Final thoughts
The Orange Pi 6 Plus is an impressive piece of hardware, featuring a 12-core CPU and five display interfaces: DP1.4 4K, 2*Type-C DP, and eDP, making it a great choice for electronic single applications. The two Gen4.0 M.2 2280 slots are definitely a bonus, but having two 5GbE LAN ports is probably the standout feature of this board.
Software-wise
In the software department, the Orange Pi Debian image worked great for us, and our experience was better than expected. That said, Orange Pi still has some improvements to make. The official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS image works for the most part, but there are a few hiccups, like no sound output, possibly due to the driver not detecting the hardware. Some users have also reported issues with the Ethernet ports not working. The Pi 6 Plus also supports Windows 11 OS, but we’re pretty sure the overall performance isn’t great, so there wasn’t much point focusing on it in this review.
Hopefully, the mentioned issues will be resolved. It would be great if this hardware came with official OpenWrt and OPNsense images, and there’s some hope the Orange Pi team might offer them in the future.
Is the price justified or too pricey compared to the Raspberry Pi 5?
The Orange Pi 6 Plus with 16GB of RAM costs around $223.90, while the Raspberry Pi 15 with the same memory is about $145. The Orange Pi packs in extra perks like dual M.2 KEY-M 2280 slots, two 5Gbps Ethernet ports, and a faster 12-core CPU paired with a 28.8 TOPS NPU, making it a great pick for AI tech enthusiasts and professionals.
So, do we recommend it?
Absolutely! If you’re fine with sticking to two or three supported Linux distributions, this new board is a solid investment. It’s perfect for building a low-end mini-PC, running a compact NAS or SAMBA server, and can even manage some high-end gaming.
This is great, but i have a Orange Pi 5 Max almost a year and still there is only first versions of few images for that board and few beta on some forums. So support for that is like zero after board is released.
From my checking, the Orange Pi 5 Max supports around 3-4 distributions. There’s often a delay for new images after hardware release, but the popular RK3588 SoC has solid support. You can always upgrade your existing distribution and install a newer kernel with the latest packages. You can always switch to an RP5 that has less powerful hardware but comes with better software support.
I think this is BS, no announcements form the Orange PI, nothing on the forums.
I would definitely buy this with 32GB or 64GB, now that would be a decent platform
It’s not ready yet, but the news is reliable, and the company has also shared some updates about it.
Well, if they truly on this, this will be a great SBC, I would buy one immediately.
This should be marketed using like 5$ vouchers in ARACE, OrangePI would immediately gauge the interest and get some early revenue o produce the board