I recently bought a mini pc with an AMD 5500u (6 cores, 12 threads, 15W), 16 GB DDR4, and a 512 GB nvme SSD for $225 (on sale a bit). I suspect it would run laps around the orange pi despite the similar price and wattage.
Vastly better hardware and software support too by virtue of being x86. Preferred flavor of *nix, Windows, Haiku, whatever, as well as the possibility of virtualization of any of the above.
Not to knock ARM SBCs — ARM is great and I think holds a lot of promise for the future, but there’s no arguing that the platform tends to be restrictive outside of mainstream devices (e.g. Samsung Galaxies and Macs).
I've got a Ryzen 5560U mini-PC in my k8s cluster at home, and it's great. It is faster than the OPi5's that are also in the cluster; those are around the same speed as a few-year-old Celeron or so (edit: originally I said a N5105 but I'm not actually that sure). But I have them in my cluster because CPU perf isn't the only axis that matters. They're also cheaper, they're fanless, they're physically small, they're ARM so I can use them for arm64 builds at speeds faster than qemu offers, and they use less power. I guess I'm here for heterogeneous hardware.
I was going to say that mini pc's were more powerful and cheaper but then I realize that cheap mini pc's like yours use HDMI 2.0 (it can drive 2 or 3 4k@60Hz monitors but not 8k@60 like this Orange Pi 5 using HDMI 2.1). Mini PC's using HDMI 2.1 must be at least $400 a piece. At that price, the mini pc's CPU is much more powerful than this orange's.
Beelink sells a bunch of them, as do a few other vendors (who are all probably rebadging from the same manufacturers somewhere). If you're willing to spend more, the ones with Ryzen 7840HS processors are particularly impressive.
The other avenue you can go down is to get a used mini pc from Lenovo/HP/Dell. These are great because the providers are delivering huge volumes meant for corporate America. This means there is competition, and the build quality is good, not expecting the hacker market to throw together a printed case. I recently picked up a used HP with 16GB RAM, 512SSD, AMD5 series chip, and an OEM Win10 license for ~$150. Untested, but the idle power draw on it is supposed to be 10-15watts. My only complaint about the unit is that I wish these were powered by USBC PD. More common is to be powered by a 19V barrel jack, which would make replacements more of a pain if the external power supply dies.
I have two of those lying around, but care should taken with some of the smaller HPs at least. I have 800 G4 DesktopMini. It has two SO-DIMMs, two full-length NVME slots and a 2.5" SATA bay. It supports thunderbolt (which was rare at the time - it's an intel 8th gen era model). It looked absolutely great on paper. Had them at work, worked perfectly with Linux. Bought one for my house, where I don't have the 24/7 hum of AC and random people talking all day. I quickly began to hate it, since the fan spins all the time and they figured there was no reason to attach it securely, so it rattles around in the case. Newer models (G6 at least) seem to have improved the design so that the fan is actually secured, but I've never tested one in a quiet environment.
> Untested, but the idle power draw on it is supposed to be 10-15watts.
I haven't tested the "mini" one I have, but I also salvaged an older "SFF" HP from work, an 800 G2, with an i5-6500. I've replaced its spinning drive with 2 SATA SSDs (Samsung 840 EVO 512 GB), increased RAM to 2*8+16 GB and thrown in a 4-port intel i350 network adaptor. According to some watt-meter off Amazon it pulls around 16W while idling under Linux running three VMs on top of KVM (OpnSense (= FreeBSD), and two Linux). The highest I could get it was around 50 W while booting up.
The watt meter seems accurate enough. I tested it with a laptop for which I have two adaptors, one specified as 45W, the other 65. With the battery drained, screen backlight at max and a compilation taking 100% CPU, it was reported as drawing 46W and 55 respectively on the two adaptors.
> My only complaint about the unit is that I wish these were powered by USBC PD
Which unit is that? I would actually love that, especially if the USB-C port can also be used as a regular "docking" port, handling DP out and USB in. I could connect my monitor and peripherals with a single cable to it and call it a day, instead of having to deal with random power adaptors lying around. Bonus points if it's actually Thunderbolt.
> More common is to be powered by a 19V barrel jack, which would make replacements more of a pain if the external power supply dies.
I don't think so, those look like pretty much standard fare to me. Although I've heard stories about Dell doing shady stuff with the adaptors, trying to talk to them and stuff, AFAIK HP doesn't do that.
Did not mean the barrel jack power is vendor proprietary. Only that it's not something I can pickup anywhere, but more or less have to source from online. Unlike USBC, where we are almost at the point I could get a 100W charger from any corner store. If nothing else, the standard charger is laughably bulky vs the GaN chargers that are now available.
Those are pretty cool and I like that website. I have one, it's great. I'd probably have a bunch more if they had Type C power, that's too good of a product to come out of those environments I guess.
