While it might not be comprehensive, [Bret.dk] recently posted a retrospective titled “Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025.” The post covers 15 boards from 8 different companies. The cheapest board was $42, but the high-end topped out at $590.
We like the structure of the post. The boards are grouped in an under $50 category, another group for $50-100, and a final group for everything north of $100. Then there’s some analysis of what RAM prices are doing to the market, and commentary about CIX P1, Qualcomm, RISC-V, and more.
You get the idea that the post is only summarizing experiences with each board, and, for the intended purpose, that’s probably a good thing. On the other hand, many of the boards have full reviews linked, so be sure to check them out if you want more details. The Arduino Q didn’t fare well in review, nor did the BeagleBoard Green Eco. But the surprise was newcomer CIX. Their SoC powers two entries, one from Radaxa and the other from Orange Pi. In both cases, the performance of these was surprisingly good. There are some concerns with tooling and a few hiccups with things like power consumption, but if those were fixed, the CIX chips could be showing up more often.
[Bret’s] post is very informative. We’d be interested to hear whether you disagree with any of his assessments or have a favorite SBC that didn’t make his list. Let us know in the comments. Of course, there are other boards out there, but you can see that development tools and support often differentiate products more than just raw computing power.
I’ve kind of given up on SBC, besides the one I have running octoprint they’re all collecting dust.
Same
I have a raspi zero 2W which has a DIY 4Ahr UPS connected to it, with a 128GB thumb drive to backup my work files. Its a third backup, so to speak so I don’t care if the thumb drive fails. I’ll just replace it.
In my opinion: Once an sbc becomes to advanced, to fast, and to exoensive it’s usually better to buy a used sff pc. That comes with a nice case, power supply, upgradable RAM, expansion options, standard interfaces, and often something like an 8th gen i7. All for the same or less cost than a pi5…
How do you disable IME on your glorified i7? If you don’t, all your activity is streamed back and forth to the NSA. You don’t get that kind of BS on R-Pi.
Pure tinfoil hat wack-a-doodle conspiracy nuttery.
I worked on the Management Engine for over 15 years and wrote software to use its features.
It doesn’t do anything like that, and on a serious tech site like HaD you should hang your head in shame for spreading such FUD. Take it to InfoWars or 4Chan.
The network interface of the ME is disabled until it’s activated by the PC owner – a process that entails so many levels of security and paranoia that our #1 complaint from customers was, “why is it so difficult to activate AMT [Active Management Technology, the remote management part of the ME]?” and I was endlessly beaten up by frustrated field sales folks wanting it to be easier.
On a consumer platform the network interface stuff isn’t even present – go ahead, the firmware blobs are on downloadcenter.intel.com, knock yourself out – and the ME just does crazy, sinister, scary stuff like… monitoring temperatures, generating random numbers on demand, and so on.
I’m sick of hearing this $%^@.
This is a wild claim. Please provide credible sources for both claims (all activity is streamed back to NSA and that the RPI does not do this).
AFAIK raspi’s still have closed source aspects of the SoC that we can only speculate on.
While I’m aware that IME is a problem, I find it hard to believe that it’s streaming all activity. That sounds like an awful lot of bandwidth usage that I don’t see on any network monitors.
i just want to know if any of them have phone-class power management. i wish i knew the details but in effect phones stop drawing juice at a regular WFI / HALT style instruction, even though they wake up several times a second. not sure how much of that is the SoC and how much of it is off-chip power management / “suspend to ram” but it’s a really stark difference in idle consumption and idle temperature. the ‘beaglebone green eco’ sounds like it would but it seems that people report it idles at 50C too. i wonder if anyone has done the experiment to combine the various power saving modes and see if it can true idle.
both of my SBCs spend like 95% of their life idle waiting for wake-on-lan and 30F over ambient. seems so dumb to me.