OrangePi 5 Ultra Review: An ARM64 SBC Powerhouse

https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-5-ultra-review/

30•ekianjo•1h ago

Comments

Ecco•1h ago

I looked it up rapidly and couldn't figure out the difference with the original OrangePi 5.

By the way, the OrangePi 5 is a pretty good SBC. Much better bang/bucks than RPi, and the mainline kernel support is pretty good and getting better with every release thanks to the folks at Collabora.

https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

amluto•52m ago

I give OrangePi a lot of points for putting an M.2 slot on the bottom of the PCB. Not only does Raspberry Pi charge extra for their M.2 board, it sits in an obnoxious location above the board where it interferes with many other things one might want to put on top, e.g. any sort of passive cooling.

phoronixrly•47m ago

A non-Broadcom SoC and actually fast network? Absolutely better than any Raspberry Pi

rjsw•31m ago

The built-in ethernet controller would be fine, not sure why it needs to use up some PCIe lanes on an external one.

rjsw•33m ago

> I looked it up rapidly and couldn't figure out the difference with the original OrangePi 5.

RK3588S -> RK3588, LPDDR4 -> LPDDR5

Havoc•8m ago

There is also one in between - the plus. Rk3588 but ddr4

Ecco•3m ago

Thanks. Does it make a big difference in practice?

timw4mail•22m ago

Assuming you can get software support for more than one version of 'blessed' distro.

Ecco•4m ago

Well, that’s my point exactly: mainline kernel is what all distros eventually use.

As a matter of fact I’m currently running an OrangePi 5 as a server using an unmodified Debian Trixie and hardware support is nearly perfect.

yardie•34m ago

> the Ubuntu 24.04 distro is missing from the list, and this is a shame, since this is a board released late 2024. I contacted OrangePi and they mentioned that they would eventually release a 24.04 version, but there was no clear timeline for that.

Pretty much that is where most of these SBCs fall off my list. Without an active OS development its only 1/2 of the puzzle.

joz1-k•5m ago

> * Without an active OS development its only 1/2 of the puzzle.*

And this is an unfortunate state of the general purpose ARM64 computing. This board, with 16 GB of RAM and M.2 slot, would make the perfect Linux desktop machine. However, you only receive one or two major distribution updates from the hardware vendor, and then you're stuck with it.

ndiddy•28m ago

> As you can see, the Ubuntu 24.04 distro is missing from the list, and this is a shame, since this is a board released late 2024. I contacted OrangePi and they mentioned that they would eventually release a 24.04 version, but there was no clear timeline for that.

> Sadly, but this was almost expected, there does not seem to be any kind of GPU support in the version that I have chosen. A quick check with glxgears confirms that there is just a software pipe for rendering.

Stuff like this is why people keep picking Raspberry Pi. There's tons and tons of alternative SBCs that have better price to performance on paper, but the software support is always awful. You're always limited to a few distro images released by the SBC vendor, and there's no effort spent by them on getting everything working. This product came out in December 2024, and they STILL don't have images with working GPU acceleration.

rjsw•24m ago

The support for GPU acceleration is there in the mainline kernel and in Mesa, it is down to the distribution including older versions.

ekianjo•21m ago

There is upcoming support as part of BredOS, as mentioned at the end. (the link to BredOS has more details on the status). So eventually, that SBC should be working with a mainline kernel.

PaulKeeble•18m ago

These less common SBCs used to be really bad to run because they didn't get updates. Nowadays its always worth checking what is available on Armbian because they have a lot of supported images for these other SBCs.

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