Orange Pi Win Plus Review
Orange Pi Win Plus is a Development Board and a single board computer based on the Allwinner A64 SoC, a successor of the previous Orange Pi Win with few changes in the specification such as 2GB DDR3 RAM, External battery connector and 2Mb Spi Flash. This new SoC offers improved 64-bit quad-core predecessor with above decent performance for the Buck, along with a wide selection of interfaces for developers and hobbyists, such as LCD, HDMI, CSI, 40 Pins Header, Gigabit Ethernet LAN port, Four USB 2.0 Hosts, on-board WiFi with Bluetooth and more.
If you are planning to build a low-cost NAS Device or workstation running Ubuntu or Debian OS, then this board mighty is a good and cheap solution for both DIY projects including product development. That said, for further information and price you are welcome to check Orange Pi official website and their Aliexpress store in the links posted below:
Orange Pi Win Plus Development Board | Front
Orange Pi Win Plus Development Board | Rear
Orange Pi Win Plus Review focus:
- Product Introduction
- Main Highlights & Specifications.
- Product Package
- Package Content
- A Closer Look at the Orange Pi Zero Plus2
- Optional Accessories
- Software Support
- Power, CPU information, Stress Test, Temperature, Memory
- Final Words
- Pros / Cons
| Orange Pi Win Plus Hardware specification | |
| CPU | H3 Quad-core Cortex-A7 H.265/HEVC 4K |
| GPU | Mali400MP2 GPU @600MHz Supports OpenGL ES 2.0 |
| Memory (SDRAM) | 1GB DDR3 (shared with GPU) |
| On-board Storage | TF card (Max. 64GB) / MMC card slot , up to 2T on 2.5 SATA disk 8GB EMMC Flash |
| Onboard Network | 10/100/1000M Ethernet RJ45 |
| On-board WiFi | Realtek RTL8189ETV, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n |
| Video-Input |
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| Audio Input | MIC |
| Video Outputs |
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| Audio Output | 3.5 mm Jack and HDMI |
| Power Source | DC input can supply power, but USB OTG input don’t supply power |
| USB 2.0 Ports | Four USB 2.0 HOST, one USB 2.0 OTG |
| Buttons | Power Button(SW4), Recovery Button(SW2), Uboot Button (SW3) |
| Low-level peripherals | 40 Pins Header, compatible with Raspberry Pi B+ |
| GPIO(1×3) pin | UART, ground. |
| LED | Power led & Status led |
| Other | IR input |
| Supported OS | Android, Ubuntu, Debian, Armbian |
Package
Orange Pi Win Plus Board | Unboxing
Package Content
- 1x One-page quick guide
- 1x WiFi Antenna (Wire type)
- 1x orange pi win plus board
A Closer Look at the Orange Pi Zero Plus2
Orange Pi Win Plus | Top View
Accessories
Additional Accessories are not included with the orange pi win plus board. If you are planning on buying the transparent case, It highly recommends buying a decent heat-sink for the A64 Chip with dimensions of 14×14 mm (Max). In addition, to ensure decent cooling, It’s also very recommended buying a thermal pad for the pair of memory chips and apply them all with a sticky adhesive thermal paste.
Orange Pi Win Plus | Optional Accessories
- Orange Pi Win Plus Case | Full View
Case Design – Cons & Pros
Although the case design was overall good with access to all interfaces, and the board package includes a simple wire type antenna that worked pretty well inside the closed case, The case height should have to be designed higher for few reasons. For start, I was missing a hole for mounting an external WiFi antenna and also the bottom cover was designed in such way there wasn’t any extra space for adding thermal pads on both memory chips.
Orange Pi Zero Plus2 Inside Case
Software Support
In software support arena, the Pi Win Plus board currently supports the following main operating systems/ distributions:
- Armbian
- Android 6.0
- Debian Jessie
- Raspbian
- Ubuntu
- DietPi
Personal Impression
After playing with a few of the images in the above list. The Android 6.0 image had few major problems. Audio through the HDMI port didn’t work, the keyboard also didn’t work and the image didn’t come pre-installed with google play store. The WiFi function didn’t work within the Ubuntu image didn’t That said, Debian Jessie image did work pretty well, and WiFi and Ethernet performance were good.
If you want to use this board as a “lightweight” Mini PC to surf the web, check emails and use LibreOffice suite than it will provide above decent performance, especially if you place heatsinks on all chips for optimal cooling. After talking to Xunlong company I was told that they will fix the Ubuntu and Android images, but couldn’t commit to a specific time frame when this issue will be resolved.
Debian Jessie | Xfce Desktop
Ubuntu | Xfce Desktop
Power, CPU Information, Stress Test, Temperature, Memory
Power
Depending on what apps are running in the background, with two occupied USB ports occupied for wireless keyboard and mouse the mode power consumption in idle mode with very light usage (Idle mode) ranged approximately between 4-5W. In more moderate usage Consumption jumped between 6.0-6.4W.
CPU Information
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orangepi@Orangepi:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : AArch64 Processor rev 4 (aarch64) processor : 0 processor : 1 processor : 2 processor : 3 Features : fp asimd aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: AArch64 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xd03 CPU revision : 4 Hardware : sun50iw1p1 |
CPU Benchmark (Stress Test)
Test #1 – Consumption in Watts:
- Number of threads Tested: 4, 20, 50
- Before Test: 4.1-4.2W
- During Test: 6-6.4W (Max)
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$ sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=100000 run sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 4 Doing CPU performance benchmark Threads started! Done. Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 100000 Test execution summary: total time: 68.9532s total number of events: 10000 total time taken by event execution: 275.7560 per-request statistics: min: 27.44ms avg: 27.58ms max: 33.01ms approx. 95 percentile: 27.92ms Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/11.16 execution time (avg/stddev): 68.9390/0.01 |
Temperature
In the plastic case provided by Xunlong temperature measured was 53C. This temperature was measured in low system usage with Ubuntu Desktop Xenial without running any high apps.
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$ cat /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp 53 |
Memory Usage
Because Xfce is a very lightweight desktop environment, Memory and system resources consumption were relatively very low. Without loading any applications in the background. From a total of 2GB RAM, the OS utilized 308Mb I was left with 1.6G of free RAM.
Memory Benchmark
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$ sysbench --test=memory --memory-block-size=1M --memory-total-size=2G run sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 1 Doing memory operations speed test Memory block size: 1024K Memory transfer size: 2048M Memory operations type: write Memory scope type: global Threads started! Done. Operations performed: 2048 ( 2162.62 ops/sec) 2048.00 MB transferred (2162.62 MB/sec) Test execution summary: total time: 0.9470s total number of events: 2048 total time taken by event execution: 0.9455 per-request statistics: min: 0.46ms avg: 0.46ms max: 0.63ms approx. 95 percentile: 0.50ms Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 2048.0000/0.00 |
Memory usage (Ubuntu Desktop Xenial):
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orangepi@Orangepi:~$ free -h total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1.9G 308M 1.6G 10M 18M 125M -/+ buffers/cache: 163M 1.8G Swap: 0B 0B 0B |
Final Words
Although I didn’t test all images this board supports, I have mixed feelings regarding Android and Ubuntu images that had problems. If you are looking for a cheap board to run Debian and other distributions such as Armbian, then this board will do it well.
Pros / Cons
Pros
- 2GB RAM
- Fast Ethernet
- Good performance
Cons
- No eMMC
- Some images have issues.
