I have been testing a 1UP engineering sample, and I am quite impressed with the overall product:
Packaging was awesome, very nice to see the foam and supports on the outside of the box.
The fit and finish is great! I love the fact that is appears to be made from aluminum, given the projected cost, I was thinking it would be plastic.
The touch pad, screen and keyboard are all good. I like the screen size, and view angles.
There is a privacy shutter for the camera.
I installed some office tools (LibreOffice) and a build environment for C/C++ along with QT Creator. The applications all start quickly and run well. Compilation speed is to be expected from a RPI 5 based system.
I am currently running stock Raspberry PI OS, having installed onto a Western Digital Black 512 GB NVMe drive, as I wanted to preserve the original device, and test installing. Installation went well, and there were no surprises.
I selected the NVMe device I did because I have a long history with the device and how it performs under load. The performance is to be expected with only one PCIe channel.
One question: does the One UP have its own wifi+bt device, or it uses the cm5 onboard interface?
It is important to know if I have to buy a cm50xxyyy or cm51xxyyy board…
I figured I would verify before posting, so I popped the back cover off, and checked. The supplied CM5 module has the WiFI+BT, and has an antenna attached to the board.
Well, its been a while since I updated my testing of the 1UP. I had some fairly major surgery that put a damper on things. I have used the 1UP as a daily driver when needed. For me it works great, light weight, and capable enough for daily needs.
You do have to remember that while the CM5 appears to have the logic on board for suspect (I think I read that somewhere) it is not exposed. This means your 1UP will not sleep when you close the cover.
Some modifications to /boot/firmware/config:
#
# Make the fan run faster and earlier
#
dtparam=fan_temp0=45000
dtparam=fan_temp0_speed=125
dtparam=fan_temp1=50000
dtparam=fan_temp1_speed=175
dtparam=fan_temp2=55000
dtparam=fan_temp2_speed=225
dtparam=fan_temp3=60000
dtparam=fan_temp3_speed=250
#
# Overclock a little... not sure how far we can push this
#
arm_freq=2800
The first part runs the fan a little more than the default setting for a CM5, and the last bit over-clocks to 2.8GHz. I was thinking about pushing it a little more, but as it is now the system is snappy and reliable.
I am quite happy with Raspberry PI OS on the system. I seriously dislike Ubuntu, more so on Raspberry PI’s as the boot time is glacial for everything I’ve used.
Made a minor modification to my setup. I swapped out the thermal pad on the CPU with a .5mm piece of Thermal Pad, and cut a piece of 1mm thermal pad for the NVMe.
The swap of the thermal pad from the CPU was because after taking the back of multiple times to test NVMe Devices, the pad tore. Anyway, pushing a WD Black 500 Gig NVMe, with 4K IO, i was hitting 50 degrees C in both the CPU and NVMe, I now get 50 on the CPU, but only saw 40 on the NVMe device.
This was at just over 200K Iops…
As soon as the test was complete temps dropped quickly, within a few seconds I was in the 40’s on the CPU.
I’ll see if I can get some graphs of temps over time.
If you pick up an 1UP I would absolutely add a good high quality thermal pad to the NVMe device.
Typical use keeps the NVMe in the range of 35 - 38 C.
If anyone from Argon is reading… what are the best thermal pad thickness? I had a hard time measuring.
Here is a graph of the system running the same test (fio, 4K sequential read/write at a 50/50 mix). Both times I attempted to start the system when it was room temperature, which was around 23 C, (73F).
As you can seen the temperature of the NVMe device is significantly cooler with the thermal pad. With out it the device hit 55 C, and with the pad the worst case was around 36C.
If I re-run the test while system is “heat saturated”, I get the following, note the time between runs was about 2 minutes.
