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Banana Pi BPI-M7 - More Reasons to Avoid the Raspberry Pi
(www.cnx-software.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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It looks like it's ~$100. But when I've used similar SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. Even if something is faster and better specced than a RasPi, you end up outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.
I have a BananaPi M3 and the software support was horrific. Getting a kernel to compile with the hacked drivers and firmware was like black magic.
Orange pi worked quite well but I mostly used python & GPIO.
Oh yeah, I had to debug and recompile that GPIO lib so no it was kind of not very user friendly...
For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.
And power, that's a pretty important metric if you plan on running something 24/7.
Yeah, I've mostly given up on Pis at this point.
Your OptiPlex will have considerable PCIE expansion though, so you could slot in a second hand dual-port nic if you wanted to (10GbE might be easier to find than 2.5 and they are still relatively inexpensive as second hand hardware)
The RPi does have a nice ecosystem but the trick is to pick a board supported by Armbian - that will ensure future kernel updates and low level things working fine. For instance I've been using a NanoPi M4v2 since 2018 with a RK3399 CPU mind that at that time it already had a PCIe x2 interface, 4GB of RAM and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.
There's an AliExpress link in the article that clearly prices it at $260...
Cool? I'm seeing $165, but my original comment was based on the article as it existed five months ago. I'm not sure the board was even shipping at that time