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Orange Pi 3 review: A Raspberry Pi rival that's a serious disappointment

30 points by Daviey 8y ago

magicnmonkey 8y ago
This is blatantly false written by a Raspberry Pi Fanboy Truth is Orange Pi is the most powerful Raspberry Pi killer. Please check this authors tax returns ( he surely receiving speaking fee via Raspberry Pi people ) who are submarining and astroturfing for Pi foundation. Go check /r/OrangePi, people are statisfied with this board
- tachyonbeam 8y ago
  Yeah, most of this article is complaints about the web browsing experience. I'm a little puzzled. My main use case for the Raspberri Pi is little robot projects or home automation, etc, so I don't really care about the web browser. It would be nice if they had software compatibility with the Raspberri Pi though, if you could just put Raspbian on there, as that would allow them to leverage all the work that's been put into that and reduce ecosystem fragmentation a bit.
  - magicnmonkey 8y ago
    I never found Raspberry Pi 3B+ to have less laggy browsing, on YouTube it drops frame and sometimes video just hangs while audio keeps playing. I am using Orange Pi 3 for a Router, which filters traffic/does DNS filtering too. It has 5gbps USB3 and true Gigabit ethernet.
  - zwieback 8y ago
    Agreed, I use Pis a lot not because it's the fastest or cheapest or whatever but because of its popularity. If a not-quite-compatible board came out at the same price point that was twice as fast and had twice as much memory I might use it if I had a specific use case and enough time to sink into making it work. From the other testimonials it sounds like the Orange Pi is a reasonable choice but the performance premium doesn't convince me.
crististm 8y ago
What kind of analysis is this? "I'd normally include a range of benchmarks for the board but I had so much trouble running them on the Orange Pi 3, only a few are worth reporting." Then it goes on: "Pi 3 recorded an average connection speed of 45.7Mbps via iPerf, a perfectly reasonable result and comparable with the Raspberry Pi 3 boards and the Rock Pi 4. It also racked up a score of 22 on the GLmark 2 GPU benchmark, slightly above a reported score of 18 for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B on Ubuntu 16.04." They'd better let numbers speak instead of letting emotional writing confirm a weak hardware review.
- peeters 8y ago
  It wasn't a hardware review though, it was a platform review. If the platform has so many issues that you can't even test the hardware in an apples-to-apples comparison, that's worth mentioning in a review.
  - crististm 8y ago
    What I understand is that they can write whatever they want and wave their hand when it comes to benchmarks? By the way, what part of the cited comparison where the "platforms" as you want to call them, compare on equal foot let them off the hook for a professional benchmarking in other areas?
d1str0 8y ago
This article has nothing substantial in it.
Matsta 8y ago
The H6 processor it uses isn't well supported yet and is still reasonably new. See support here: https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort Armbian has only started to work on it, see here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-chip/ https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-... Orange Pi make some great boards, they just take a while for them to be well supported. The Allwinner H2+/H3 which was originally released in 2014 has only got really good software support over the last 2-3 years.
JeffRosenberg 8y ago
Who is using a Raspberry Pi to browse the web and watch Youtube videos? That's a crazy way to review an SBC.
- magicnmonkey 8y ago
  Yea author is astroturfing for Pi foundation. I'll read nothing from him from now on, he just sold his soul to Pi foundation
  - JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
    This is a new fandom I'm discovering and didn't know existed.
- fulafel 8y ago
  If the advertised features are the gpu and 4k, it's the minimum that should work well. (The RPi actually runs a browser pretty well).
- dleslie 8y ago
  The RPi is incredibly popular as a Kodi and emulation machine. Browsing the web and watching YouTube videos is well within its abilities; the YouTube plugin on Kodi is a reasonable good, ad-free interface to YouTube. That said, yes, some websites are grotesquely slow; but that's more a poor reflection on them.
- Matsta 8y ago
  The primary factor with using a Desktop Linux is GPU support. The Videocore IV in the Raspberry Pi is as close as to open source as you're going to get on an ARM board. Plus it's been around since 2013 according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi Compared to this to the Mali-T720 MP2 in the Orange Pi 3, GPU support in Linux is virtually non-existent. https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali This article is a little outdated but is still very relevant: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7037-multimedia-related-stuff-on-armbian-opengl-es-videodecoding-mali-etc/ https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7037-multimedia-related-stuf... Also, note that GPU support on Android is usually a lot better compared to Linux. This is because they are using an older, more mature kernel.
fooblat 8y ago
I can't speak for the Orange Pi 3, but I have an Orange Pi PC2, two Orange Pi Ones, and an Orange Pi Zero and I'm very happy with all of them.
dleslie 8y ago
There's a substantial audience for SBCs as Multimedia PCs, Emulation consoles, and even as a primary desktop. The RPi interface has effectively become a peripheral standard for all the different case/input/etc hats it can wear. (RetroFlag makes great use of this). With a low price point and reasonably decent performance, why wouldn't they have such an audience? So yes, that the Orange Pi struggles to watch YouTube videos, scroll through web pages, et al is an important concern. It sounds like driver support just isn't there for the hardware it provides. I'd hazard to say, on HN no less, that SBCs as tinker boards for robotics and cybernetics projects are the minority use-case.
- fooblat 8y ago
  While the Orange Pi 3 may have driver issues, the older models work quite well. Just as you suspect, I'm using an Orange Pi One combined with a usb arcade board/stick to run RetroOrangePi[0] and for game emulation it works great. 0. http://www.retrorangepi.org/ http://www.retrorangepi.org/ edit: typos
DCKing 8y ago
Linux SBCs are in a bit of a sad state. There was a rush to the market, which has led to many boards being in a very sad state when it comes to software support. Moreover, no interesting SoCs have come out for these things in just about forever. Software support for the Raspberry Pi is pretty good, but just about every other hardware platform doesn't get enough support. This is because the vendor doesn't want to, cannot cope with support, or the community isn't there. And that makes them very difficult to use. As is the case for this board. How do you release a board in 2019 for which the standard image is a three year old release of Ubuntu? I'd say Odroid's announced N2 [1] is probably the first interesting SBC to come out in long time, just because it has an SoC that should be a lot more powerful and feature-rich than any other SBCs. 4x ARM Cortex A73 + dedicated gigabit + 4 GiB DDR4 + a Vulkan capable GPU is a really compelling package for $79 (or $63 for the 2GB model). But also for that it's a certainty that software support will suck, at least initially. They already announced that when running GNU/Linux the GPU will only support Wayland and not X11, and their initial Android release will run a 32-bit userland on a 64-bit kernel (how do these things happen??). [1]: https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/ https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/
- sjcoles 8y ago
  The Odroid H2 is also a fantastic little bit of kit: x86, 4x PCI-e, SATA connectors, 32Gb of ram max. Great little low-power hypervisor for playing around on.
  - ac29 8y ago
    x86 SBC's are really in a different market from ARM based ones. The software support is vastly more mature, and they also tend to be more expensive (>$100 for x86, well under $100 for ARM). Hopefully this will start to change as ARM standardizes via things like SBSA and SBBR/EBBR.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I think a lot of this will come down to why x86 isn't going anywhere for a while... the tooling that everyone uses from OSes, drivers, etc around it all. Though once you've added a case, psu, ram, etc... I'm not sure you wouldn't be better off with an ITX build. (though it's time for a new nano standard).
jamespo 8y ago
I have one of these, currently you're limited to the 3.10 kernel from Android. I bought one for the gbit ethernet & emmc. No intention to use it as a desktop. Once support is mainlined and armbian is working it'll be great. At the moment though you can't even buy a case!
elcritch 8y ago
Interesting, while the OP might not find the boards interesting my interest is piqued. Anyone know if the GPU could be capable of running OpenCL or similar? Could be a hidden gem for cheap edge-AI on the edge. Though it sounds like GPU support could be rudimentary at best.
- fulafel 8y ago
  https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-mali-t720-support-for-opencl-why-allwinner-h6-doesn-t-provide-opencl-driver https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-...
sneakernets 8y ago
The main sticking point for Raspberry Pi (at least for me) is the community, and the constant optimization and stability improvements on the software/kernel side for the sub-par hardware. Of course you can buy a device that would run circles around the latest Pi models, but that's missing the point, imo.
- ldiracdelta 8y ago
  Exactly. You gotta stay with the crowd on Arm SBC's or you'll vastly increase the risk of being the first person who is doing something with the non-Pi platform and then hitting bugs and configuration issues. I hope pi teams will eventually upgrade their hardware platform.

30 points by Daviey 8y ago

This is blatantly false written by a Raspberry Pi Fanboy Truth is Orange Pi is the most powerful Raspberry Pi killer. Please check this authors tax returns ( he surely receiving speaking fee via Raspberry Pi people ) who are submarining and astroturfing for Pi foundation. Go check /r/OrangePi, people are statisfied with this board

tachyonbeam 8y ago
Yeah, most of this article is complaints about the web browsing experience. I'm a little puzzled. My main use case for the Raspberri Pi is little robot projects or home automation, etc, so I don't really care about the web browser. It would be nice if they had software compatibility with the Raspberri Pi though, if you could just put Raspbian on there, as that would allow them to leverage all the work that's been put into that and reduce ecosystem fragmentation a bit.
- magicnmonkey 8y ago
  I never found Raspberry Pi 3B+ to have less laggy browsing, on YouTube it drops frame and sometimes video just hangs while audio keeps playing. I am using Orange Pi 3 for a Router, which filters traffic/does DNS filtering too. It has 5gbps USB3 and true Gigabit ethernet.
- zwieback 8y ago
  Agreed, I use Pis a lot not because it's the fastest or cheapest or whatever but because of its popularity. If a not-quite-compatible board came out at the same price point that was twice as fast and had twice as much memory I might use it if I had a specific use case and enough time to sink into making it work. From the other testimonials it sounds like the Orange Pi is a reasonable choice but the performance premium doesn't convince me.

crististm 8y ago

What kind of analysis is this? "I'd normally include a range of benchmarks for the board but I had so much trouble running them on the Orange Pi 3, only a few are worth reporting." Then it goes on: "Pi 3 recorded an average connection speed of 45.7Mbps via iPerf, a perfectly reasonable result and comparable with the Raspberry Pi 3 boards and the Rock Pi 4. It also racked up a score of 22 on the GLmark 2 GPU benchmark, slightly above a reported score of 18 for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B on Ubuntu 16.04." They'd better let numbers speak instead of letting emotional writing confirm a weak hardware review.

peeters 8y ago
It wasn't a hardware review though, it was a platform review. If the platform has so many issues that you can't even test the hardware in an apples-to-apples comparison, that's worth mentioning in a review.
- crististm 8y ago
  What I understand is that they can write whatever they want and wave their hand when it comes to benchmarks? By the way, what part of the cited comparison where the "platforms" as you want to call them, compare on equal foot let them off the hook for a professional benchmarking in other areas?

d1str0 8y ago

This article has nothing substantial in it.

Matsta 8y ago

The H6 processor it uses isn't well supported yet and is still reasonably new. See support here: https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort Armbian has only started to work on it, see here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-chip/ https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-... Orange Pi make some great boards, they just take a while for them to be well supported. The Allwinner H2+/H3 which was originally released in 2014 has only got really good software support over the last 2-3 years.

JeffRosenberg 8y ago

Who is using a Raspberry Pi to browse the web and watch Youtube videos? That's a crazy way to review an SBC.

magicnmonkey 8y ago
Yea author is astroturfing for Pi foundation. I'll read nothing from him from now on, he just sold his soul to Pi foundation
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  This is a new fandom I'm discovering and didn't know existed.
fulafel 8y ago
If the advertised features are the gpu and 4k, it's the minimum that should work well. (The RPi actually runs a browser pretty well).
dleslie 8y ago
The RPi is incredibly popular as a Kodi and emulation machine. Browsing the web and watching YouTube videos is well within its abilities; the YouTube plugin on Kodi is a reasonable good, ad-free interface to YouTube. That said, yes, some websites are grotesquely slow; but that's more a poor reflection on them.
Matsta 8y ago
The primary factor with using a Desktop Linux is GPU support. The Videocore IV in the Raspberry Pi is as close as to open source as you're going to get on an ARM board. Plus it's been around since 2013 according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi Compared to this to the Mali-T720 MP2 in the Orange Pi 3, GPU support in Linux is virtually non-existent. https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali This article is a little outdated but is still very relevant: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7037-multimedia-related-stuff-on-armbian-opengl-es-videodecoding-mali-etc/ https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7037-multimedia-related-stuf... Also, note that GPU support on Android is usually a lot better compared to Linux. This is because they are using an older, more mature kernel.

fooblat 8y ago

I can't speak for the Orange Pi 3, but I have an Orange Pi PC2, two Orange Pi Ones, and an Orange Pi Zero and I'm very happy with all of them.

dleslie 8y ago

There's a substantial audience for SBCs as Multimedia PCs, Emulation consoles, and even as a primary desktop. The RPi interface has effectively become a peripheral standard for all the different case/input/etc hats it can wear. (RetroFlag makes great use of this). With a low price point and reasonably decent performance, why wouldn't they have such an audience? So yes, that the Orange Pi struggles to watch YouTube videos, scroll through web pages, et al is an important concern. It sounds like driver support just isn't there for the hardware it provides. I'd hazard to say, on HN no less, that SBCs as tinker boards for robotics and cybernetics projects are the minority use-case.

fooblat 8y ago
While the Orange Pi 3 may have driver issues, the older models work quite well. Just as you suspect, I'm using an Orange Pi One combined with a usb arcade board/stick to run RetroOrangePi[0] and for game emulation it works great. 0. http://www.retrorangepi.org/ http://www.retrorangepi.org/ edit: typos

DCKing 8y ago

Linux SBCs are in a bit of a sad state. There was a rush to the market, which has led to many boards being in a very sad state when it comes to software support. Moreover, no interesting SoCs have come out for these things in just about forever. Software support for the Raspberry Pi is pretty good, but just about every other hardware platform doesn't get enough support. This is because the vendor doesn't want to, cannot cope with support, or the community isn't there. And that makes them very difficult to use. As is the case for this board. How do you release a board in 2019 for which the standard image is a three year old release of Ubuntu? I'd say Odroid's announced N2 [1] is probably the first interesting SBC to come out in long time, just because it has an SoC that should be a lot more powerful and feature-rich than any other SBCs. 4x ARM Cortex A73 + dedicated gigabit + 4 GiB DDR4 + a Vulkan capable GPU is a really compelling package for $79 (or $63 for the 2GB model). But also for that it's a certainty that software support will suck, at least initially. They already announced that when running GNU/Linux the GPU will only support Wayland and not X11, and their initial Android release will run a 32-bit userland on a 64-bit kernel (how do these things happen??). [1]: https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/ https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/

sjcoles 8y ago
The Odroid H2 is also a fantastic little bit of kit: x86, 4x PCI-e, SATA connectors, 32Gb of ram max. Great little low-power hypervisor for playing around on.
- ac29 8y ago
  x86 SBC's are really in a different market from ARM based ones. The software support is vastly more mature, and they also tend to be more expensive (>$100 for x86, well under $100 for ARM). Hopefully this will start to change as ARM standardizes via things like SBSA and SBBR/EBBR.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I think a lot of this will come down to why x86 isn't going anywhere for a while... the tooling that everyone uses from OSes, drivers, etc around it all. Though once you've added a case, psu, ram, etc... I'm not sure you wouldn't be better off with an ITX build. (though it's time for a new nano standard).

jamespo 8y ago

I have one of these, currently you're limited to the 3.10 kernel from Android. I bought one for the gbit ethernet & emmc. No intention to use it as a desktop. Once support is mainlined and armbian is working it'll be great. At the moment though you can't even buy a case!

elcritch 8y ago

Interesting, while the OP might not find the boards interesting my interest is piqued. Anyone know if the GPU could be capable of running OpenCL or similar? Could be a hidden gem for cheap edge-AI on the edge. Though it sounds like GPU support could be rudimentary at best.

fulafel 8y ago
https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-mali-t720-support-for-opencl-why-allwinner-h6-doesn-t-provide-opencl-driver https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-...

sneakernets 8y ago

The main sticking point for Raspberry Pi (at least for me) is the community, and the constant optimization and stability improvements on the software/kernel side for the sub-par hardware. Of course you can buy a device that would run circles around the latest Pi models, but that's missing the point, imo.

ldiracdelta 8y ago
Exactly. You gotta stay with the crowd on Arm SBC's or you'll vastly increase the risk of being the first person who is doing something with the non-Pi platform and then hitting bugs and configuration issues. I hope pi teams will eventually upgrade their hardware platform.