Yeah that's the problem with ARM devices. Better just buy a N100
Unless you strictly need the tiny form factor of an SBC you are so much better going with x86.
Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.
Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of performance per watt but it is already pretty far into the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.
A lot of the cheaper mini PCs seem to let the chip go wild, and don't implement sleep/low power states correctly, which is why the range is so wide. I've seen N100 boards idle at 6W, and others idle at 10-12W.
Boost enabled. WiFi disabled. No changes to P clock states or something from bios. Fedora. Applied all suggestions from powertop. I don’t recall changing anything else.
It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
It performs well but there is definitely a thermal problem compared to other N100 based systems I got.
It's 127 x 127 x 508 mm. I think most mini N100 PCs are around that size.
The OrangePi 5 Max board is 89x57mm (it says 1.6mm "thickness" on the spec sheet but I think that is a typo - the ethernet port is more than that)
Add a few mm for a case and it's roughly 2/3 as long and half the width of the A40.
Big by comparison, but still pretty small