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Orange Pi 5B is a variant of the Rockchip RK3588S powered Orange Pi 5 SBC with up to 256GB eMMC flash and a soldered-on wireless module offering WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, at the cost of losing the M.2 2242 socket and 16MB QSPI NOR flash found in the original board.

The board still comes with HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4 (USB-C), and MIPI DSI display connectors, three camera connectors, a Gigabit Ethernet interface, a few USB ports, and a 26-pin GPIO header for expansion.

Orange Pi 5B specifications with the new features highlighted in bold, and the missing ones as strikethrough text:

Shenzhen Xunlong Software provides Orange Pi OS (Android), Orange Pi OS (Arch), Debian 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Android 12 images. Some of the images (Ubuntu/Debian) are developed in collaboration with Armbian where the company pays for the integration and maintenance of the images. Right now, neither the Orange Pi nor Armbian websites have images for the Orange Pi 5B, but you’ll find images for the earlier Orange Pi 5.

The price for the Orange Pi 5B is higher than for the Orange Pi 5 due to the eMMC flash and wireless module with four models currently for sale:

Provided software support is good enough for your specific requirements, it’s still very good value for money, considering one Orange Pi 5S – and other RK3588(S) boards – packs the performance of three to four Rasberry Pi 4 SBCs depending on the workload. You’ll find the Orange Pi 5B for sale on Amazon and Aliexpress. Additional information may also be found on the product page.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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Ha yes! Finally considering the eMMC up to 256GB it is not so important to loose the nvme.

Only problem is the price as it starts to creep into Radxa Rock 5B territory and IMHO you’d be better off investing the extra $$$ into getting a true RK3588 SBC then the lighter RK3588S version.

The biggest appeal of the OPi 5 was the affordable price so why pay $169 USD for the RK3588S when you can pay $189 USD and grab a Rock 5B 16GB from allnetchina and have full I/O options and a fully certified SBC…?

I by far prefere the version with the m.2 slot. I can choose high quality MLC m.2 ssd and write the bootloader i prefere on the SPI chip and be always able to fully wipe the m.2 content and still keep a working bootloader. Also having a wifi chip that can not run with just free software like ath9k wifi chips do is a downgrade to general freedom and i would recommend to everyone to just use free Software capable usb wifi adapter. In conclusion: The orange pi 5b is by far the more worse version of the two available…  Read more »

Wifi or NVME, not both. I would prefer to have the NVME.

I believe there’s talk of a OPi 5 Plus/Pro that will be the full RK3588 version to compete with the Radxa Rock 5B…?

I’m not convinced the OPi 5B is the upgrade everybody wants considering its very much the original proto model and the eMMC read/write speeds will need to be good as NVMe Isn’t super fast at below 400MBs…?

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