There is no doubt that the Raspberry Pi 4 is a resounding success, not only demonstrated by the huge number of applications it has, but also by the fact that the demand is so great that it is not only almost impossible to find one, but also its price has reached stratospheric levels. That’s why they became extremely interesting alternatives like the Orange Pi 5. What does this SBC offer us?
One of the most common complaints against the Raspberry Pi 4 is the lack of power for certain applications, however, the fifth generation of the famous board does not arrive due to the fact that the company in charge of manufacturing them lives a golden age caused by the shortage of components. What causes there to be less supply than demand, increases the prices and, therefore, the advantages on the Raspberry Pi have increased. There is no motivation for a Pi 5 with a quadruple or even quintuple cost of use.
What is the Orange Pi 5?
It is a Single Board Computer or computer on a single board, so it is part of the same family of devices as the Raspberry Pi against which it competes and presents itself as an alternative to them. Its main feature? Its circuit components are much better and reach a much higher power level than the Raspberry Pi 4, to the point that it has many times more computing power in each of its components, and it shows in the fact that the Orange Pi 5 can run applications with ease which for the Pi 4 are a test.
| Raspberry Pi 4 (Model B) | Orange Pi 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| main chip | Broadcom BCM2171 | RK3588S Rock Chip |
| CPU cores | 4x Cortex A72 @ 1.8GHz | 4 x Cortex A76 @ 2.4 GHz + 4 x Cortex A55 ambos @ 2.4 GHz |
| Type of RAM | LPDDR4-3200 | LPDDR4X-4266 |
| RAM Setups | 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB | 4, 8 and 16 GB. |
| graphics processor | Broadcom VideoCore VI at 0.5GHz | Mali-G610 MP4 |
| NPU | No | Integrated with 6 power TOPS |
| M.2 port | No | Yes, PCIe Gen 2 x1 |
| GPIOs | 40 pins | 28 pins |
One of its greatest qualities regarding hardware is that it has an M.2 connector that allows us to install a Wifi+Bluetooth adapter, however, we can choose to install an NVMe SSD. The bad part? Its bandwidth is a PCI Express 2.0 with a single lane, the bandwidth speed of which is not higher than a SATA interface, but translates in a system like this to a performance improvement over the running the operating system from the MicroSD card.
Advantages and disadvantages of the Orange Pi 5 compared to the Raspberry Pi 4
The fact is that if we want to use it as an alternative to Rasbperry PI in projects that do not involve tinkering with other devices that need to interact with the SBC, we will have no problem using it. We refer to simple applications such as creating a small PC for office tasks, an emulation machine for old consoles, an Android-based office system or a NAS server, among many other examples that come to mind.
All this with much higher performance so if you can’t buy a Pi 4 then this Orange Pi 5 is a more than solid alternative, what’s more it should become the main option given the capabilities of this hardware compared to the more popular SBC.
However, there are a number of differential elements that can make it worse in some cases.
- It is larger in size and therefore the large number of cases for the Raspberry Pi 4 are not compatible because they are too small. And things get worse if we use an 80mm long M.2 SSD
- The power of the Orange Pi 5, being higher, also transmits more heat and therefore active dissipation is recommended, i.e. the use of fans to keep the SBC cool.
- Keep in mind that power supplies for the Pi 4 won’t work, but anything USB-C based will do.
- It has fewer pins on its GPIO connector, although this does not affect all uses, keep this in mind if you need to create a project that requires all or nearly all of the pins on a Pi 4.
Price and availability
Its price is low and it is compared to the current Rasbperry Pi 4, but if we then take into account the ratio between price and power, then it is clear that it is much fairer. We saw a kit at 192$ on AliExpress which contains not only the card with 16 GB of memory but also all the elements necessary for its use.
