Radxa Orion O6N Review: The Powerful and Silent ARM64 Beast
5 hours ago
- #SBC Review
- #ARM64
- #CIX P1 SoC
- Radxa Orion O6N uses the CIX P1 SoC on a 6nm process, similar to OrangePi 6 Plus, and features a large active cooling system.
- Specifications include a 12-core tri-cluster CPU (Arm Cortex-A720/A520), Immortalis-G720 GPU with ray tracing, NPU up to 45 TOPS, LPDDR5 RAM up to 64GB, dual M.2 NVMe slots, dual 2.5GbE, and multiple video outputs.
- The board lacks integrated wireless; users must install an M.2 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module and drivers manually.
- Software includes Debian 12 Bookworm with options like Flatpak, AppImage, and Distrobox for newer packages, and experimental Debian 13 with open-source drivers is in development.
- Power draw is around 14.2W idle and 24.9W under load, similar to OrangePi 6 Plus, making it less ideal for 24/7 server use.
- Cooling is excellent, keeping temperatures between 50-60°C under full load with minimal fan noise.
- Benchmarks show performance comparable to OrangePi 6 Plus, with slight multi-core advantages, and gaming via Heroic Launcher works for some titles but has a 30-40% success rate.
- LLM inference on ARM64 is possible with optimizations like KleidiAI and llama.cpp, achieving up to ~7 tokens/s on large models, though prompt processing is slow.
- Pricing is competitive: 16GB at $309 and 32GB at $549, offering better value than OrangePi 6 Plus, but availability may be limited.