Orange Pi 5 Review – Powerful, No WiFi

The Orange Pi 5 has finally arrived! I received my pre-order and the board is great. So should you go out and buy it? Probably, but there are some things you should know first that you may not be expecting.

The biggest thing to know is that there is no WiFi/Bluetooth included. If you were planning on using Ethernet anyway this doesn’t have much of an impact. If you do need wireless capabilities we’ll cover what options are available.

In this review we’ll cover what you need to know about the Orange Pi 5 including it’s onboard capabilities, the available RAM options as well as benchmark the board. Let’s get started!

Hardware Used

Custom WiFi Module (Added 1/13/2023)

Specifications

CPU	8-core 64-bit processor Big.Little Architecture: 4xCortex-A76 and 4xCortex-A55 Big core cluster is 2.4GHz Little core cluster is 1.8GHz frequency
GPU	Mali-G610 MP4 “Odin” GPU Compatible with OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.2 OpenCL 2.2 and Vulkan 1.2 3D graphics engine and 2D graphics engine
NPU	Built-in AI accelerator NPU with up to 6 TOPS Supports INT4/INT8/INT16 mixed operation
PMU	RK806-1
RAM	4GB/8GB/16GB/32GB (LPDDR4/4x)
Memory	QSPI Nor FLASH 16MB MicroSD (TF) Card Slot M.2 M-KEY Socket
USB	USB3.0 × 1 USB2.0 × 2 Type-C (USB3.1) ×1
Video Output	HDMI2.1, up to 8K @60Hz DP1.4 (DisplayPort) DP 1.4 and USB 3.1 ports are multiplexed and the port is shared with Type-C 2 * MIPI D-PHY TX 4Lane Configurable up to 4K @60Hz
Camera	MIPI CSI 4Lane 2 * MIPI D-PHY RX 4Lane
Audio	CODEC: ES8388 3.5mm headphone jack audio input/output Input: Onboard MIC HDMI 2.1 eARC
Ethernet	10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet
Expansion Port	For extending UART, PWM, I2C, SPI, CAN and GPIO interfaces.
M.2 M-KEY Socket Expansion Slot	Supports PCIe NVMe SSD Supports custom PCIe Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth 5.0 module
Button	1×MaskROM key 1×Recovery key 1×On/Off key
Power Source	Support Type-C power supply 5V @ 4A
LED	Power indicator: red Status indicator: green
Debugging	3 Pin debug serial port (UART)
Supported OS	OrangePi OS (Droid) OrangePi OS (Arch) Ubuntu Debian Android12
Dimensions	62mm*100mm
Weight	46g

Build Quality

The Orange Pi 5 is built very well. Everything is clearly labeled and visible. The PCB is a nice blue color. I received board revision/version 1.2.

Here is the top view:

You can see the holographic effect on the RockChip CPU in the middle of the board. As you move it in the light you get a neat little effect.

The bottom of the board only contains a few connections such as the M.2 slot, a CAM slot and a couple others.

Here’s the bottom view:

I/O Benchmarking

For the review I used a SSSTC 128GB 2230 M.2 NVMe drive. These are available on Amazon for around $10-12 (also see Kioxia 128GB M.2 2230 module*).

You can verify the performance of your drive on Pi Benchmarks using the following command:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

Here are the results:

     Category                  Test                      Result     
HDParm                    Disk Read                 375.32 MB/s              
HDParm                    Cached Disk Read          381.15 MB/s              
DD                        Disk Write                234 MB/s                 
FIO                       4k random read            47080 IOPS (188321 KB/s) 
FIO                       4k random write           35128 IOPS (140514 KB/s) 
IOZone                    4k read                   75628 KB/s               
IOZone                    4k write                  67285 KB/s               
IOZone                    4k random read            35874 KB/s               
IOZone                    4k random write           70620 KB/s               

                          Score: 17,718

The full Orange Pi 5 benchmark can be viewed here on Pi Benchmarks.

That is an outstanding score. We are getting NVMe performance. This score actually even beats my ODROID M1 benchmark.

The Orange Pi 5 is without a doubt a very powerful board and is performing exactly where it should be.

Keep in mind that this is PCIe 2.0 performance. This board does not have PCIe 3.0 (only the RK3588 proper has that, not the RK3588S).

UPDATE 1/2/2023: If you update the Orange Pi 5 firmware by using sudo orangepi-config and choosing “System->Firmware” and then choose to update the firmware I was able to get *low* PCIe 2.0 performance (about 280MB/s). I highly recommend updating the firmware with sudo orangepi-config. You may see some marginal improvements!

Due to this you should not use a powerful NVMe drive with the Orange Pi 5. You are limited in speeds to around 500MB/s at best (according to Orange Pi themselves via the user manual) and more like 250MB/s write according to the benchmarking.

If you need help setting up SSD booting see my Orange Pi 5 SSD Boot Guide here.

Benchmarking vs. Pi 4 (added 12/16/2022)

I’ve now installed my heat sinks which looks like this:

That means it’s time for a head-to-head benchmarking match against the Pi 4 to see how the Orange Pi 5 compares. For the benchmark I used the “hardinfo” benchmark which can be installed on most Linux flavors with:

sudo apt install hardinfo

Here are the results:

Test	Orange Pi 5	Pi 4
CPU Blowfish (lower is better)	2.65s	5.24s
CPU CryptoHash (higher is better)	574.49 MiB/s	466.37 MiB/s
CPU Fibonacci (lower is better)	0.5s	1.73s
CPU N-Queens (lower is better)	4.24s	8.74s
CPU Zlib (higher is better)	0.80	0.31
FPU FFT (lower is better)	1.23s	5.52s
FPU Raytracing (lower is better)	2.86s	2.18s
GPU Drawing (higher is better)	2064.13 HiMarks	1708.15 HiMarks

That is almost a clean sweep for the Orange Pi 5! The only category it didn’t win was FPU raytracing interestingly enough. On GPU drawing performance however the Orange Pi 5 scored significantly higher and also won all other categories.

Pros / Cons

Pros

• 4 GB and 8 GB RAM variants cost under $100
• M.2 slot supports high speed NVMe storage
• RAM options from 4 GB all the way up to 32 GB available

Cons

• No WiFi or Bluetooth included (requires either adapter for the M.2 slot or a USB adapter to get WiFi/Bluetooth capabilities)
• No eMMC option
• PCIe speeds are limited to 500MB/s (PCIe 2.0, benchmarks show closer to 250MB/s write or PCIe 1.0 performance) — this is slower than SATA3

Conclusion

The Orange Pi 5 feels almost perfect except for the lack of built in WiFi / Bluetooth. This seems like a surprising choice on what seems like is portrayed as their “flagship” model. Fortunately it is easy to add WiFi/Bluetooth on the board via either the custom M.2 wireless PCB or by using one of your USB ports and just using a USB-based WiFi/BT chip.

The board performs extremely well. The GPU is powerful on the board and feels very snappy while using the desktop OS and applications. This board would be a good choice for almost any use case. It would make a great Minecraft server as well.

I’d recommend this one for just about anyone. The price is right. There are widely varying amounts of RAM available depending on what you need. There are good Linux and Android images available even at launch. At under $100 for the 4 GB – 8 GB the Orange Pi 5 is priced well in this market especially for the power and flexibility it offers!

Other Resources

I’ve also covered how to install Steam on the Orange Pi 5 here

I’ve also reviewed the Orange Pi portable monitor here (with the Orange Pi 5 connected)

If you’d like to use an alternative WiFi adapter see my E-key to M-key adapter guide here

Make sure to see my Orange Pi 5 SSD Boot Guide to see how to set up your NVMe drive to be the root partition for your OS

Don’t miss the rest of my single board computer reviews here

The Orange Pi Zero 2 is a great headless option from Orange Pi available for <$35 or so

I’ve also recently reviewed the Orange Pi 3 LTS which is a long term support variant equivalent in power roughly to a Pi 4