Raspberry Pi Alternative Offers Double The RAM For Less Money

By Ash Hill
published

Pick your flavor; these Pis are fresh.

Orange Pi
(Image credit: Orange Pi)

The Raspberry Pi has a handful of competitors that release similar SBCs, often with comparable specs in a familiar form factor. Today, we’ve got another alternative board to share that aims to stand as a substitute for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. This board is known as the Orange Pi Zero 2W, and right off the bat, it starts with a base model with twice as much RAM as the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (1GB vs. 512GB).

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SpecOrange Pi Zero 2W
SoCAllwinner H618 Cortex-A53
CPU1.5GHz
GPUIntegrated Mali G31 MP2 Graphics
RAM1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB, 4GB LPDDR4
StoragemicroSD
NetworkingWi-Fi5, BT5.0, with BLE Support
VideoMini HDMI
AudioAudio Output via 24-pin Expansion Interface
USB2x USB 2.0 Type-C
GPIO40-pin
Power5V at 2A via USB 2.0 Type C port
Dimensions30 x 65 x 1.2mm

The Orange Pi Zero 2W has the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and features a 40-pin GPIO header. It also uses a microSD card for storage with compatibility with many popular OS choices, including Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, and even Android 12 TV. It’s driven by an Allwinner H618 Cortex-A53 processor with a base speed of 1.5 GHz.

The base model is available at AliExpress for $12.90, less than the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, for a recommended price of $15. The Orange Pi Zero 2W is available at Amazon for $15 (USD). If you want to see more about the Orange Pi Zero 2W, you can find spec details on the official Orange Pi website.

Ash Hill
Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer at Tom's Hardware US. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Findecanor
    It might be worth mentioning that the Allwinner H618 has four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, like the Pi Zero 2 W.
    The Pi is clocked at only 1 GHz though, but you can usually get sustained performance on SoCs like this only with active cooling anyway.
    Reply
  • usertests
    The 1.5 GB model is bizarre, but on the other hand it's triple what you get in any Pi Zero. A small upsell gets you to a nice 4 GB.

    As always with Chinese knockoffs, or even ARM in general, the OS/support will be the biggest problem.
    Reply
  • edzieba
    There are plenty of 'Raspberry Pi alternatives' of various architectures that may be more or less 'cheaper' per-unit-performance (or memory, or IO, etc). The problem is that people aren't buying Raspberry Pis for performance, they're buying them for the extensive support, both knowledge (official and community) and 3rd party hardware. Whatever weird use-case you have, it's pretty likely there is a board that can drop right on top that does what you need, along with multiple tutorials on how to work with that board with minimal prior knowledge required.
    Reply
  • zintoki
    It's not only about RAM size. RPi Zero 2 has only archaic DDR2. Memory bandwith is crucial for iGPU and that is why RPi sucks even more.
    Reply