qcasey1

there is quite easy and good manual how to build an image by yourself. in that way you are sure that it is clean and latest/greatest version
 
I personally use vagrant setup as it looks like easiest way to do this on windows.
 
https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Build-Preparation/
 
torrent images for orange pi 3
Armbian_5.77_Orangepi3_Ubuntu_bionic_dev_5.0.4_desktop.img.torrent
Armbian_5.77_Orangepi3_Debian_stretch_dev_5.0.4_desktop.img.torrent

Great job. I've built Armbian_5.77_Orangepi3_Ubuntu_bionic_dev_5.0.1_desktop, and I finally can see the potential of this SoC.
It now outperforms all my other quad-core SBC's. Thermals are ok, even without a fan it's very workable.
It does seem that the heat can't dissipate well into the heatsink, I think this SoC is a bit too small. With a short 7z benchmark is quickly goes up to 75°C. But the heatsink doesn't warm up. When done it immediatly goes back to 45°C. So it can't deliver the heat into the heatsink.

Maximum display resolution is 1024x768. On-board wifi doesn't work, but my dongles worked immediatly. Also no hdmi sound.
Just for fun I tried Youtube. And it plays great in 1080p with Firefox. Don't know if this would be the same with a true 1080p display resolution.

I'm very happy seeing a better performing image for it. What a difference with the images from Orange Pi.
The SoC could use a metal casing to better dissipate the heat, otherwise it looks good. Thank you.

Even with a heat sink and a fan I encountered thermal throttling under load as well, using the Debian image. Worse transcoding performance than a Raspi Pi 3B+ but that's probably unrelated