Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC – A Raspberry Pi 400 alternative powered by Rockchip RK3399

There’s now a Raspberry Pi 400 alternative with the Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC that offers a very similar design, but it is powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor.

Like the Raspberry Pi model, the Orange Pi 800 comes with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, two USB 3.0 ports, and one USB 2.0 port, but it also adds 64GB on-board flash storage and features one full-size HDMI port capable of 4Kp60 resolution plus a VGA port, instead of two micro HDMI ports.

Raspberry Pi 400 Keyboard PC alternative

Orange Pi 800 specifications:

  • SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 cores up to 1.8GHz, 4x Arm Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.4GHz, and an Arm Mali-T860MP4 GPU
  • System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4
  • Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot
  • Video Output
    • HDMI 2.0 port up to 4Kp60
    • VGA port up to Full HD resolution
  • Audio
    • 3.5mm audio (headphone+mic) jack
    • Integrated speaker(s) and microphone
    • Digital audio via HDMI
  • Networking
    • 1x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port
    • Dual-band 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE
  • Keyboard – 78-key QWERTY Keyboard
  • USB – 2x USB 3.0 ports, 1x USB 2.0 port
  • Expansion – 26-pin GPIO header
  • Power Supply – 5V/4A via Type-C port
  • Dimensions – 286 x 122 x 22mm
  • Weight – 385 grams

Orange Pi 800 portsThe product page says the keyboard PC can run Android12.1, Orange Pi OS, Manjaro OS, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 11. “Orange Pi OS” is described as a lightweight operating system based Arch Linux Arm that will support all Orange Pi hardware including Orange Pi 800 on the website, but the store page says it is compatible with Android 12 and comes with the Google Play store.

Orange Pi OS
Orange Pi OS

The supported operating system images are not available for download yet, but should eventually show up on the Download page on the Orange Pi website, and hopefully, there will be images released by the Armbian community as well.

The Orange Pi 800 is now available for $99.00 plus shipping on Aliexpress, but you might want to get the $108 bundle with a 5V/4A power adapter instead [Update: It’s also listed on Amazon US]. Considering the Orange Pi 800 does come with 64GB eMMC flash storage, it’s somewhat competitive against the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard PC which was launched for $70, and could provide an alternative to advanced users. Note that the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard PC now seems to be out of stock in most shops, and is often sold as part of a $100 kit with a mouse, 16GB microSD card, HDMI cable, and a programming book, or even more on places like Amazon.

Update: The article was initially published on June 4, 2022 and updated following the availability of the keyboard PC on Aliexpress.

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42 Replies to “Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC – A Raspberry Pi 400 alternative powered by Rockchip RK3399”

  1. That headline got me.

    It also has a headphone jack, something that is missing on the Pi400. As well as “speakers”.

    Where is the integrated microphone?

    but is now almost sold as part of a $100 kit with a mouse, keyboard, cables, and programming book.

    Almost always sold?

    1. They sell the 400 with an extra keyboard or are there people charging extra for the ‘keyboard’ part of the 400? 😉

    2. Integrated Mic seems to placed aboufe the ESC Key on top left, so on the other side of the speaker, that is places in the right rear. But left if you look to the rear.

    1. Azerty my personal enemy

      Whenever our IT logged into my pc keyboard is azerty and windows speaks french

      You won’t believe how hard it is to log in with a mildly complex password 😸

  2. You could just put your fanless SBC to the left or right of a normal keyboard. Just like when computers had disk drives. Several other options too.
    Could be a all in one thin client.

  3. On the product page, the picture advertising “4K HD video output” is funny.

    This product should have been called a Pi 600 for its 6-core RK3399 instead of Pi 800.

  4. Chromium OS is good choice since it is lightweight and optimized for this level of SOC. But why not use type-c with DP-alt mode?

    1. Vs having an HDMI port? It’s more expensive and requires more complex external hardware. Dumb USB-C power + standard HDMI beats an expensive power delivering USB-C dock with some kind of video out or a USB-C enabled monitor.

      The dumb solution is much more accomidating to actual hardware in the field.

      1. This is true as long as we are talking full size HDMI

        Compared to mini/micro HDMI I would prefer USB-C anytime, also you can connect 2 monitors via a single USB C DP, at least with laptops that is the way it works.

        1. Yes, as someone who has almost all HDMI cable sizes, I fully agree. Death to any non-full size HDMI ports. If you want to go smaller, use USB-C alt DP mode.

          1. Yes all my adapters i had so far broke.

            If you cant afford DP alt mode, neither want fullsize HDMI, then better implement a proprietary usb c connector pinout for hdmi. Or maybe if easier go for mini dp/tb3 plugs.

  5. They were too afraid of changing the size to do something cool like offer real PCIe expansion, which to me would properly capture the expandability and excitement of the C64s and Tandy CoCo style of home computers the RPI foundation was trying to emulate.

    Instead just another RPI clone without innovation. Great job Xunlong

    1. It’s orange pi, their focus used to lie on cheap, but somehow it doesn’t work out anymore in the current supply chain environment.

  6. If it is anything like my experience with the Orange Pi Win, it will be a pile of junk. Support will be very lacking. In comparison the RPi 400 is rock solid, support groups everywhere and troubleshooting advice all over the internet. Lack of 3.5mm audio jack not an issue as a USB DAC works out-of-the-box. Nice copy of the RPi 400 but I’ll give it a miss.

    1. Yea David M I had a similar experience with a orange 8 core device that was supposed to be a pi competitor/upgrade at the time. But it took me two days to boot it then the district gave me fits…my pi 400 will stay…as will my 8 node pi cluster, and numerous pi zero 2ws.

      1. > orange 8 core device

        The only older and somewhat popular SBC with eight cores are FriendlyELEC NanoPC T3+ / NanoPi Fire3, Hardkernel ODROID XU4/HC1/HC2/MC1, Khadas VIM2 and SinoVoip Banana Pi M3. So while OrangePi would easily qualify for horrible OS images and ‘software support’ this time it must have been SinoVoip to blame (even if ‘took me two days to boot’ is more a symptom of failing to write an OS image correctly to SD card 😉 )

  7. How does the RK3399 overclocked compare to the Pi4/400 OC – I hear the RK3399 doesnt OC much so for emulation maybe Pi is better?

    1. There’s no easy response to this. RPi has a limited memory bandwidth, and for some use cases, overclocking it to 2 GHz will bring very little gains. RK3399 has a significantly better memory controller but many boards do not seem to exploit it well, and it may even run at a very low frequency (as low as 200 MHz was found in a TV box). There are too may little cores on the RK3399 (and additionally they run at a low frequency), making them often difficult to use in the general case, though for embedded usage it can make sense to dedicate them to I/ processing, keeping the big ones for the application. I’d say that overall an RPi is easier to use efficiently, but with careful tuning, RK3399 can deliver more. In my compiler tests (http://wiki.ant-computing.com/Choosing_a_processor_for_a_build_farm) the NanoPI-M4 (RK3399) builds in 20s at stock speed (18.6 at 2.0GHz+1.5GHz) vs 23.9 for RPi at 1.5 GHz or 21.6 for RPi at 2.0 GHz, thus there the RK3399 can benefit from the parallelism, but only by a small margin. For other use cases involving cryptography, the RK3399 will wipe the floor with the RPi however.

      If you want high raw performance, S922X or A311D/A311D2 in the Odroid-N2+ and VIM3/VIM4 that feature 4 A73 and 2(4) A53 at a high frequency will deliver significantly better performance than these two, especially since you can operate them at 2.4 GHz.

      I would say that overall we’re speaking about high performance processors anyway and there are other significant differences between these SoCs that should dictate your choice (GPU, I/O, etc).

    1. and $17 s&h … bad offer. I will go with rock 5b 16GB rk3588 next week for almost the same price. Different product but makes more sense

    2. You must be in Europe where Aliexpress adds VAT.
      The rest of us living in the free world don’t get that 😉

      1. Yes, I live in EU. I think paying taxes is fair. Pi800 price compared to pi400 is a bit insane. Hopefully retail price will become more realistic soon.

      2. For me Amazon USA says it will be released Sept 30Th. For the cost, unless you need the gpio, they buy a refurbished PC with a warranty gives better bang for bucks.

          1. Still slow compared to a refurbished PC.

            The edge some Arm SBC played was low power use but a good PC will finish intense work faster. No one in real world spends all hours running benchmarks headless. Today’s must have, will be, passed by.

            I can buy a refurbished Linux capable Chromebook with warranty for less.

            Your money, buy your N2+

  8. It would be nice to be able to use the keyboard as a passive device for another PC when it is powered by the USB-C connector.

      1. if you don’t have a physical keyboard device around and why should you waste space IF you already own a pi 400/800 around

  9. I would be interested how did they managed cooling of the soc or actually how much time does it take before it completely melts down when it runs on 100%. It could be nice ergonomic keyboard if the soc is situated in the centre of it.

    1. Its actually not that bad at all. throughout my in general use case of at least using 1 core at full 100% then say watching videos on youtube, and checking htop every so often, have seen it reach up to 75c for max, averagely I’d say it stays around 68-70c with the way I use it. Haven’t tried Overclocking it tho and if I were too well it wont be too high, that’s for sure. Not sure if I will ever do that tho.

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Khadas VIM4 SBC
Khadas VIM4 SBC