Back in July, Radxa released a little block of pi-shaped madness containing NVMe storage, 2.5 Gigabit ethernet, and an Intel Alder Lake N100 CPU That&

Radxa X4: Pi Sized X86_64

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2024-11-18 02:00:16

Back in July, Radxa released a little block of pi-shaped madness containing NVMe storage, 2.5 Gigabit ethernet, and an Intel Alder Lake N100 CPU That’for under $100. They sold out immediately, and the 8GB version remains nearly impossible to obtain four months later.

Undeterred, I reached out to Radxa and asked if I could buy one of the review kits. They kindly declined, but offered to send me an X4 with a heat sink when they had some spare.

Inside the box containing the Radxa X4, you get a Radxa X4—and that’s it! The box containing the X4 open-air test bench/heat sink comes with a few more supplies for some arts and crafts fun. You get a thermal pad, sticky feet, and screws to secure the X4 and its wee legs.

Smash that delete button, fam! The BIOS/UEFI on the Radxa X4, provided by American Megatrends, has a delightfully old-school feel. You will find all the needed bits to configure the CPU, power, network, and storage.

One of the advantages of the Radxa X4 being X86_64 is its ability to run a wide range of operating systems, including BSD, Windows NT, Haiku OS, and FreeDOS. However, I’ll be using Debian 12, assuming that if it can handle Debian, it should be able to run any other operating system you choose.