Raspberry Pi Zero vs MangoPi MQ Pro Benchmarks - bret.dk (2024)

Putting the Raspberry Pi Zero vs MangoPi MQ Pro was something I’d wanted to do since seeing the MQ Pro’s announcement and specifications. It just seemed to make sense. On paper, they’re largely similar, with 1GHz single-core CPUs, and 512MB of RAM. A 1GB MQ Pro is also available and is what I’ll be using here so your mileage may vary slightly if you have the 512MB version.

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Specifications

Benchmarking Information / Hardware

For these benchmarks, the boot storage is the best-performing Amazon Basics 64GB microSD card and the SSD is a Samsung 850 EVO (500GB). For USB Ethernet, I use the Linksys 1Gbit USB Ethernet adapter. A 120mm fan is blowing across the board for all tests (unless mentioned) to ensure no thermal throttling takes place.

Raspberry Pi Zero vs MangoPi MQ Pro – Compute Performance

As always, I’ll start with UnixBench and move on to a mix of “real-world” and other synthetic benchmarks.

The Mango Pi MQ Pro under PHPBench testing shows a 50.31% performance increase over the Raspberry Pi Zero W and its compute dominance doesn’t end there. PyBench also completes 22.26% faster and the WavPack encoding test is 7.43% quicker on the MangoPi board.

When we move to GZIP compression, Crypto++ and OpenSSL work though, the Pi Zero W starts to fight back. With GZIP, it’s 34.98% faster to complete the same test, OpenSSL benchmarks show around 50% increases across the board and whilst with Crypto++’s Integer and Elliptical curve run the MQ Pro pulls ahead by 31.23%, Keyed and Unkeyed Algorithm runs were 20.73% and 10.91% faster respectively.

UnixBench

PHPBench

PyBench

WavPack Audio Encoding

Crypto++

OpenSSL Bench

GZIP Compression

Memory (RAM) Performance

It should be noted that we are testing the 1GB RAM model of the MangoPi MQ Pro here. If you compare it to a 512MB board, your results will likely differ! The MQ Pro also gets an advantage from its newer DDR3 memory and this is clearly shown across the board with tinymembench and CacheBench with performance increases between 20% and nearly 700%!

tinymembench

CacheBench

Networking Performance

The MQ Pro train doesn’t stop when we move onto networking performance either, with WiFi tests showing it 60% and 17.37% faster during download and upload testing. We see a slightly odd result with a USB Ethernet adapter where the Pi Zero offers a 16.66% gain on the download side, though trails by 26.27% on the upload front.

Storage Performance

MicroSD Card Reader

The micro SD card results are taken from my Best SD Cards for Raspberry Pi piece and show that in comparison to other similar boards, the SD card reader in the MQ Pro isn’t exactly the speediest of things. With the board’s limited compute resources though, this shouldn’t hold it back too much unless you’re hoping to run a speedy full desktop environment but top tip, don’t.

MangoPi MQ Pro

Raspberry Pi Zero W

USB SSD & microSD Card Comparison

The SD data here is an average of all tested microSD cards so that there’s a more simple comparison.

The USB SSD testing surprised me though. Bar the odd sequential read results they’re much the same, with the BCM2835 based Raspberry Pi being slightly ahead. I tried with 2 different USB to SATA adapters and 2 SSDs to try and find what was going on with the sequential read results and each was consistently that far ahead! The only consistent difference was that I used a USB-A to Micro USB adapter on the Pi Zero and USB-A to USB-C on the MQ Pro but I don’t believe this to be relevant given the other tests falling in line.

Thermals & Power

Temperatures

With an ambient room temperature of 25.8 degrees celsius in both tests we can see that these 2 boards are quite close in terms of operating temperatures. What interested me during this testing was the delta between idle and load on the MQ Pro. As I mentioned in my stand-alone MangoPi MQ Pro Review, I thought I may have been doing something wrong, or stress-ng wasn’t up to the task but with multiple forms of stress-testing I saw the same behaviour.

Power Draw

Finally, we move on to the overall power draw where the Pi Zero W sips 17.74% more power at idle and a whopping 34.48% more under load. Whilst you may look at the numbers and see 0.73W vs 1.17W and think that’s not a big difference, if you’re thinking of running either of these boards on battery or solar power, this will make a big difference to your potential run-time.

Closing Thoughts

There’s a theme running throughout these tests and it’s one of surprise for me. I’ll be very honest and say I knew very little about the RISC-V ecosystem before diving in with the MangoPi MQ Pro but I’m so glad that I did. The process of getting it up and running and seeing how it compared to its closest “rival” in the Zero style board lineup was great.

The issue at this point though is that due to MangoPi being a smaller, newer manufacturer with limited resources, they’re not churning out as many units and due to the initial buzz, they’re being snapped up quickly. This means that whilst yes, the MQ Pro is a very valid alternative to the Pi Zero if your software/interests will run on a RISC-V architecture, annoyingly, you still need to wait to get your hands on one.

That also ignores the price side of things. The Raspberry Pi Zero W retails for around £10GBP (keep an eye out on rpilocator if you’re currently in the market) in the UK through authorised retailers whereas the Mango Pi MQ Pro 1GB model tested here will run you around £23 if you manage to get one through the official store when they have stock (these prices both include GST/VAT at 20%). At £23 I still think it’s worth it to get your hands on a small RISC-V based board that offers twice as much, faster RAM and better performance in a lot of areas but if you’re purely interested in the price this may not appeal to you.

Good job, mangobuge and anyone else behinds the scenes! You’ve created a great product with huge potential. With the ARM H616 MangoPi MQ Quad on the way, it’s great to have more alternatives available. On behalf of myself and the community though, please make sure that the operating system images and support is available upon future board launches!

Bret

Bret has worked with Raspberry Pi computers for almost 10 years now and in that time he's benchmarked and tested over 30 Single Board computers. In his day job, he's a systems administrator for a large cloud computing provider.