The Orange Pi 5 Plus is the latest addition to the line of Single Board Computers (SBCs), which is constantly expanding thanks to the Raspberry Pi’s momentum. There are more and more offershigher performance, connectivity and for more use cases.

One of the most interesting and best-selling is the Orange Pi 5 produced by the Chinese group Shenzhen Xunlong, which has a number of improvements in its catalog, such as a portable console of the same name or “great” consoles, such as a complete PC included in the price. in the keyboard (Pi 800).

Orange Pi 5 Plus: “more wood”

Already the name Plus suggests that we are facing a superior version of what is one of the main alternatives to the Raspberry Pi 4. The board retains its compact dimensions with dimensions slightly larger than before, 100 x 70 mm, but now with an ARM-SoC Rockchip RK3588 eight cores (four 2.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A76 cores and four 1.8 GHz Cortex-A55 cores), Mali-G610 MP4 graphics and a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI.

The rest of the news comes from its greater connectivity, the main one being the connector M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 where you can install an NVMe SSD with a sequential transfer rate of up to 2000 MB/s, which is much higher performance than eMMC flash, which provides 32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB or 256 GB capacity by default.

Another improvement comes from 2 2.5GbE LAN ports installed using RTL8125BG drivers. It also increases the number of ports with the following:

• 2 USB 3.0 Type A ports
• 1 USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port (with DisplayPort 1.4 alternative mode)
• 1 USB Type-C port (power)
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• 2 HDMI 2.1 ports (output up to 8K/60 fps)
• 1 HDMI 2.0 input (up to 4K/60fps)
• 1 3.5 mm audio jack

It has an M.2 E Key connector that can be used for a wireless card and support Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 540-pin header common on SBC boards, MIPI-CSI and MIPI-DSI connectors for cameras and displays and an IR receiver.

The Orange Pi 5 Plus will be available soon with the following price estimates:

• $89 with 4GB of RAM.
• $109 with 8GB of RAM.
• $129 with 16GB of RAM.

Take this into account in the SBC. The current version is one of the best sellers (always behind the Raspberry Pi) and this Plus improves it especially in terms of connectivity. It will be available on Aliexpress and Amazon, where other versions are also sold.