I've bought recently a Minisforum N40 (Celeron N4020 CPU), and man, it's much faster than the Pi. Installing Manjaro Linux was a breeze, all peripheral supported out of the box. I bought used on ebay, but new is priced like €150, which competes directly with the Raspberry Pi 4, and this one comes with 64GB eMMC and 4GB RAM. No exposed GPIOs though, so it won't be the ideal choice for hardware hacking, but for media boxes or tiny desktops it beats the Pi hands down.
That does look reasonable. Seems like a lower spec though, 1/2 the ram, fairly slow CPU, single ethernet (instead of two 2.5G ethernets ports). I do like usb-c for a power supply over whatever custom wall wart+barrel connector.
I'm curious about the Celeron N4020 vs rk3588. Keep in mind that the rk3588 vs Pi4 isn't really in the same class. In a compile based benchmark my rk3588 was 7 times as fast as the Pi4. JeffG's geekbench multi placed it 3+ times faster than the Pi4. On the same compile benchmark the rk3588 was about half as fast as my quad core xeon system from 2015, not bad for a few watts.
Do you have a transcoding benchmark you prefer to compare? Or something else media related? Or storage? JeffG managed 3GB/sec which is pretty respectable for a small/cheap widget.
