ODROID-XU4: Much Better Performance Than The Raspberry Pi Plus USB3 & Gigabit Ethernet @ $60

As a word of caution, even with the active cooling on the ODROID-XU4, under load it can get quite toasty. Here's a look at the SoC temperature with the stock cooling outside of any enclosure and then when run within the included XU4 chassis.

The average SoC temperature under load was 70 degrees (Celsius) or 75 degrees when run within the XU4 enclosure and peaked up to 84~90 degrees. Though between the bare setup or the enclosure, I didn't notice any case of the enclosure causing any thermal throttling as the performance benchmark results came out identical. Warm SoCs aren't anything new but the data certainly shows active cooling is necessary with this Exynos5 chip, if you plan on constantly running the ODROID-XU4 under load it may even be worthwhile switching to a larger heatsink/fan.

Overall this is quite a nice ARM SBC coming in at the $60 price point with very competitive performance. If you wish to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the ARM SBCs tested for this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1812082-SK-ODROIDXU403. Thanks to Hardkernel for sending over this ODROID-XU4 for testing.