We previously provided a hardware review of the boards we currently carry and now the numbers are in. Using standard images from our download section, we put all of the boards in a head to head test. Special thanks to Phoronix and Armbian for creating the tools and images that makes this possible.

We will have software reviews in the next two weeks and some accessories and how to get up and running.

This is the only benchmark where the ODROID-XU4 does not win with its hefty Out-of-Order A15 cores. The Banana Pi M3 stays relatively close to the ODROID-XU4 in most of the benchmarks. The Raspberry Pi 3 and ODROID-C2 A53 In-Order cores will be more responsive in single threaded scenarios than the Banana Pi M3. Raspberry Pi 3 is handy-capped by Raspbian's ARMv6 instruction set and would perform better using ARMv8 instuction set.

The ODROID-XU4 and Banana Pi M3 again lead the pack by more than 50%. They do cost more than 2x on average and the performance reflects their price points.

Audio encoding demonstrates the importance of Out-of-Order cores on single threaded performance. The ability to reschedule instructions vastly improves the throughput in the system. The ODROID-XU4 is alone in this respect among these boards.

You can find the entire test result set here.

This concludes the performance review of these boards. We will have GPU and IO performance reviews in a few weeks as well. As a reminder, this is purely for out of the box performance purposes and does not reflect the whole ecosystem surrounding each board. Also, price comes into play as the Orange Pi One is only $10 and demonstrates very competent performance and the most performance per dollar. The Raspberry Pi boards have an ecosystem several times the size of any of the other boards and is invaluable in some respects. We will be going over some of these aspects of the board in future reviews.

You can purchase all of these boards from this website or our store on Amazon. We thank you for your patronage and we hope to continue to bring you more of the latest products and information.