Raspberry Pi 5 vs. Orange Pi 5 Plus vs. Rock 5 Model B

Exactly, we scrap them after like 5 years at the hospital system I work in.

I've also compared many 1L PCs from a performance/price/power consumption perspective. I decided on the HP prodesk/ elitedesk 400/800 G5 with the i5-9500T. It idles at ~2-3W and has considerably more computing and storage than these embedded solutions. I only see something like a raspberry pi be handy when relying on GPIO ports.

To be fair, you also need to account for consumption when you make the machine do something. The TDPs for these machines are in the 25-35W range, and hitting 50W does not seem unreasonable. You of course won't be running that the entire time. The larger SFF machines with 65W TDPs will go way above that.

An orange pi 5 uses 7.5W under full load, 3.3W idle in comparison.

This sort of underscores the weakness of RPi as a complete computer:

A complete computer is at least somewhat hardened against ESD and what not, has onboard storage of some description, and isn't severely throttled from a power standpoint.

I like RPis and similar for rapid prototyping if I know I need GPIO control, but if you don't, there are better machines out there, at similar price points.

The more I mess with SBCs the more I lean towards this method. The M720q's or M710q's are two of my favorites. As an added bonus the chargers even work with my lenovo laptop(s).

I wish someone made a rack to hold them vertically. I'd own 10 if I could mount them in a rack like this: https://images.prismic.io/macstadium/949d85ad-18be-4059-acf6...

I do similar but I look for older laptops.

Gets me integrated: battery, screen, keyboard, mouse

I can buy an old laptop for $100 and would cost me $150 for similar RPI hardware.

> Here's an example of a USFF (ultra small form factor) for $110 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/325826958401

Hm...

> No adapter is included. Needs 65W or above (most dell/hp laptops around the year it came out are compatible)

The 65W power adapter on Dell retails for $46.99 on sale, bringing the grand total to $156.99.

And that's just after skimming your link for 2 minutes.

The Serve The Home articles inspired me to go this route. I want to improve my understanding of Kubernetes for work. I picked up an HP EliteDesk 705 G4 mini desktop and an HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini desktop. Each was less than $200, and included 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, HDMI and DP outputs, and a power brick. One from Amazon ("renewed") and one from eBay. My 705 came with a Ryzen 2400G, and the 800 came with a i5-8500. I'm not planning to stack them so I was happy with the 65W chips although it means keeping the top of the case clear for cooling. Serve The Home recommends the 35W chips if you are going to stack them.

My router is an Optiplex fx160. Been running for years. I had to upgrade the storage and add another NIC. Has a built in power supply. I've never managed to run a Pi for this long, even with a decent power supply.

Or you can get a brand new N100 mini pc from Amazon for < $150 with 16Gb RAM and a 512Gb SSD (probably cheaper on AliExpress). It's much newer (10nm instead of 13nm+) and can idle as low as 6W.

And for GPIO (if really needed) you can always add something like an USB Arduino micro (clone) for a couple of bucks.

Or... brand new $189 Ryzen 7 4800H at https://store.minisforum.com/collections/amd-%C2%AE-ryzen-%C....

I like zotac silent SFF pcs.

I love the silence, and run proxmox with enough memory and storage.

Any idea what to similarly search for for a cheap, low power server but has at least 4 bays for hard drives to use as a NAS?

> You also get standard x86 support, normal expand-ability, M.2 slots, PCIe ports, etc.

Let's acknowledge that there are good reasons for avoiding x86 for those who care. The security problems for one, and the long shadow of Microsoft over the ecosystem. Perhaps an additional concern about the supply chain. The closer we can get to an open-source system without blobs, the better.

But the above concerns apart, it seems clear that R.Pi 4 and 400 were peak R.Pi. The performance and low-cost of Intel's recent x86 NUC mainboards is impressive. AMD is also offering strong value in the SFF market.

As I long-time R.Pi/Odroid user, I continue to enjoy these devices. But their lunch has been eaten by competitors.

Are there any that have h265 and avi decoders?

I think RPis have pretty much outgrown (outpriced?) their usefulness, except in very specialized applications:

If you want to run a server-task, listen to the common chorus and buy an 3-7 year old SFF business PC. Slap Proxmox on it, and you can virtualize a bunch of small 'servers' as LXCs with plenty of CPU and memory. Easy to add storage, dependable, and well-supported. Power draw is highly overstated for typical ancillary-server tasks, and if you were planning on 2+ Pis, you're now in the same ballpark.

If you want to hack together something with sensors/electronics, use a $5 ESP32, which likely has way more power than you need. If you need more processing power, move that from the edge device to something like the cheap SFF above. Plenty of sample ESP32/8266 Arduino libraries to expose/control the GPIO via a simple API, MQTT, or UDP/TCP payloads. Then, you can write your processing logic in whatever language you want, on a powerful server, and the edge device doesn't need Linux distro updates to blink some LED strips or whatever.

To get one in the EU the price triples at least and usually they simply don't ship here.

Yup, can confirm. Was trying to setup an Octoprint machine for my 3d printer, none of Raspberry Pi’s were in stock. After trying to catch one for weeks, I ended up buying the second-newest revision of OrangePi that was pretty powerful (not the barebones version).

To say it was trouble would be an understatement. Even after I successfully completed the setup (which took forever, as the documentation was contradicting, confusing, and felt like it was worse than machine-translated to english). Stability wasn’t there either at all. Occasionally it would just lock up and freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It would heat up pretty bad sometimes, despite an extra heat dissipator/cooler (that i triply made sure was installed properly). Webcam would randomly just refuse working (and I had to manually edit linux configs to get it to work in the first place). Sometimes SSH connection would just die and I become unable to connect to it again without either a reboot or restarting networking services on it (which would require me physically being next to it, thus defeating the point of Octoprint being remote). And mind you, I didn’t run it as some heavy production-tier 3d printing controller, I would print something a couple times a week tops, and nothing too complex or too high res (in terms of the model being printed).

All while Raspberry Pi has great documentation, and Octoprint setup on it is pretty much plug and play with just a few clicks of installing dependencies (or even simpler than that, if you install a dedicated Octoprint distro made specifically for Raspberry Pi).

Having owned many raspberry pis, a handful of rock pis (4A, 4B, Zero and S), Mango Pis, Khadas VIM4 and other SBCs (I have a problem haha)... I can say without a doubt the two shining stars the Raspberry Pi has are their distro/software and general ecosystem.

Just upgrading and dealing with downloading/upgrading the Raspberry Pi is a dream compared to the Rock Pis. The Khadas is a little better, but still I have a hard time upgrading it and sometimes certain images just won't even work from the company. Sometimes when trying to upgrade Rock Pis with eMMC you will find 2 or three different ways to install the freaking image on their own wikis.

There's also the "security" aspect for me, I really don't trust some of these distros (maybe I shouldn't worry??). A random image someone put on their website with broken instructions and messed up repos/kernels doesn't exactly instill confidence to me.

I will say the one GREAT thing from Rock Pi is their rock pi x. But it has an x86 processor and I can just install any distro. I wish they were easier to purchase and had more memory!!!

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend one that doesn't have mainline kernels. But Pine64 does good work on getting stuff upstreamed. The RK3399 used in the PinePhone Pro, the Orange Pi 4, Rock 4, and other boards has proper mainline support. I'm also a fan of the open sourced GPU drivers for that SoC done by the panfrost team that has desktop OpenGL support (not just the ES stuff).

Pine64's QuartzPro64 board uses the same RK3588 in the Orange Pi 5 Plus and Rock 5B, and they're working on upstreaming support for that: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...

That's my experience with many alternatives, basically nothing (INCLUDING rPi) is just supported in mainline, but rPi's patched version of Debian is well supported unlike the alternatives.

If just for playing around paying extra for pi just to have something that works makes a lot of sense.

Especially when dealing with low-level hardware stuff, like SPI and PWM and other pin I/O, design can be much easier when sticking to Raspberries only, because there are inevitably a lot of quirks that are different between companies.

Custom and outdated distros is a big problem with ARM boards unfortunately, unless you are a big and popular player like the Raspberry Pi. But even then a lot is not supported in mainline

First two links are resellers, as mentioned in the footers. But yes, Orange Pis have always been a bit shady.

Ebay or Aliexpress are good options with buyer's protection. I bought quite a few OrangePis in my time, although that was at a time when the Orange Pi Zero was 9 EUR a piece. At current prices, I don't see the point.

The OPis themselves were quite decent devices, Raspbian worked very well on them.

Aliexpress

Welcome to Chinese fruit clone vendors. They're all copying RPi and now copying each other. Good luck spotting the good ones.

Then when you get the device it won't do anything new after a while because the vendor never maintains their distro and the GPU or device tree are is proprietary so nobody else can either. If you're lucky maybe there's an Armbian build which marries new userspace with the older kernel and its unmaintained drivers.

This is why Raspberry Pi still dominates this market.

If you are hobbling with a PI it's all about the community support, form factor, low power and the header pins. Hopefully if you are buying a Pi you already have a specific project in mind.

For example: I use a few zero 2 w's with shairport-sync to make Airplay stereos. I use the header pins to control a relay to turn on and off an audio amp. Pi 4+ would actually work a lot better for this especially when playing audio on multiple of these setups at once. A Lenovo mini pc wouldn't be as easy to hide.

But that mini PC likely has as much as 10x the power draw... They are not interterchangable for lower power use cases

They’re an order of magnitude more powerful than a Pi or a clone, and are much easier to deal with from a compatibility standpoint.

The power considerations are pretty negligible from a cost per year perspective.

I really only use mine for pseudo IOT applications where space is a factor, like for OctPi and a Shairplay receiver.

What’s the power consumption on that? The biggest draw for these machines (to me at least), is how they seem to run on a 5w power source.

I've been using one for my media centre for many years, only swapping it out for newer versions for the performance upgrades. No issues here, and things like CEC are plug'n'play.

After my 3b+ died and the 4 was nowhere to be found, my enthusiasm kind of shifted towards something even crazier - Ryzen 7840 based machine for 5x the price.

Since these SBCs keep getting pricier and need active cooling while software is still far from ideal, it's not that big of a jump.

I like this idea, but what do you do for GPIO (and SPI, I2C etc.)?

do you have strong opinions on the matter? geez

every person I know who has had problems with the Pis has had problems because they've cheaped out on either storage or power supply.

the official power supplies (and others with the same ratings) are only sufficient if you don't plug anything into the USB port, don't have any hardware drawing power from the GPIO, and don't utilize Bluetooth and wifi 100% of the time at full throughput or anything.

boot to a fast thumb drive, power the board via a 30W or more power supply, and get an onboard battery so in the rare event that the onboard power regulation can't keep up, a battery powered supply can deliver power through the GPIO pins.

Raspberry Pis are built down to a price point, not up to a quality level. they are extremely good per unit of money spent on them, but they are not perfect.

calling them "shit" shows a general lack of understanding, to me.

There are multiple uses for the Pi. The mini PC is good are being computer, which Pi really isn't good at. But the mini PC can't do the other uses.

For example, the mini PC doesn't run on PoE. It won't fit in enclosure and can't put it on pole outside. But that is what I'm planning to do with Pi for ADS-B receiver.

The mini PC doesn't have PPS support or ability to install GPS receiver. That is what I need for Stratum 1 time server.

A lot of things I want to do just need USB. The question is if one PC or multiple Pis is better. I like idea of Pi per task since are independent units.

FWIW once I started deploying my Pis with automotive-grade SD cards bought from Arrow and Canakit 5.1v PSUs, all the stability & integrity issues completely disappeared. Costs a bit more, bringing the price of a setup closer to a used SFF HP or whatever, but it’s super stable.

Whether we should feel bound to go to such lengths is another topic…

Power button was just a pair of wires to a switch and some settings in old rpi IIRC

> Does it have some way to safely recover the filesystem after power-loss?

that is not a hardware feature

> The default configuration was "if you lose power there's a good chance the filesystem will be corrupt".

"Good chance"? We used to do kernel module development directly on Pi3/4s at this one client of mine, and I would OOPS the kernel from time-to-time (couple of times a day on average in the beginning stages) and never had a loss that ext4 couldn't recover from (and as the Pis lacked a "reset" button, resets were done via power-cycling).

We used standard PNY/Samsung Micro-SDs, too (i.e., not industrial-grade varieties), but we did pick the faster-IO variants when possible.

I'm really not sure that you'll get that much power savings. Given the idle consumption of a drive is ~6W I'm actually surprised my 10 year old server/NAS only consumes about 110W for a system with 10 drives, 10GBase-T, 8 DIMMs, Intel 3930k and fans/some USB peripherals.

I should try testing under some load however.

If you really care about power consumption here, buy a proper NAS like a Synology.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is available in stock in many places now https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4

It's a lot better in the last few months. If you're still looking for an RPI 4 then sign up on a waitlist at place like adafruit and you'll get one soon.

I picked one up a few weeks ago from Digikey. They had over 2000 in stock at the time.

I was surprised too, I expected 5 to come next year

there hasn't been a shortage for a while now, but you probably didn't hear about it because shortages ending isn't considered newsworthy.

it's the same with sriracha, you can pretty easily find it for msrp now, but lots of people still think it is hard to find because the last thing they heard on the topic was a news article about bottles selling on the gray market for $40-$80 back in may.

Those RPi4 supply problems seem to be mostly fixed. And RPi5 may come from different production line(s) such that it's available in quantity even if the 4s were not.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I completely aggree with you. You'd need something advanced like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliers#/media/File:Long-nosePl... to even be able to remove the mic. It's impossible. Don't reward those hackers!