[bhouston]

Orange PI 5 Plus is faster (10% faster single threaded, 200% faster multicore per Geekbench) and also supports up to 32GB of memory. It has decent support, but not anything like the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. So if you want a SBC that is fast for special well defined projects, go with Orange PI 5 Plus, but if you want one for arbitrary hobby projects with tons of support everywhere, go with the Raspberry Pi series.

[eropple]

I have both two OPi5's and an OPi5 Plus, and honestly? It's not a problem. Armbian support's there and is emphatically Good Enough for the 90%+ case. They're excellent boards.

If you want to talk about bad support, let's talk about something like the NanoPi R5 series. Oof.

[ThatPlayer]

The big current issue that prevents me from using my boards is lack of GPU drivers. Armbian has instructions on how to use the panfork fork, but even those are not good. The panfrost team definitely do good work, so I have high hopes for future drivers. Especially with desktop OpenGL support that the rPis never got.

So I do have a rPi 5 ordered because they've advertised full upstreamed mesa Vulkan support on release. Maybe desktop OpenGL via Zink on top of Vulkan will be good enough.

[rjsw]

What is wrong with NanoPi? I was thinking of getting an R6C to use for RK3588 development.

[eropple]

The vendor OS is clunky and weird, Armbian doesn't have support (for the R5C at least), it doesn't have NVMe support (only a wireless m.2), flashing the eMMC is really weird...I wouldn't buy another NanoPi. I quite like the Orange Pi 5's for RK3588 boards though.

[fanf2]

Orange PI 5 Plus is about 2x the cost of Raspberry Pi 5.

[jrockway]

The Orange Pi 5 has a very similar CPU and is comparable in cost. The Plus is the "premium" model with things like 2x 2.5G ethernet ports.

[nottorp]

Wait wait wait. 2 LANs on PCIe? One M.2 slot on PCIe? And this works with armbian?

That's my new router board, if it works okay!

And... if i can buy it anywhere...

[jrockway]

Amazon has it, so it seems widely available: https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Rockchip-Frequency-Developm...

I have an ordinary Orange Pi 5 for my HomeAssistant setup and it's quite alright. Having a real NVME SSD in there instead of an SD card gives me peace of mind. I did some tests with zstd and found it about 50% the speed of my Threadripper (restricted to 8 cores for the test). The non-efficiency cores are therefore probably more than twice as fast as a 2 generation old AMD chip, which is pretty impressive.

For the cost of the Orange Pi 5 Plus, you're starting to get into similarly-equipped Intel N100-based machines. I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing the two, but I'd assume it's faster. So you might want to look at those. (Amazon is expensive; everyone gets these from AliExpress. I also don't know how well modern Intel machines do booting without a keyboard and a mouse; the ARM SBCs do great.)

[nottorp]

Well amazon.com doesn't help me much, although they can handle customs to europe for me (it's more trouble dealing with customs than the actual VAT value).

As for Intel machines, most i've found lately seem to be oriented towards home theater, a lot of useless (to me) video outputs and never enough network cards.

Not sure how low power they are either. This is the Intel that seems to have stopped caring about power consumption completely to win the speed race, and people are buying so why would thy care?

Right now I'm still using a dual core Atom Dsomething from I don't remember when, its main quality is it eats 15 W including 2 spinny discs (2.5" 5400 rpm). An Orange Pi with a ssd and the GPU turned off might eat even less.

[Havoc]

I’ve never seen a 32gb for sale?

[bhouston]

They are available for pre-order via the official Orange Pi store on AliExpress right now, slated to ship in November. I know since I was about to pull the trigger on this one:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006119813607.html