COMPLETED Bananapi M7

A nice replacement for my old orange pi. New boost for HA and other home office services

Hi, I would like this m7 as replacement for my low-cost build of Armbian rk322x-box, currently serving a self hosted webspace.

 

Looking forward to have my id as the giveaway winner.

Hi!

 

I would mainly use this board to upgrade my current low power nas running on rk3399 (rockpro64 with OMV) and gift my old board to my brother who is learning programming.
Because my current nas has some limitations :

 

• Rk3399 limited by transcoding capabilities for ultra high resolutions (no tone mapping for hdr->sdr, limited x265 encoding/decoding, no av1 decoding)
• Slow sd card speed (my rockpro64 is hardware limited to 22.5mb/s). Importing Emmc is expensive, especially in europe where we add tax duties.
• Pci 2.0 only for my nvme ssd
• Only 1gb ethernet, 2.5gb is better for copying files over my nvme that is on my nas and in the future if my network and nas infrastructure improves (disks, internet speed, ...)

I will also use it to test some projects such as ollama for LLM, it will be fun to see if it is better or worse than my old 2gb quadro p400 😅

I am mainly more interested about the RK3588 chip capabilities and integrated emmc of this bananapi m7 board, and it will be handy to solve my current limitations.

 

Good luck for the contest!
Falaxir

I want to make a portable mechanical keyboard with sbc, like the raspberry pi 400, but more powerful due to support for nvme ssd and RK3588. I have been looking at mpi 7 for a long time, because it does not have very high usb ports compared to other SBCs, this will make the keyboard the optimal height. Even if I don't win, I'll probably buy it myself.

As a CS student who cannot afford to buy new ARM boards, I would love to tinker with one and have many projects planned for it.

First, I would run benchmarks to compare it against my current Intel Celeron 4105 in terms of performance and efficiency. These Intel low-powered x86 chips are the main competitors to these powerful SoCs (at least when considering NAS/homelab projects, although x86 SBCs and compute modules do exist).
 

I would also try out the RK3588 VPU. With this being a fairly recent chip with good support thanks to the rockchip-ffmpeg project, it would be really cool to run benchmarks and see how well it stacks up in quality compared to my Celeron’s QuickSync (Whiskey Lake) and my 1660s Turing NVENC. I would do this by running quality assessment tests like VMAF on the encoded videos. The RK3588 also features an NPU, which is a really cool piece of hardware. There are endless projects that can make use of it thanks to recent AI developments.
 

Additionally, I could compare it to my old OrangePi 0+, even though that’s an almost pointless comparison. The Banana Pi surely surpasses it with its newer and more expensive SoC and stellar I/O speeds.

After publishing a review with all these tests, I’d transform it into a dedicated router. The dual 2.5G ethernet ports make this board perfect for that.
If I find its performance good enough, I’d also move my entire home server to it; it surely has more than enough RAM, and the power consumption would be significantly lower.