The Khadas VIM3L is a new single-board computer with an Amlogic S905D3 quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor and Mali G31 MP2 graphics.

Its maker says the system supports 4K video playback at up to 60 frames per second, making the little computer a reasonable option for building a small, quiet home theater computer.

And unlike a Raspberry Pi, the Khadas VIM3L has 16GB of built-in storage and comes with android 9 Pie pre-installed, so you don’t necessarily need to supply your own storage or operating system (although you can if you’d like).

The Khadas VIM3L is up for pre-order for $50 and up and the board is expected to start shipping at the end of October.

If you’re wondering about the “and up” part of the price, here’s the deal. Pre-order by September 16th and you can snag the board for $50. Or you can pay $70 for an HTPC Kit bundle that includes a VIM3L, a transparent case, a metal plate, an IR remote control, and CoreELEC installed (rather than Android).

Order between September 17th and October 7th and you can get the VIM3L for $55 or the HTPC Kit for $75.

After that the price goes up by another $5, so the normal retail prices will be $60 and $80, respectively.

The Khadas VIM3L’s other specs include 2GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and USB-C ports, plus 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, a 40-pin header, GPIO expander, power, function, and reset buttons, and two external antenna’s that you can screw onto the board.

There’s also a PCIe (1-lane) connector on the bottom of the board, as well as MIPI-CSI and MIPI-DSI connectors for adding an optional display or camera. There’s also an optional M2X Extension board that adds 4G LTE, SSD, and Power over Ethernet support.

via CNX-Software

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9 replies on “Khadas VIM3L is a single-board computer aimed at HTPC builders (Pre-orders start at $50)”

  1. As cheap as ram is these days, you’d think 4GB would be standard..

  2. This board is significantly better than the pi4 Hardware acceleration is full supported in CE and it runs about 20c cooler than the pi which makes it easy to run a silent htcp.

    Shoog

    1. How well is soft support for Linux/BSD & not Android? Working blind or good documentation?

      1. 2GB RAM seems just sufficient for a SoC built using in-order/small cores (even if 1.9GHz).

        …but why did they settle for only 16GB of soldered-on eMMC 5.1 storage?

        They know one of the biggest use cases for their products is to load Android, that’s not enough storage to properly use it or let alone load it. People are going to treat it as if the storage is non-existent and use their own microSD cards to boot from instead. It would’ve been wiser to simply bump the storage to a much more user-friendly 64GB amount, and that doesn’t even cost much.

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