7 ms·

Every single board computer I tested in 2025

226 points by speckx 8mo ago

tripdout 8mo ago
The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it. Unifi released the UCG-Fiber around a year ago that can also apparently finally handle it, but plenty of threads about slow performance with their UDMs since it's entirely done on the CPU [0]. I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT and would prefer something like OPNSense, but it's x86 only and good PPPoE performance isn't guaranteed either - need a CPU with good single core performance that costs more than the BPI-R4, or apparently virtualizing OPNSense allows it to process PPPoE with multiple threads. 0: https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performance-for-PPPOE-on-UDM-Pro-With-Solution/67057f47-509e-4f8b-8edd-5dc29f380759 https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performan...
- briHass 8mo ago
  I'm curious why you don't like OpenWRT? I've found it to be the better choice for x86 hardware, because it performs so much better on older CPUs. FreeBSD has gotten better with driver support, but the Linux kernel in OWRT is just a better base to build off of.
  - Palomides 8mo ago
    not GP but I've found the install and upgrade experience for OpenWRT on larger machines is not great compared to the alternatives and normal Linux distros, everything is biased towards the use case of occasionally flashing/configuring little systems I still use it though, can't complain in terms of actual routing/switching
- magic-amoeba 8mo ago
  I think OPNsense now supports ARM. Edit: never mind. Not official images.
heavyset_go 8mo ago
I basically stopped buying SBCs several years ago, are there any SoC platforms that have mainline Linux support these days? Or is x86 still the way to go?
- aarroyoc 8mo ago
  RK3588 is well supported right now and is present in many SBCs
  - doubled112 8mo ago
    I am generally happy with my Orange Pi 5, but I have flip flopped between the vendor kernel and a mainline kernel depending on what purpose the OPi5 is serving at that moment. There’s also a fairly usable UEFI implementation.
    - heavyset_go 8mo ago
      Does the vendor kernel support more of the board's peripherals than the mainline kernel? Had that issue with some Odroid boards, where the vendor kernel supported MFC hardware acceleration but the vanilla kernel didn't/doesn't. I'd like to avoid that
      - doubled112 8mo ago
        Yes, that’s the main reason to run the vendor kernel. Mainline support is improving all the time though. I believe I needed the vendor kernel to use video through the USB-C port, and to use the HW acceleration for transcoding in Jellyfin. This situation may have changed since my last attempts.
        MrDOS 8mo ago
        I think https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... is still the best reference for mainline support of the RK3588. As you say, DP alt mode and video encoding are totally unsupported right now. Hopefully things will keep progressing; it's a very feature-rich platform, and I think it will have some legs even after it is no longer the compute king (e.g., the RK3688 is on the horizon).
yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
I really wish these lists would talk about software support. If I buy these, do they have mainline Linux support? Will I have security patches in a year? Is there decent distro support, or am I stuck with the vendor's half broken default image?
- sthlmb 8mo ago
  Hey! Author of the post someone linked here. Fair comment, though this wasn't really meant to be a review, or "go buy this!" type of post, it was more to highlight what I tested from the boards released in 2025 and share the results to those benchmarks via sbc.compare Armbian do a great job of handling support for a whole host of boards (including most I included in this list), so you'll usually have Debian/Ubuntu-based flavours. Vendor kernels and vendor supplied images will be hit and miss. Mainline Linux support is a flag you filter by on the benchmark comparison site linked in the article, but it's a difficult one to keep up to date and define exactly. It could have some kind of support, but miss out on display functionality, or WiFi yada yada. What would we then class as having mainline support? All hardware etc functioning? If so, very, very few will meet that definition. I get the desire for the information, and perhaps I should have envisioned these types of questions, but all I initially meant for the post to be was a recap for people following me to see which boards I'd tested that were released last year :D
  - fn-mote 8mo ago
    > All hardware etc functioning? If your standard is "supports suspend/resume", there's even plenty of laptops that won't meet it. That gave me a laugh.
    - robinsonb5 8mo ago
      Suspend / resume? I'll settle for "keyboard works". (From what I've learned so far, some magic incantation is required to convince Linux that a Lifebook E559 is a laptop not a tablet. I'm finding I have way less patience with these side-quests as I get older.)
plagiarist 8mo ago
I wish comparisons would get into whether or not drivers have been upstreamed far enough where it is possible to run real Linux distros. And whether or not they've made braindead choices about boot device ordering.
tamimio 8mo ago
It would be better if there was a table summarized it all.
- sthlmb 8mo ago
  What kind of summary are you realistically looking for/expecting in an article like this? (Genuine question, no sass!)
  - IshKebab 8mo ago
    Price, CPU performance, RAM, storage, networking, software support outlook. I mean really though unless you have a lot of time I don't think there's anything close to worth leaving the software support of Raspberry Pi for.
    - tamimio 8mo ago
      We posted that at the same time!! Rpi and also nvidia jetson I would add.
    - sthlmb 8mo ago
      For that I'd really point you towards the links in the article, as that was really what it was supposed to do :D As I mentioned to another person in the comments, this was literally supposed to be a recap of the boards I tested, with links to in-depth benchmark results for each of the boards, with the ability to then filter and compare against around 100 other SBCs that I own and have tested in a controlled manner. Software support is a very tricky one though, sadly. I have a few ideas for little things like being able to search for Armbian support, but others would need a long hard think!
    - adrianwaj 8mo ago
      Yeah, the Pi has a very interesting looking mini-screen addon too. https://www.waveshare.com/product/cm4-disp-base-2.8a.htm https://www.waveshare.com/product/cm4-disp-base-2.8a.htm I think being able to switch between a phone and desktop is a great use-case for SBC. Important to be able to attach a power bank and the real bottleneck to adoption: a telco addon. Some sort of vibration absorbing case would also be great with a few different varieties around too: https://www.gttwireless.com/raspberry-pi-outdoors/ https://www.gttwireless.com/raspberry-pi-outdoors/ https://github.com/NebraLtd/IP67-Enclosure https://github.com/NebraLtd/IP67-Enclosure You could take that SBC with you on a bike, car, around the home, to the worksite. Even a mobile web server for temporary gatherings placed on a high vantage point. Signage is also an important area for SBCs. I'd wager on Polymarket that Apple will end up doing something in this space.
jeden 8mo ago
please make llm.cpp benchmark on this same model
veegee 8mo ago
[dead]
regularfry 8mo ago
I find it really weird that it's not until you get to the $200 range that anything has USB-C DP Alt mode support. You'd have though that anyone trying to squeeze space would want to drop full-size HDMI or DisplayPort ports at the first opportunity.
- rm1988 8mo ago
  I switched from SBC to thin clients. You get the Dell wyse 5070 for 50 euros in my country and it has USB c dp alt mode and much more.
- regularfry 8mo ago
  I will note that in theory there's the Radxa Cubie A7S, but that's unobtainium. Or I'd have bought three by now.
- ikmckenz 8mo ago
  I really want a small SBC with USB-C DP Alt mode that I can stuff into a ~60%ish mechanical keyboard-sized case to make into a headless laptop thing so I can justify buying some display glasses like the XReal One or similar. Seems like it would be the ultimate travel computing solution.
  - regularfry 8mo ago
    That's precisely what I want. I've got all the parts other than the SBC. Even designed my own keyboard with this in mind. You can do it with a pi zero 2 but going from mini-HDMI to full-HDMI through an adapter to USB-C to only then pop out too the XReals is a complete mess of cables and little boxes, not least of which is caused by the HDMI->USB-C adapter needing to be independently powered. I'm tempted to print up a case to hide the mess but it's still, you know, a mess. Also the zero 2 is a little under-powered. It's fine as far as it goes, it just feels like there's probably performance on the table with a more modern chipset.
eleventyseven 8mo ago
> ollama benchmark ... for now, it's purely CPU, with DeepSeek R1 models tested based on the RAM available. Then the results aren't comparable across different boards across RAM sizes. It'd be better to test a set of different model sizes on all and report -- if it didn't fit. But could you report the full ollama model name and version size slug for each? > I pull Jeff's fork of the ollama-benchmark software A link would be nice.
- sthlmb 8mo ago
  Hmm, I'm not sure if I'm missing something but that 1st comment is what I'm doing. I have 3 different sized Deepseek R1 models (1.5, 8, 16) and they run on each board that can handle them and then the data is reported. For the 2nd, the file I grabbed initially was https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/blob/main/obench.sh https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/blob/main/obenc... - which I now notice wasn't modified in his repository, so I can check that out, but either way, the same version has been tested across everything thus far.
guenthert 8mo ago
"This one caught me off guard. Arduino, the company most of us associate with microcontrollers and blinking LEDs, have released an SBC." Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC? I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.
- sthlmb 8mo ago
  If I stripped my old laptop down to a single PCB, it certainly wouldn't boot, it would be missing RAM, and storage. My PCs would have no RAM, no CPU, no storage, potentially no GPU, and most of the servers would be the same. The IPMI/iDRAC etc would boot up I guess if we count that, and we'd potentially get into the BIOS if a device has soldered RAM, but M.2/SATA attached storage or something? We could debate about strict definitions all day, but I think the vast majority of people differentiate between a Raspberry Pi 5 (not a great example given it needs storage, pick anything with eMMC if you truly want everything on a single board) running a full Debian-based OS, and a Pico running MicroPython (or whatever your poison of choice is) and one task at a time, at least I do when it comes to this kind of thing!
gmiller123456 8mo ago
Budget boards start at $42? Not really sure what the criteria was for being included, but it looks like you can still get a RPi 2B for $25. And Orange Pis are available for under $20.

226 points by speckx 8mo ago

The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it. Unifi released the UCG-Fiber around a year ago that can also apparently finally handle it, but plenty of threads about slow performance with their UDMs since it's entirely done on the CPU [0]. I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT and would prefer something like OPNSense, but it's x86 only and good PPPoE performance isn't guaranteed either - need a CPU with good single core performance that costs more than the BPI-R4, or apparently virtualizing OPNSense allows it to process PPPoE with multiple threads. 0: https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performance-for-PPPOE-on-UDM-Pro-With-Solution/67057f47-509e-4f8b-8edd-5dc29f380759 https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performan...

briHass 8mo ago
I'm curious why you don't like OpenWRT? I've found it to be the better choice for x86 hardware, because it performs so much better on older CPUs. FreeBSD has gotten better with driver support, but the Linux kernel in OWRT is just a better base to build off of.
- Palomides 8mo ago
  not GP but I've found the install and upgrade experience for OpenWRT on larger machines is not great compared to the alternatives and normal Linux distros, everything is biased towards the use case of occasionally flashing/configuring little systems I still use it though, can't complain in terms of actual routing/switching
magic-amoeba 8mo ago
I think OPNsense now supports ARM. Edit: never mind. Not official images.

heavyset_go 8mo ago

I basically stopped buying SBCs several years ago, are there any SoC platforms that have mainline Linux support these days? Or is x86 still the way to go?

aarroyoc 8mo ago
RK3588 is well supported right now and is present in many SBCs
- doubled112 8mo ago
  I am generally happy with my Orange Pi 5, but I have flip flopped between the vendor kernel and a mainline kernel depending on what purpose the OPi5 is serving at that moment. There’s also a fairly usable UEFI implementation.
  - heavyset_go 8mo ago
    Does the vendor kernel support more of the board's peripherals than the mainline kernel? Had that issue with some Odroid boards, where the vendor kernel supported MFC hardware acceleration but the vanilla kernel didn't/doesn't. I'd like to avoid that
    - doubled112 8mo ago
      Yes, that’s the main reason to run the vendor kernel. Mainline support is improving all the time though. I believe I needed the vendor kernel to use video through the USB-C port, and to use the HW acceleration for transcoding in Jellyfin. This situation may have changed since my last attempts.
      - MrDOS 8mo ago
        I think https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... is still the best reference for mainline support of the RK3588. As you say, DP alt mode and video encoding are totally unsupported right now. Hopefully things will keep progressing; it's a very feature-rich platform, and I think it will have some legs even after it is no longer the compute king (e.g., the RK3688 is on the horizon).

yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago

I really wish these lists would talk about software support. If I buy these, do they have mainline Linux support? Will I have security patches in a year? Is there decent distro support, or am I stuck with the vendor's half broken default image?

sthlmb 8mo ago
Hey! Author of the post someone linked here. Fair comment, though this wasn't really meant to be a review, or "go buy this!" type of post, it was more to highlight what I tested from the boards released in 2025 and share the results to those benchmarks via sbc.compare Armbian do a great job of handling support for a whole host of boards (including most I included in this list), so you'll usually have Debian/Ubuntu-based flavours. Vendor kernels and vendor supplied images will be hit and miss. Mainline Linux support is a flag you filter by on the benchmark comparison site linked in the article, but it's a difficult one to keep up to date and define exactly. It could have some kind of support, but miss out on display functionality, or WiFi yada yada. What would we then class as having mainline support? All hardware etc functioning? If so, very, very few will meet that definition. I get the desire for the information, and perhaps I should have envisioned these types of questions, but all I initially meant for the post to be was a recap for people following me to see which boards I'd tested that were released last year :D
- fn-mote 8mo ago
  > All hardware etc functioning? If your standard is "supports suspend/resume", there's even plenty of laptops that won't meet it. That gave me a laugh.
  - robinsonb5 8mo ago
    Suspend / resume? I'll settle for "keyboard works". (From what I've learned so far, some magic incantation is required to convince Linux that a Lifebook E559 is a laptop not a tablet. I'm finding I have way less patience with these side-quests as I get older.)

plagiarist 8mo ago

I wish comparisons would get into whether or not drivers have been upstreamed far enough where it is possible to run real Linux distros. And whether or not they've made braindead choices about boot device ordering.

tamimio 8mo ago

It would be better if there was a table summarized it all.

sthlmb 8mo ago
What kind of summary are you realistically looking for/expecting in an article like this? (Genuine question, no sass!)
- IshKebab 8mo ago
  Price, CPU performance, RAM, storage, networking, software support outlook. I mean really though unless you have a lot of time I don't think there's anything close to worth leaving the software support of Raspberry Pi for.
  - tamimio 8mo ago
    We posted that at the same time!! Rpi and also nvidia jetson I would add.
  - sthlmb 8mo ago
    For that I'd really point you towards the links in the article, as that was really what it was supposed to do :D As I mentioned to another person in the comments, this was literally supposed to be a recap of the boards I tested, with links to in-depth benchmark results for each of the boards, with the ability to then filter and compare against around 100 other SBCs that I own and have tested in a controlled manner. Software support is a very tricky one though, sadly. I have a few ideas for little things like being able to search for Armbian support, but others would need a long hard think!
  - adrianwaj 8mo ago
    Yeah, the Pi has a very interesting looking mini-screen addon too. https://www.waveshare.com/product/cm4-disp-base-2.8a.htm https://www.waveshare.com/product/cm4-disp-base-2.8a.htm I think being able to switch between a phone and desktop is a great use-case for SBC. Important to be able to attach a power bank and the real bottleneck to adoption: a telco addon. Some sort of vibration absorbing case would also be great with a few different varieties around too: https://www.gttwireless.com/raspberry-pi-outdoors/ https://www.gttwireless.com/raspberry-pi-outdoors/ https://github.com/NebraLtd/IP67-Enclosure https://github.com/NebraLtd/IP67-Enclosure You could take that SBC with you on a bike, car, around the home, to the worksite. Even a mobile web server for temporary gatherings placed on a high vantage point. Signage is also an important area for SBCs. I'd wager on Polymarket that Apple will end up doing something in this space.

jeden 8mo ago

please make llm.cpp benchmark on this same model

veegee 8mo ago

[dead]

regularfry 8mo ago

I find it really weird that it's not until you get to the $200 range that anything has USB-C DP Alt mode support. You'd have though that anyone trying to squeeze space would want to drop full-size HDMI or DisplayPort ports at the first opportunity.

rm1988 8mo ago
I switched from SBC to thin clients. You get the Dell wyse 5070 for 50 euros in my country and it has USB c dp alt mode and much more.
regularfry 8mo ago
I will note that in theory there's the Radxa Cubie A7S, but that's unobtainium. Or I'd have bought three by now.
ikmckenz 8mo ago
I really want a small SBC with USB-C DP Alt mode that I can stuff into a ~60%ish mechanical keyboard-sized case to make into a headless laptop thing so I can justify buying some display glasses like the XReal One or similar. Seems like it would be the ultimate travel computing solution.
- regularfry 8mo ago
  That's precisely what I want. I've got all the parts other than the SBC. Even designed my own keyboard with this in mind. You can do it with a pi zero 2 but going from mini-HDMI to full-HDMI through an adapter to USB-C to only then pop out too the XReals is a complete mess of cables and little boxes, not least of which is caused by the HDMI->USB-C adapter needing to be independently powered. I'm tempted to print up a case to hide the mess but it's still, you know, a mess. Also the zero 2 is a little under-powered. It's fine as far as it goes, it just feels like there's probably performance on the table with a more modern chipset.

eleventyseven 8mo ago

> ollama benchmark ... for now, it's purely CPU, with DeepSeek R1 models tested based on the RAM available. Then the results aren't comparable across different boards across RAM sizes. It'd be better to test a set of different model sizes on all and report -- if it didn't fit. But could you report the full ollama model name and version size slug for each? > I pull Jeff's fork of the ollama-benchmark software A link would be nice.

sthlmb 8mo ago
Hmm, I'm not sure if I'm missing something but that 1st comment is what I'm doing. I have 3 different sized Deepseek R1 models (1.5, 8, 16) and they run on each board that can handle them and then the data is reported. For the 2nd, the file I grabbed initially was https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/blob/main/obench.sh https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/blob/main/obenc... - which I now notice wasn't modified in his repository, so I can check that out, but either way, the same version has been tested across everything thus far.

guenthert 8mo ago

"This one caught me off guard. Arduino, the company most of us associate with microcontrollers and blinking LEDs, have released an SBC." Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC? I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.

sthlmb 8mo ago
If I stripped my old laptop down to a single PCB, it certainly wouldn't boot, it would be missing RAM, and storage. My PCs would have no RAM, no CPU, no storage, potentially no GPU, and most of the servers would be the same. The IPMI/iDRAC etc would boot up I guess if we count that, and we'd potentially get into the BIOS if a device has soldered RAM, but M.2/SATA attached storage or something? We could debate about strict definitions all day, but I think the vast majority of people differentiate between a Raspberry Pi 5 (not a great example given it needs storage, pick anything with eMMC if you truly want everything on a single board) running a full Debian-based OS, and a Pico running MicroPython (or whatever your poison of choice is) and one task at a time, at least I do when it comes to this kind of thing!

gmiller123456 8mo ago

Budget boards start at $42? Not really sure what the criteria was for being included, but it looks like you can still get a RPi 2B for $25. And Orange Pis are available for under $20.