ODROID-C5

Good Hardware & Poor Software

The C5 SBC has some great hardware specs, but... Amlogic hasn't yet released to the open source community all of the S7D hardware interfaces that make it possible to mainline the Linux kernel or U-Boot loader. So when you purchase this board, you must accept using only that which HardKernel provides. That limits you to a significantly hacked 5.15 kernel and 2023.01 u-boot. The Ubuntu OS may be satisfactory for many and you have the option of Android and Yocto with the limitations I just mentioned. You can browse linux-meson.com to get a better picture of where things stand. If I would have known this prior to purchase, I would probably buy another M1S, which has most everything mainlined and even HAOS support. For the tinkerers out there, these boards aren't going to someday become less expensive. If you have the funds, snag one of these and put it on the shelf for when the software catches up. When mainline releases finally become available, this C5 board will really shine. Maybe Linux kernel version 8.0...?

Excellent performance and strong thermal tolerance

I have run this board in a vented plastic enclosure, in a room which gets as hot as 85-87F , running Rust compilation on all four cores for long periods. It didn't seem to break 160F on the SoC, with no heatsink, and no fan, and no throttling! This unit is great, highly recommend it.

Nice CoreElec device

Purchased this SBC for use as a CoreElec box and it works flawlessly -- after a few setup issues. I migrated the setup from an old Odroid-C2, so this was quite an upgrade. If you don't already have one, I highly recommend purchasing an eMMC reader / writer from ameriDroid (v1, not v2). This allows directly writing the CoreElec image to the eMMC storage from your computer. It should be listed as a recommended accessory, but it's not.