As one might assume of a tech nerd in 2024 I run a home network and home lab in order to keep current on modern technology. To stay relevant in tech you need a playground where you can test and fail and learn in a way that isn’t “in production” or at least mostly. Where the stakes are low at least.

I very much appreciate the “buy used enterprise tech” folks who have the space, and cheap power, to do that. Recycling is very important and there are great deals to be had. Unfortunately for me, and I would guess many folks, space is limited, budgets are small, and someone might just want to learn and work with more modern tech.

This is where SBCs come in. They’re ARM based which many data-centers are switching to, they’re a huge price to performance ratio win, they’re small, and they’re power efficient. The first instinct might be to go with the Raspberry Pi and that wouldn’t be a bad choice. I have a few myself. However the Raspberry Pi 5 has some limitations that aren’t ideal if you really want to have a proper platform for all the things you might want to do in your home lab. First, the processor is meager by modern standards. In the context of this post lets compare it to the Raspberry Pi 5’s Broadcom BCM2712 2.4GHz quad-core processor with the Orange Pi 5 Plus’s Rockchip RK3588 8-core 2.4Ghz processor. To put it gently the Rockchip smashes the Broadcom in performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4297vs4906/BCM2711-vs-Rockchip-RK3588 Another big aspect to performance is just quantity of ram. The Pi 5 tops out at 8GB where the Orange Pi 5 Plus has models that go as high as 32GB ram. Finally there’s I/O or at least out of the box I/O. The Pi 5 does have a wonderful world of Hats available to expand it’s I/O but out of the box it’s pretty meager. You can find the onboard I/O here https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/ The Orange Pi 5 Plus on the other hand comes with 3x HDMI 2.1, 2x 2.5Gb, Nics, 2x M.2 slots, IR reciever, EMMC port the list goes on.

So what about price? The Raspberry Pi 5 8GB comes in around $85 https://amzn.to/3U4MBIS The Orange Pi 5 Plus comes in at $152 for 2x the ram https://amzn.to/4eHFHS8 I’m no mathematician but that’s less than 2x the price for well more than 2x the hardware and capabilities. If you don’t need 2x the ram for some reason or your tighter on the budget there is an 8GB Orange Pi 5 Plus for $130 https://amzn.to/3U8XWYy Given the price differential between 8GB and 16GB I find it rare not to figure out how to pay the difference and have quite a bit more ram. I’m sure you could probably do some aliexpress spelunking and come up with some different numbers but lets be honest most of us aren’t going to do that.

I hear you say but but but the Pi ecosystem and community is A+. You’re right! That’s probably the best thing the Pi has going for it. There isn’t an SBC going with such a rich community and wealth of information. I wouldn’t fault you for going Raspberry Pi for that reason alone. Again, I have Pi’s. Here’s the thing, the platform only matters so far as specificity of hardware. With time the Rockchip hardware has worked it’s way into wider compatibility in the Linux kernel and now, by in large, it’s a commodity machine running the biggest platform Linux. This is courtesy of both the Linux community and the Armbian project. https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-5-plus/ This Armbian support also addresses the concern over chineseium software presented by using default images from Orange Pi. So while the board specific community may not be A+ you can, by in large, simply treat it as an ARM PC running Linux.

So what’s the catch? As much as people might like to pretend that any given platform is without issues almost every platform has them. Ironically for a low power platform the only issues I’ve run into are power issues. The board seems susceptible to instability from both the power supply. Get a nice high quality clean power adapter. Somewhat ironically the “Pi 5” official adapters work beautifully. I nabbed this one for a mere $10 https://amzn.to/4dLGwrV The second power issue I ran into are NVME drives pulling too much power and also causing instability. My first attempts were with a Samsung 980 Pro which would cause some sort of fault every 12-24 hours requiring a power cycle. I found this list https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-benchmarks-hierarchy which includes an average power column. I picked up the Lexar NM790 1TB for $75 https://amzn.to/4dOTx3H and all the issues disappeared.

If you don’t need the hand holding of the Pi’s community and are comfortable with the resources of the wider Linux community then the Orange Pi 5 Plus might be the better choice for you. I’ll write follow up posts regarding what I’m using these for specifically.