Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
I have the non-B variant. Same cpu, just no wifi. Really powerful actually. Blows a raspberry out of the water in cpu and gpu performance. Good memory options. And the NVME M.2 slot is a fucking godsend. Being able to run 512gb or even 1tb of full fat flash storage that won't fall over after a week of log writing like most SD cards turns it into a legitimate homelab server with a lot of flexibility
Runs super hot though, aftermarket cooling and a fan is an absolute must if you're gonna run it near full load for any amount of time. And ofc it's pretty expensive, pushing into Intel NUC territory. Can't best the form factor and power consumption though, if you can deal with the relatively poor os/software support and ARM architecture.
Is the M.2 port fully PCI capable? I’d like to put a PCI RAID controller with maybe four or six SATA ports into something Pi-adjacent. But full featured PCI-ports are kinda hard to come by in SBCs.
I think so. Since it supports proper NVME drives it should be compliant with the rest of the pcie spec. It is only a pcie 2.0x1 lane on the 3588S, so not roaring fast, but it still beats the pants off usb3.
I don't have an m.2 to slot adapter but I do have a couple m.2 wifi cards floating about. I may try to put one into the board and see if it works and report back.
Edit: I just looked on their website. Under the m.2 slot it lists
So yes- it should be fully pcie complaint. Not fast, but usable, if you can get arm64 support from your driver.
Edit edit: the orange pi 5 "plus" has the 3588 (non-S) processor that supposedly supports PCIe3.0x4 lanes to a 2280 SSD. plus also has a dedicated e-key pcie slot for a wifi card. Plus 2.5gig LAN. You pay extra for the privileges of course, but it would also be a good option depending on what all you need it to do.
Oh yes, PCI is just so good. The only thing I have against those boards is that if you go for the mid or high-end configurations + case + power adapter and other extras it becomes just cheaper to buy an HP Mini second hand with a much more powerful i3 or i5 CPU from 3 generations ago. Those computer are way more powerful, some have dual M.2/NVME, also come with wifi and everything out of the box and a much more powerful and stable CPUs. The power consumption of those systems isn't a concern, a 8th gen i3 under low load will not consume much more than those boards.
It seems the business around SBCs is simply to make a board and then make it useless without a ton of extras that will run you close to the a second hand mini pc for a LOT less performance.