Tronsmart Ara X5 Plus Win10 Cherry Trail Z8300 Quad Core 1.8G Gen 8 Graphics 2G/32G 2.4Ghz/5Ghz LAN HDMI H.265 BT4.0 USB3.0

[trebor]

As the pioneer in Mini PC market, Tronsmart is the first brand to feature Ara X5 Plus with Intel Cherry Trail CPU: Z8300. Z8300, the premier Intel Atom CPU, took the initiative to apply 14nm Soc technology, next generation micro architecture which leads the market for approximate 2 years. In the meantime, it is also equipped with 1.8G 64-bit Quad core CPU as well as Gen 8 graphics.
Pre-installed Windows 10

Tronsmart Ara X5 Plus is pre-installed with licensed Windows 10 home, so that our users are able to enjoy the advanced functions of Windows OS directly. Moreover, the built-in Cortana in Windows 10 can turn Ara X5 into a work assistant as well as life-partner. With Windows 10 OS, you can sync game display to any devices of Windows 10 OS. What an amazing scenario! When your friends are watching football matches on TV, you can play games on Xbox and display on another PC screen.
Fanless Design

With fanless design, Ara X5 Plus offers quiet but stable system performance, with embedded systems performing steady heat dissipation under industrial automation control. Ara X5 is marked by high performance dual-layer PCBA, characterizing of heat sink design. Even through fanless, it still fulfills desirable temperature control performance on CPU.
Acrylic Panel

Continuing on the inspirational design of Ara BJ19, Ara X5 Plus adopts Acrylic panel and the whole mould structure, but with far more thinner, lighter figure.
Intel 3160. Thanks to the Intel 3160 Wi-Fi module, Ara X5 Plus supports 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 2.4Ghz/5Ghz and embedded with BT 4.0 module, it is capable of cutting down power consumption and minimizing delay by 3-milliseconds, with transfer-distance over 10 meters, apart from AES-128 coding support. It is compatible with 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0, all BT standards 2G+32G eMMC

Tronsmart Ara X5 Plus boasts 2GB DDR3 RAM, and 32GB eMMC Flash, advantageous in performance, security and reliability, ascribing to the eMMC memory, ultimately delivering a richer end-user experience. Ara X5 Plus ultilizes eMMC5.0 technology, with read&write speed doubles that of the eMMC4.5
Tronsmart Ara X5 Plus Certificates download: Ara X5 Certificates

Operating System Pre-installed Windows 10
CPU Cherry Trail Z8300 14nm 1.8G 64-bit Quad core
GPU Gen 8 Graphics
RAM 2GB DDR3L
ROM eMMC 32G
Communication
Wifi Connectivity 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 2.4Ghz/5Ghz
Ethernet 100m
Bluetooth 4.0
Media
Video Supported HD MPEG1/2/4,H.264, H.265,HD AVC/VC-1,RM/RMVB,Xvid/DivX3/4/5/6 ,RealVideo8/9/10
Audio Supported MP3,WMA,AAC,WAV,OGG,AC3,DDP,True HD,DTS,DTS,HD,FLACAP
Picture Supported JPEG,BMP,GIF,PNG,TIFF,etc.
Interfaces
HDMI Port Standard HDMI female
Other Interfaces USB2.0*2
USB3.0*1
Audio out&Mic-in*1
LAN(100Mbps)*1
HDMI Type A *1
Power Button*1
Micro SD Slot*1
DC-IN*1
Other Features
3G N/A
Other Function Status Indicator
White LED lights(power on); White LED lamp(power off)
Power 5V/3A
Wake On LAN N/A

[marcuspresident]

And the "plus" stands for? External antenna! No more difference between plus and none plus?

[bluesmanuk]

The one key thing that seems to have changed is that it is now using an Intel 3160 for WiFi, with an external antenna.

There is also mention of the use of eMMC5.0, so hopefully it will be a little faster too and perhaps better heat dissipation.

Would be interesting to see some comparable benchmarks.

[trebor]

If you have an X5 this may be a quick and dirty to make it a plus sorta thing.

[IMG]http://i.****img.com/00/s/MzMwWDgwMA==/z/HsAAAOSw3ydVxb2H/$_12.JPG[/IMG]

****

[trebor]

Tronsmart ARA X5 Plus.

Thanks To Geekbuying and the DHL again excellent and quick delivery to this part of the world.

Here is the release of the New ARA X5 Plus Cherry Trail z8300 2/32 GB
Much the same Spec as previous model with a few improvements
Obvious is the external Wifi Antenna.
Feels a little heaver than previous model more on this later.

At first switch on, Windows 10 location login and pretty quick
A few other settings to be setup, asked for wifi connections done.
A bit of an online update reboot and we are in Windows 10.
So a few more updates and install some apps wifi speed 5g good.
Ara X5 plus seems snappy no lag at present, while doing first scan with Defender,
Windows update while installing other apps performing well for a 2/32 GB unit.

While typing and sorting out images the Unit has done the updated.
Being windows 10 all will be pretty much the same a few torture test later to see any improvements.
Ok let's get inside and have a look see.

So we now have the PCB sandwiched between 2 pieces of alloy block that will be great as you can see by post 1 (forgot to take a new one).

Also an extra block on the underside to the cutout base area of CPU excellent this will keep it thermally maintained.

You can see the Wifi is a plugin module and we have the External and Internal so coverage is improved and good.

Also removal of the tin lid, Heat sink has good direct contact to CPU with thermal Pad





Note sure the rating of the Pink Thermal may alter at a later date if required
We have the new improved Battery ? And also a Reset Button yet to see if it does good or bad.



Look at the OS system.

Previous Model Tronsmart ARA X5 ram Test

Tronsmart ARA X5 PLUS Tests
As you can see by the Stress test, the idle is around the 50c jumps up to 75c and pretty much sits there without complaining to much.
You will also note that Ram is much improved over the previous model

Previous Model had a Bench test of around 570 so a little improvement has to be good.

Current Free space after doing all updates and removing old version etc 1115 as of the 2nd March easy up date.

[bluesmanuk]

Good to see that the changes have yielded improvements.

[trebor]

Coupon found for those interested
KPYNDMBY $20.00 off

[trebor]

Installing Openelec Tronsmart ara x5 plus, as HDMI Audio in Linux is Working

News, Tronsmart and their developers have implemented HDMI Audio Output under Linux kernel 4.4/4.5 and released Openelec.
Now you can enjoy both Windows or Linux on Ara X5 Plus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjOn...ature=youtu.be



Audio output works great via HMDI cable and speaker jack(system->setting-system->audio output->audio output devices, choose USB Audio device)

Now Openelec can let Ara X5 Plus as great media player.
Tronsmart checked 10bit, [email protected] ,3D ISO,
Blu Ray ISO, AC3/DTS 5.1 pass through etc, all works amazing also WiFi and Ethernet working,
You can enjoy Add-ons from Kodi too.
Openelec download link:
Click Here to download http://www.mediafire.com/download/85...-X86_64-7.0.gz

Following the instruction to install.

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php/HO...ge#tab=Windows

Some tips with instruction of installing openelec.

1. Format a USB(more than 2GB) FAT 32, use Win32Diskimager to make booting USB.
2. After make booting USB and Insert it to USB3.0 of X5 Plus, power on and fast press F7 on keyboard, now enter into UEFI system.
3. Choose the name of your USB and press enter key on keyboard, Now you can install openelec step by step as instructions of system.
4. Tronsmart information and windows key are pre-written in BIOS, when and if you flash back to Windows you will not loose BIOS Keys.

[bluesmanuk]

Excellent.

For X5 Plus only or have Tronsmart thought about X5 users too?

[trebor]

I thinks it to do with some hardware, speculation only
Pressure will be applied to make it so
Cheers

[scooter2014]

Open Electric good for some with the specs i wonder if full linux distro would work with hardware support. Great tear down and review!

[trebor]

Special build LibreELEC 8.0 for Tronsmart ARA 5X PLUS
Found at the Tronsmart Forum may interest a few
Cheers

[bluesmanuk]

Nice.

[bluesmanuk]

Installed this new librelec build on my older X5 (non plus) to see what it would be like.

Feedback.

Wow!

Installation and update went without a hitch.

Boots to kodi in about 20 seconds.

As already known, no WiFi or BT bur that didn't matter to me as I use ethernet anyway.

I started off playing with all the default settings but video was dark and panning scenes showed noticeable stutter.

But once I changed a few settings (TV 50Hz, limited colour range, adjust refresh rate always) the colours were sharp, detailed and with depth and also very smooth.

Tested about 100 files with a whole range of formats and audio.

4K excellent playback all round.
HEVC excellent playback all round.
HD excellent playback all round.
SD excellent playback all round.
Advanced Dolby formats played the audio downmixed to PCM (instead of silence or crackles and pops as can be seen on other boxes)
2 files in particular had me smiling. A Eulsat HEVC demo that always has an element of stutter when playing through any platform but here it played better than anything that I have seen before.
The same was true of a stop motion clouds MOV file that played more smoothly than I have seen before.
Even a VP9 played rather well (albeit not perfectly)

Streaming from my NAS went well.
Playback from USB flash dand hard drives presented no issues.


Issues:

Every so often I went to play a file and it had major stutters and lag but on a second play it was fine.
Once in a while I play a file and the box locks up meaning a hard reset.
Sometimes when i go for a reboot, upon starting it locks at the Tronsmart logo.
There was a slight audio/video sync issue but as it was consistent that was easily solved by adjusting audio offset and setting as default.

Bearing in mind that it is using Alpha, this is excellent.

The only change that I made was to replace Estuary with a new Confluence master that has the old style video overlay information that we got when pressing the O key in 16.1 and previous.
This enabled me to see more information about the video playing when required, including CPU usage that was extremely low and averaging across all 4 cores never really went beyond 25%.