The ODROID-N2+ is a speed upgrade to the original ODROID-N2 that is even more powerful, more stable, and faster performing than the N1. Today I’m going to review the ODROID N2+ and examine the available image choices, benchmark the performance of the board, take a look at the capabilities and give some general recommendations about who would best benefit from using a board like this.

Thanks to the modern 12nm silicon technology and a revised silicon design of the S922X SoC, the A73 cores run at 2. If you’re digging around for used hardware and can only find the N2s, don’t worry too much about it. The Odroid N2+ CoreELEC (4GB) version is an Odroid N2+ bundle which has a pre-installed version of the CoreELEC OS, allowing for a full multimedia playback system straight out of the box. The ODROID N2+ is a great board with a built-in Petitboot bootloader capable of booting from SSDs and other types of devices.

This is due to it’s popularity and the fact that people know in the game emulation community that this is a good board. If it doesn’t work, try powercycling and try again… but it should eventually boot to something familiar! The most powerful and affordable ARM based Linux board for 4K HDR video player currently on the market.

Havent been able to try Playstation 2 or N64 emulators as there are no binaries for respective emulators for AmLogic devices that I know of yet. We tested the latest PPSSPP emulation and it can handle x3 scaling on a 4K display nicely with well implemented VSYNC. The large heat sink in the metal housing is designed to optimise the heat dissipation of CPU and RAM and minimise throttling. and did not experience any problems with them, resulting in a 33% clock frequency improvement over the original N2. There wouldn’t be much difference between an N2L with Ethernet and an N2+ I guess - just fewer USB ports?The “Petitboot” software provides a user friendly interface and allows users to select a boot media. This board is powerful enough that it will hold you back to be using a SD card for storage with such a powerful CPU/GPU.

Dhrystone-2, Double-Precision Whetstone, Sysbench and Memory bandwidth benchmark results show the N2+ system performance comes out ahead of other popular ARM SBCs. As far as I can tell the ‘ne’ devolpment is still in the air for these, bit i can’t really imagine support ending completely. I’ve talked about the N2+ before a bit, in the Battle of the Boards 2023 post, but they’ve recently started taking over as “desktops in my office. Conveniently for some, the firmware will grab an IP address and you can update things over the network - it’s quite nice. Edit: I’m guessing this is what was vaguely referred to above so maybe it’s already being worked on.Everything is securely attached to the board and the fact that the bottom is a giant heat sink makes it quite rugged.

Now exit (ctrl-d ought to do it), and you should see a bunch of Netboot Installers up at the top of the screen. Given that in current market conditions it’s still generally cheaper than most Pis I would say it’s definitely worth considering over the Pi and a very solid choice! ODROID-N2 has an on-board RTC component, NXP PCF8563, interfaced to the I2C bus and can use a backup battery as an alternative power source while the main power source is absent. With a score of 7,151 that is the fastest eMMC score I’ve ever received (or that I think I’ve ever seen). After the system reboots to a console, install the desktop with sudo apt install ubuntu-desktopIts maximum frequency is over 150Mhz, and we will try to implement a DMA driven SPI driver for faster LCD display. I like having the onboard eMMC plus an SD card reader, because that means I can easily blow images onto uSD cards for other systems (if it seems like I use small ARM systems to troubleshoot, install, and mess with other small ARM systems, that’s quite fair).