6 x as much. 
With normal configuration they both perform almost as well in performance/watt.

In idle the Threadripper sonsumed 100W, what is a lot for doing nothing.
The 32-core ARM server only consumed a bit more than 100W maxed out. And about 20W in idle.

The BMW Blender benchmark, which takes 29m23s on the fastest ARM SBC the Odroid N2+. The Ampere ARM server did it in 8m27s.
For the Threadripper this was a way too light load, it did it in 30s. 

Even when doing this render 10 x after each other it didn't raise the temperatures much. The maximum I've seen was 50C.

To try a heavier load I downloaded the Barber Shop Blender render. This was 6912 tiles to render. But again the Threadripper wasn't impressed by this load. 2m18s79. The AWS with 32-cores (of 64) done this in 8m28s. So this ARM server does compete well per clock for a floating point task with TR.

ARM may be great, but AMD is mighty. Intel does not have anything to compete with this. Certainly not performance/watt. 
It was a pleasure benchmarking this server. 
I learned a lot, like that I need to find better tools for these amazing machines.  
 
The specs of this monster :
 
ASRock Rack TRX40D8-2N2T AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990x 256GB memory (8 x 32Gb) ECC 2 x 1TB PCI 4.0 Nvme SSD Water Cooling  
The specs of the Threadripper 3990x
 
64-cores 128-threads AMD64 Zen2 Matisse 2.9Ghz - 4.3Ghz 4-channel DDR4-3200 MHz 256GB RAM 88 lanes PCIe4 TSMC's 7nm process node 280W - +400W 32 KB L1 per core (64x) 64 x 512 KB L2 256 MB L3 cache shared
You can see my full review video here, greetings.
NicoD

 

I was just kidding. 
 
 
I had to look mine up (I have a Kill-A-Watt and do periodic power testing on things) and the KGPE-D16 idles about 165 W and 372 at full power.  But it's older tech, much less powerful than this brand new Threadripper of course.  I trade efficiency for freedom (and happy to do so). 
 
Until NSA launch their back doors, and then I am the only one left standing with a running computer.  Muhahahahah!    Hello, this is John Connor. 
 
But I don't need it most of the time, for personal use.  In fact just talking to Nico about his videos making me think very hard about using SBC for daily driver desktop and save some electricity.

Link to donate for the server 
May we know more about the ARM64 server? What cores? How many? What frequency? What cooling? Just any info  

I've got my RK3399's with the M4 and M4V2. Plenty enough. It will not perform any differnt.
Why don't you write a review about it on the forum? And if you want, you can film a few things and I can put it in a video for you.
Shipping in Europe is also pretty expensive. But thanks for the offer.

P.S.: Amazing gaming Armbian image almost available for RK3399 made by @Salvador Liébana. I'm now making a preview video about it.
Box86 installed. So x86 linux games, and Windows games/programs are possible on RK3399.

I will but split it up into at least three posts to fulfill the requirements
 
Would be 14€ from DE to BE.