Radxa Rock 5B

Overview

The Radxa Rock 5B is a flagship single-board computer built around the Rockchip RK3588 octa-core SoC, delivering desktop-class performance in a compact form factor closely matching the Raspberry Pi 4. Powered by four Cortex-A76 performance cores and four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores running up to 2.4 GHz, the board handles demanding workloads such as 8K video decoding, AI inference (6 TOPS NPU), and native NVMe storage — all while remaining accessible to makers and developers.

Memory options range from 4 GB to 32 GB of LPDDR4X, paired with an eMMC socket and a full-size M.2 M-key slot for NVMe SSDs via PCIe 3.0. Connectivity is comprehensive: 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet (RTL8125BG), WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, two USB 3.0 Type-A, one USB 2.0, a USB-C port supporting DisplayPort and data, and a 40-pin GPIO header compatible with standard HATs. Power is supplied via USB-C PD (5–20 V), though note that PD negotiation has been reported unreliable on many board revisions — a fixed 5 V supply is recommended.

Armbian provides well-maintained images based on Debian and Ubuntu, with both vendor (6.1) and mainline kernel options. The board is well-supported by the open-hardware community and is popular for NAS builds, edge AI projects, and mini desktop setups.