OrangePi 4A Review: Coming for the king

Liberfi

As long as there has been a Raspberry Pi, there have been challengers to the throne. Some have come close, but many have fallen far short of the flagship single board computer. OrangePi has released a slew of boards over the years and one of its latest is the OrangePi 4A, which, as the name suggests, takes aim at the older Raspberry Pi 4’s market. Starting from $47 for the 2GB model , or $53 for the 4GB model that we have in for review, this is an octa-core CPU with onboard M.2 NVMe SSD support. It could be an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 if you don’t need the horsepower.

Will the latest challenger take the throne, or is the kingdom safe for another day? We’ll only find out by putting it on the bench!

OrangePi 4A Technical Specifications

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Header Cell – Column 0 OrangePi 4A Raspberry Pi 4
SoC Allwinner T527,8-core ARM CortexTM-A55 @ 1.8GHz Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
RAM 2GB/4GB LPDDR4/4X 1/2/4/8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM
Storage Micro SD, eMMC, M.2 NVMe SSD Micro SD
Networking Gigabit Ethernet Gigabit Ethernet
Wireless Wi-Fi 2.4 / 5GHz, Bluetooth 5.0 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0
USB 4 x USB 2.0 1 x USB 2.0 host expansion 2 x USB 3.0 ports 2 x USB 2.0 ports
Display 1 x HDMI 2.0 up to 4K@60FPS 1 x MIPI DSI 1 x eDP1.3 2 × micro-HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported) 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
Camera Connectors 1 x 2-lane MIPI-CSI camera interface 1 x 4-lane MIPI-CSI camera interface (underside of board) 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
GPIO 40-pin compatible with Raspberry Pi pinout. 40-pin GPIO
Audio 3.5mm audio jack 3.5mm audio and composite video port
Power USB C 5V 5A USB C 5V 3A
Dimensions 89 x 56 x 18mm 85 x 56 x 17.7mm

OrangePi 4A

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

The nearest comparison for the OrangePi 4A is the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. Sure the OrangePi 4A has four more cores, but the systems run remarkably similar. To look at, they are quite different. For starters, the PCB cooler is different, as is the USB and Ethernet port placement. The Allwinner SoC is rotated 45 degrees and we have a single HDMI port.

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