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Comment by johann8384 | Hacker News Reader

I still think the OrangePi and BananaPi lines are a better price/performance ratio.

They are Some Intel N100 based boards in the pi5/OrangePi/BananaPi price range. They are more powerful and can have their power consumption capped to that of the Pis. What is still the value proposition of the pis?

Probably other companies don't have staff offending people on social networks

The Radxa X4 is a recent entrant and starts at $60. It has its compromises but is an interesting alternative with an onboard RP2040 providing GPIO.

I have an Radxa X4 on order, thinking it would be somewhat on par with other X4's.

Your writeup is making me somewhat regret-im-advance this purchase. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/radxa-x4-sbc-unites-i...

Half of price is hidden in shipping fee. It's 60 + 70 in shipping + taxes.

As you said in your recent video though, it'd be more effort to use the GPIO due to the side-channel RP2040.

I was interesting in looking at the Radxa Zero 3 after one of your videos; for an application where I need the Zero form-factor but more power than a Zero 2W, unfortunately a quick look at the Radxa forums left me with the impression I'd spend half of my time fighting with poor software and general board issues, and there's only so many rabbit-holes I have the time and energy to go down these days.

Knowing you've tested a good selection of boards, can you think of anything in that FF that runs mainline Linux, or something close?

gpio

I have a couple of orangepi 5+'s that replaced a large, loud, power hungry server. with an attached nvme drive, iscsi connected over 2.5gbit ethernet, 8 cores, and 32gb of ram, they are quite capable.

one is the primary database, another runs everything else in docker containers.

Yep.

With the popularity, one would assume we'd be able to get a CPU that's not a decade behind smartphones. Mine is now gathering dust; it's inefficient for the power it consumes.

The power consumption is genuinely worse than advertised (2x the draw of Pi 4, 3x the performance). The reality is a 3W idle minimum, 15W at full load, meanwhile the Pi 4 can idle at 1W and won't ever go over 5W. They're just about the same power per watt, the efficiency gains are zero.

For a NAS, surveillance, streaming and alike I think old smartphones are more efficient than modern Pi and analogies. They also have a screen, battery, less heating and other advantages.

> less heating

I am not so sure about that unless maybe you mod them to extract everything from the original casing and add heatsinks and possibly a fan.

Also from a safety point of view, you'd need to make sure those can still be powered up without their batteries as I wouldn't trust a +10y old smartphone battery on a device that is running unattended 24h/365d/year.

I really like their H618 offerings with Zero form factor and 4GB of RAM.

Plus the Banana Pi M4 has eMMC.

my only issue with Orange Pi is that it can't run the Ubuntu images that work on the Pi, I have to use the armbian Ubuntu. i'm not quite for if the responsibility is on Canonical or the SBC manufacturer. i'm just saying it's one of the reasons why I have trouble getting started with the Orange Pi

price-wise, though, Orange Pi is unbeatable. the Raspberry Pi has no business being more expensive than an Intel NUC

while not perfect, this is fairly close: https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip

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