subhuman

I believe in recycling.* Rip the heat sinks off old motherboards, get out the hacksaw and cut them to size. Chipset heat sinks are usually a good size to be repurposed for embedded devices. A bit of epoxy on each corner of the IC package, a dab of heat sink grease in the middle and drop the sink into place. It's not exactly removable after, but it does the trick. * or, maybe I am actually THAT cheap!

I got that. It's crappy, but these are far from unique. Remember dial-up modems? v.90 modems marketed as 56k here in the US, even though the FCC limited them to a max of 53.3k (and many of them reported a connect rate of 56k regardless of the lower actual rate- much like we see here) A multitude of 802.11n single-antenna devices that claim speeds over 150 Various HDD manufacturers being sued (unsuccessfully) ~20 years ago for advertising capacities in power of ten instead of powers of two (i.e. megabyte=1,000,000 vs megabyte=1,048,576) How do you tell when a salesman is lying? His lips are moving.

@tkaiserOf course marketing focuses on raw speed and not actual performance numbers. This isn't unique to the ARM or SoC areas; we've seen it many times in the x86 world as well. Joe Public will go buy a computer with a higher clock speed but lower performance 95% of the time. (these same people will also pay $50 more for a computer with a $20 optical drive they'll never use, but that's a different rant) @chwe Heat management isn't only about maximum performance. It also has a marked impact on silicon longevity. http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sprabx4a/sprabx4a.pdf Most importantly, Fig 2 in section 4. And this quote from section 4.1: "It shows that if the processor runs at 90°C effective temperature instead of the 105°C, x2 increase is useful lifetime can be projected." And bear in mind this study is on silicon junction temperature, NOT temperature of the chip package. The junction temperature will be considerably higher than the temperature measured on the package. It is quite possible to have a junction temp of 105 or more with the package temperature at 50-70 and not throttling yet. Most of these devices are too new for us to be seeing the results yet, but I predict the majority of these devices, left with "stock" (read: virtually nonexistent) cooling fail YEARS sooner than the same device where people added fans/heat sinks.

I also have the same. If yours is like mine, it came with a 5v 2.5A wall wart power supply. While the extra 2 USB ports are easily uncovered and fully usable, I would not recommend doing so with stock power supplies. There have been benchmarks with similar devices that show performance degradation with 2A power supplies I strongly suspect that a 2.5A power supply cannot adequately power both the H96Pro+ and 4 USB devices simultaneously. I'm using mine with a 5V 4A supply- luckily I have a pile of them lying around. You may want to look for something similar. Armbian_5.44_S9xxx_Debian_stretch_4.16.1_icewm_20180515.img worked first try. Thanks, Balbes150 and all others who have contributed!