I want to buy Banana Pi M3 board but I have same question in my mind. Can anyone help me?
Banana Pi M3 have 2 usb ports. But in my project I can need more USB ports. If I use USB hub with this board, is the performance of the board will lose?
Other question I want to image procecess in my project. And when I looking for smilar boards on the internet I find Orange Pi plus 2. Which board is the more powerfull for my project or are there any boards more powerfull which price less then 100$ ?
Both Banana Pi M3 and Orange Pi Plus 2 are crap. They are made for morons who look only at the specifications but don’t try to understand what’s important.
The M3 is even worse than OPi Plus 2 since here the ‘engineers’ managed to use only 1 of the two available USB ports of the SoC. Both USB ports and the (ultra slow) USB-to-SATA bridge have to share bandwidth (this is different on OPi Plus where the USB-to-SATA bridge uses an own USB port).
The issue with the M3 board is mainly that the Rev1 board is under powered(actual amps, rather than performance), and it tends to run hot, so it should have some heat sinks added.
Like all low cost SBC’s there are a lot of compromises in its design such as having only 2USB’s and the SATA not being true SATA, so its SATA is slower than a true SATA board (but true SATA costs…) At least you can connect a SATA device to it…most other boards won’t let you do that out of the box.
But, as with most things your choice of SBC will depend on what you want it to do. The M3 has processing power aplenty, when it has enough amps, make sure you use a 2amp on the Rev1 and get a 3-4 amp power unit for the Rev2.
The Rev2 model should cope with a USB hub, but for any low ampage setup, its always best to try to use a powered hub if you are going to connect a lot of other devices to the USB. So they don’t drain the boards power allocation. I only have a Rev1 so can’t be sure the power issues are fully resolved on Rev2, but on paper they seem to be with the new power input.
As for image processing, that depends, what do you mean by that? If you are talking CPU based manipulation of image data, then the M3 is fine for that, so is the Orange Pi, (it also gets overhot) or any of the other quadcore systems on the market, they all have their plus and minus points.
If you are planning to render and display in real time though, the M3, and Odroid Xu4 have the best graphic chips of the sub $100 systems. But you’ll probably need to write your own software to do it, as most software for these machines has not learned to use the specific PowerVR and Mali 600 GPU’s.
The GL830 used on Banana Pi M3 and Orange Pi Plus is maybe the slowest USB to SATA bridge in the world (15MB/s sequential write speed and 30 MB/s sequential read speed max. Every cheap USB enclosure outperforms this crap). Using such an inadequate design is simply just another design failure the M3 is famous for (the most moronic one Micro USB for DC-IN)
Regarding ‘true SATA costs’: A20 equipped devices like Banana Pi M1 are way cheaper than the overpriced M3, contain one SATA 2.0 port (limited write speed) but also 2 real USB host ports that do not have to share bandwidth unlike with the M3.
And you seem to be kidding when you’re talking about ‘best graphic chips’ and the M3 in one sentence. The A83T only contains a single core PowerVR GPU and you can’t do anything reasonable with this GPU due to missing drivers/features.
If you want to do GPU processing you have to choose other SoCs that feature at least OpenCL capabilities.
In my project I want to make real time image proccesing with usb camera. And When I looked for a board in the internet I found ODROİD XU4. I wanted to choice ODROID XU4 but its power consumption is very high from other boards. So I think feeding odroid on the robot without adapter will be very hard and I want to change it. Is there a solution for this problem?
When I want to choice M3, it has 2 USB ports. and in my project I need at least 3 USB ports. I dont need more USB speed. I want to ask in my first question if I use USB hub with Banana M3 to extend USB ports, It will effect my board’ s performance? (Like voltage drop or restarting)
Ah you’re very funny, or think you are.
Its quite true I’m a total linux noob, I have little or no interest in using it, its a shit OS and the less I have to deal with it the happier I am, mainly because too many people like you seem to think its funny to mock noobs.
However I do know quite a bit about hardware, having worked with computers, games consoles and embedded systems for quite some time. I have over 20 of the current SBC’s. Once I can get past the OS, I usually code these things in C/C++ or assembly for specific purposes. So, fine mock me for not knowing how to use Linux…I don’t care!
I also can recognize hate for hate sake, if you really don’t like the M3, or appreciate the effort that’s fine, but why spend so much time running it down. As I said all current SBC’s are a compromise, price vs function and as such some work better than others, and some are really not suitable for certain types of things.
OMG. Why don’t you click on the link I provided? The XU4 will be shipped with heatsink and fan for a reason. Because this device has been designed by a company that cares.
If you want to unlock M3’s performance and use all 8 CPU cores at higher clockspeeds the consumption of A83T alone might exceed the Micro USB power specifications.
I said it was the best in the Sub $100, which is almost totally dominated by Mali 400Mp2 and older Power VR chips,
The M3 does have a much more modern GPU than most of the others, and it can do OpenCL 1,1(do some checking).
Yes I would have preferred to see it have more cores, but even a single core will show a Mali 400Mp2 a clean pair of heels.I doubt that the Rev 1 power could support dual or quad cores on the GPU, maybe Rev 3
My comment was that the M3 GPU and XU$ GPU are the best of the current batch, but I am well aware there are much better SoC GPU’s out there, they just cost a lot more. Driver support is up to the community…but I understand Imagination are working on some, so patience!
You seem intent on bashing the decisions made in the making of the M3 or Orange Pi etc, certainly its true some cost cutting and decisions to overclock have produced poor results, but its an open source community, so its up to you to be constructive and provide advice for the next revisions to improve…instead you prefer to use words like Moronic
and insults to make your point… which is a shame as you seem quite knowledgeable and could be a great help to people seeking help.
I have 3 Odroids, a C1+ a C2 and an XU4
they are indeed nice machines but have their own issues, my C2 needs to be returned due to a faulty HDMI socket. I don’t think that any company who make these boards does not care…they work to produce what they produce and ask for the community to help and advice, you choose instead to scorn.
you made your point…the power usage is poor, its been revised…what more do you want them to do?
if you use an unpowered/standard USB hub, then yes you almost certainly will have a problem with the M3, Rev1. It barely has enough power to manage a keyboard and mouse, anything else that draws current will probably cause it to hang or restart,
A powered hub will prevent that, since the devices you plug in will then take their power from the hub, not the M3 preventing issues.
If you want low power usage, you really need to use a lower speed SBC, high speed == high power drain. All the Odroid machines are fast and power hungry.
If low power is what you need try a Raspberry Pi zero , its just about fast enough for most things,
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I prefer whice board I need to my project. I bought Banana M3. Because Odroid xu4 can be cause a problem with shipment to my country. I hope I will not regret with this decision…
no I used only a power unit with 2A rated micro USB, which worked fine. I also used a 1A rated version which gave me problems. I’ve never used a battery on them.
Well, if you had read the links I gave you, you would understand the answers from Dragan.
My intention with the links was;
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
I don’t consider Dragan’s posting as hate, it is more anger.
You cannot understand that with touch and go here, you must stay a couple of months on a daily basis.
I close here, it is not worth to write more unless you read and understood the links I gave you.
He needs an SBC for mobile usage with 3 USB ports and you recommend a board that is nowhere in stock, has only 1 USB port, no charging capabilities and can only shine when it’s about low consumption when nothing is connected. Really?
A Banana Pi M1 has 3 USB ports (you can use the OTG as host port too), its AXP209 PMU supports direct connection of a battery, parameters like remaining capacity can be readout through sysfs, no need for an USB hub and consumption doesn’t exceed the RPi’s if you add all the necessary stuff.
And so on… nothing has changed. They simply ignore their customer’s needs and even provided help.
And regarding GPGPU usage and SGX544. Has you ever seen anyone suceeding in running real OpenCL stuff on any PowerVR544 equipped SoC like people do with i.MX6 for example all the times? Me not.
Can you please do an ‘apt-get install stress’, then run ‘stress -c 3 -m 3’ and tell me how low cpufreq clockspeeds are reduced due to throttling and how temperature behaves?
Unfortunately I can not measure this since I made the mistake to mount a heatsink on the board and now it immediately powers off within seconds when I want to run only light workloads on it.
Isn’t it funny that a board that has been advertised to have an octacore CPU running at up to 2GHz is either able to run at max. 1 GHz or it simply powers off?
and when you read through it, completely it will SAVE you time - very big promise.
You can 
