Orange Pi PC Plus available at AE (not too expensive)

[cbm801]

I don't know it was mentioned before but Orange Pi PC Plus with WiFi and 8GB eMMC built-in is already available in Aliexpress store

http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-PC-Plus-ubuntu-linux-and-android-mini-PC-Beyond-Raspberry-Pi-2/1553371_32668618847.html

 

price USB 19.99

Edited June 9, 2016 by wildcat_paris
moved price tag

[tkaiser]

Addendum: The 8GB eMMC on board is pretty fast, see #44 here (and for a reference of the fastest SD cards we tested so far please see here -- please remember: random IO matters!)

 

Apart from that the thermal performance is superiour (good voltage regulator, low power DDR3L DRAM and good heat spreading capabilities of the PCB which is thicker than on the first Orange Pis). Given that's just $5 more compared to the OPi PC (and from an EU perspective still below the VAT redemption treshold so no taxes/customs!) it's most probably often the better buy.

 

Please be aware that the Wi-Fi chip on OPi PC Plus is the same as on Lite and Plus 2E so everything said regarding Lite applies also to PC Plus: pretty decent performance, AP and monitor mode possible -- driver and also random MAC address problem already fixed with current OpenELEC and Armbian release 5.14. Please see post #33 for details: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1241-opi-lite-wireless-device-not-working/?p=9793

[cbm801]

I will have to test my SD cards I currently use - mostly class 10 but probably nothing more. What 4k speed do you think is acceptable for such medium?

Are schematics already available for this board (and other new)?

[tkaiser]

I will have to test my SD cards I currently use - mostly class 10 but probably nothing more. What 4k speed do you think is acceptable for such medium?

Are schematics are available for this board (and other new)?

 

Forget about the 'speed class' at all. You get SD cards rated the same that differ by factor 100 or even more when we're talking about the more important random IO performance (especially random writes). Just use the iozone parameters from my second link above and then compare.

 

You find expensive SD cards that exceed sequential speeds of 80MB/s (irrelevant since most SBC are the bottleneck when it's about sequential transfer speeds) but that really suck at random writes with small block sizes (and this is what you experience as lagginess when running databases, Android or a desktop Linux distro -- for headless/server useage it's not that important at least when running Armbian since we ship with tuned ext4 settings so even crappy SD cards aren't that problematic)

 

Schematic has been released for OPi Lite (and added to our wiki immediately) but none for OPi PC Plus or Plus 2E so far. But that doesn't really matter, Xunlong was smart enough to re-use most if not all pin mappings and follows Allwinner's reference design so after tweaking fex/.dts stuff the new boards were fully supported within short time. The only real showstopper was non-working Wi-Fi but that has been fixed by Jernej IIRC within one day after he got his board.

 

To get the idea: We added the hardware description for OPi Lite already back in March (and solely based on assumptions) and now everything we had to tweak was thermal/performance stuff. Same for OPi PC Plus: See the 2nd commit at the end of May to get the idea what Armbian does differently (in the meantime after some tests we increased THS trip points, so all Orange Pi boards perform now even a bit better under full load)