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The Orange Pi 5 series offers similar in a relatively small board factor too, though, as well as stuff like HDMI video capture, built-in or modular eMMC, Rockch

The Orange Pi 5 series offers similar in a relatively small board factor too, though, as well as stuff like HDMI video capture, built-in or modular eMMC, Rockchip's new(-ish) NPU, dual 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and M.2 support. It's a big reason why the RPi5 kind of falls flat for me: it's a worse one of those, and not really much cheaper. I have a few NUC-style very small form factor Intel machines around too, of course, but there are a lot of good options out there and ARM shouldn't be discounted.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Orange Pi is a great platform & I have one, but now the SBC price is hovering around $100 or more and so a the reused 1L business mini-pc makes even more sense, if it's computing you're after.
- eropple 3y ago
  Price-competitive NUCs are generally very old Celerons (J4105 and similar), which are CPU-competitive with the RK3588S but generally a little slower. Those NUCs also generally have glacially slow GPUs and poor hardware acceleration for stuff like video. And a lot of the mainboards of that era can't go over 4GB of RAM, whereas you can get 16GB in an Orange Pi 5; I've got three of those in my home k8s cluster alongside some older amd64 PCs.
  - cfn 3y ago
    I got a couple of Lenovo i5s with 8Gb for 99 Euros each on Amazon a few months ago. They even came with a 500Gb SSD and Windows 8 installed (or was it Windows 7? I can't remember, they are running Ubuntu at the moment). They are much better than a Pi and cheaper given the sourcing dificulties.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    The new Intel Alder Lake N N100 up to i3-N300s are just starting to appear. Most are semi pricey but we are seeing some sub $150 offerings, new. The top end N300's are easily equivalent performance of an 35w i5-8600t. With some nice extra modern features/bells/whistles. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-processor-n100-cpu-12gb/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-p... The real challenge is though that for most people, there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost always a great trade-off. My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports, which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat. Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value, and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value. If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and more. It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade & were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But there's so much more value going to resale markets or spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get away with selling such bad performance for so long. Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they have remained far up market.
    - eropple 3y ago
      Yeah I should have constrained it to new-stock stuff that isn't a repurpose of other hardware. You have absolutely been able to find stuff if you wanted to work for it. I don't really, so it's not on my radar. Alder Lake stuff is showing up now, and that's pretty great. It is not, however, particularly fast hardware, and the GPUs are still really pokey.
geerlingguy 3y ago
I can't find an OPi 5 for less than $100, nearly double the price of the low spec Pi 5, and other good boards like the Rock 5 B start in the $130s. I would love to see an RK3588S board for < $50, because the chip is incredible in terms of efficiency and feature set... but it's just so expensive still.
- eropple 3y ago
  CanaKit and PiShop have RPi5 boards for $60. Amazon sellers have 4GB OPi5 boards for $80. https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Frequency-Development-Android12/dp/B0BN16ZLXB https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Frequency-Development-Andro... My contention is for things that actually need relatively-modern performance (taking into account that the RK3588 is still a little old, albeit Very Fresh for a SBC), I think that $20 is probably worth it for most of them.
- bscphil 3y ago
  Do you have a good sense of what boards are worth looking at for media center use cases? In the last few years it's become the norm to need to be able to drive a 4k display with HDR metadata, and decode 4k HEVC with HDR in hardware (and ideally pass through Dolby Vision as well). The dream is to be able to do that with a relatively inexpensive board with just the mainline kernel. I've had bad luck with the Pi 4 with respect to video decoding. 4k HEVC decoding is an advertised feature of the Pi 4, but it chokes on anything with moderate bitrates in my experience. I'd like my next board to support HDR and HEVC so reliably that I never have to think about it, and I'm not sure if that's going to be the Pi 5 or not.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
For most of my use cases (3d printer controller), I don't really need any of those. So easily 2x the price for something I won't use isn't worth it. Not that I don't have an Orange Pi 5 for other uses, but that's gathering dust in a drawer because I'm waiting for good GPU drivers. The Raspberry Pi 5 seems like it'll have Vulkan 1.2 out of the box. I'm still waiting for Panfrost's new PanCSF drivers for the RK3588 Malis.
- eropple 3y ago
  I have a Klipper-driven print farm. For a 3D printer controller, you do not need a Raspberry Pi 5. Or a Raspberry Pi 4. You can use a $30 Le Potato and be fine with it.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    I did have a disconnect issue with CAN bus on a Pi 3 though. Swapping out the Pi 3 for a Pi 4 fixed it using the same install/SD card. I even swapped back to test and it disconnected an hour into a print again. But CAN is a whole different beast that I'm not sure I'd recommend. A 30$ Le Potato is still more than the 25$ Raspberry Pi 3A+. Which I like for it's smaller size. A single USB port isn't too big a deal if you get a CSI Pi Camera for monitoring instead of USB, or use the GPIO for serial.
    - eropple 3y ago
      RPi3A is also great too, for sure. More that 3D printers, even during Klipper motion planning, doesn't require much grunt. I see a lot of people who overspent on RPi4's, even, when they just could've used something with an H616 or whatever on it.
      - ThatPlayer 3y ago
        Yeah, I got my Pis at MSRP so I don't mind putting in a 4 instead of a 3. I've even done Klipper with an Orange Pi Zero 2 with a H616.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Orange Pi is a great platform & I have one, but now the SBC price is hovering around $100 or more and so a the reused 1L business mini-pc makes even more sense, if it's computing you're after.

eropple 3y ago
Price-competitive NUCs are generally very old Celerons (J4105 and similar), which are CPU-competitive with the RK3588S but generally a little slower. Those NUCs also generally have glacially slow GPUs and poor hardware acceleration for stuff like video. And a lot of the mainboards of that era can't go over 4GB of RAM, whereas you can get 16GB in an Orange Pi 5; I've got three of those in my home k8s cluster alongside some older amd64 PCs.
- cfn 3y ago
  I got a couple of Lenovo i5s with 8Gb for 99 Euros each on Amazon a few months ago. They even came with a 500Gb SSD and Windows 8 installed (or was it Windows 7? I can't remember, they are running Ubuntu at the moment). They are much better than a Pi and cheaper given the sourcing dificulties.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  The new Intel Alder Lake N N100 up to i3-N300s are just starting to appear. Most are semi pricey but we are seeing some sub $150 offerings, new. The top end N300's are easily equivalent performance of an 35w i5-8600t. With some nice extra modern features/bells/whistles. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-processor-n100-cpu-12gb/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-p... The real challenge is though that for most people, there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost always a great trade-off. My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports, which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat. Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value, and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value. If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and more. It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade & were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But there's so much more value going to resale markets or spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get away with selling such bad performance for so long. Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they have remained far up market.
  - eropple 3y ago
    Yeah I should have constrained it to new-stock stuff that isn't a repurpose of other hardware. You have absolutely been able to find stuff if you wanted to work for it. I don't really, so it's not on my radar. Alder Lake stuff is showing up now, and that's pretty great. It is not, however, particularly fast hardware, and the GPUs are still really pokey.

geerlingguy 3y ago

I can't find an OPi 5 for less than $100, nearly double the price of the low spec Pi 5, and other good boards like the Rock 5 B start in the $130s. I would love to see an RK3588S board for < $50, because the chip is incredible in terms of efficiency and feature set... but it's just so expensive still.

eropple 3y ago
CanaKit and PiShop have RPi5 boards for $60. Amazon sellers have 4GB OPi5 boards for $80. https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Frequency-Development-Android12/dp/B0BN16ZLXB https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Frequency-Development-Andro... My contention is for things that actually need relatively-modern performance (taking into account that the RK3588 is still a little old, albeit Very Fresh for a SBC), I think that $20 is probably worth it for most of them.
bscphil 3y ago
Do you have a good sense of what boards are worth looking at for media center use cases? In the last few years it's become the norm to need to be able to drive a 4k display with HDR metadata, and decode 4k HEVC with HDR in hardware (and ideally pass through Dolby Vision as well). The dream is to be able to do that with a relatively inexpensive board with just the mainline kernel. I've had bad luck with the Pi 4 with respect to video decoding. 4k HEVC decoding is an advertised feature of the Pi 4, but it chokes on anything with moderate bitrates in my experience. I'd like my next board to support HDR and HEVC so reliably that I never have to think about it, and I'm not sure if that's going to be the Pi 5 or not.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

For most of my use cases (3d printer controller), I don't really need any of those. So easily 2x the price for something I won't use isn't worth it. Not that I don't have an Orange Pi 5 for other uses, but that's gathering dust in a drawer because I'm waiting for good GPU drivers. The Raspberry Pi 5 seems like it'll have Vulkan 1.2 out of the box. I'm still waiting for Panfrost's new PanCSF drivers for the RK3588 Malis.

eropple 3y ago
I have a Klipper-driven print farm. For a 3D printer controller, you do not need a Raspberry Pi 5. Or a Raspberry Pi 4. You can use a $30 Le Potato and be fine with it.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  I did have a disconnect issue with CAN bus on a Pi 3 though. Swapping out the Pi 3 for a Pi 4 fixed it using the same install/SD card. I even swapped back to test and it disconnected an hour into a print again. But CAN is a whole different beast that I'm not sure I'd recommend. A 30$ Le Potato is still more than the 25$ Raspberry Pi 3A+. Which I like for it's smaller size. A single USB port isn't too big a deal if you get a CSI Pi Camera for monitoring instead of USB, or use the GPIO for serial.
  - eropple 3y ago
    RPi3A is also great too, for sure. More that 3D printers, even during Klipper motion planning, doesn't require much grunt. I see a lot of people who overspent on RPi4's, even, when they just could've used something with an H616 or whatever on it.
    - ThatPlayer 3y ago
      Yeah, I got my Pis at MSRP so I don't mind putting in a 4 instead of a 3. I've even done Klipper with an Orange Pi Zero 2 with a H616.