A Pretty Case for the OrangePi 6 Plus

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We have already received and talked about the OrangePi 6 Plus several times. It’s an awesome ARM64 system with a lot of power under the hood, akin to what you find on modern laptops in terms of performance, it can even run some fairly demanding X86_64 games with Box64! I was always a little sad that it sat naked on my table without a proper cover, so I purchased an aluminium case (I guess the only one?) on Aliexpress to see if it could not be a good match for it. It’s litterally made for it, so it had to! Note that this is NOT something that we were provided, and this is not an ad. Just wanted to share my impressions if you considered buying this case.

Turns out, it’s a great case. It’s very light, as expected, but protects well the board that fits perfectly inside. You only need 4 screws to attach the main board, and there are two openings (one on the top of the board, and one on the side) that ensure that air will flow nicely to cool the SoC. I did not notice, under operation, an increase in noise profile so I am assuming the case has no negative impact on the air flow.

All ports are clearly labelled, which is very practical. You get holes for other important functions like the micro-SD card port, the audio jack, and the power button. The board comes with a small attachment to make the power button very easy to click.

One of the side of the board has a dark glass, which I presume is to allow for a remote infrared control to be used with this board. If you use this device as a media player, this is a great feature so that you can use a relatively cheap IR remote to control what’s happening on a large screen without having to plug a mouse or a gamepad.

The bottom of the case comes with a trap, that is closed and secured with one small screw. Remove it, and you can easily assess the NVME ports at the back of the board, to extend storage. Easy. And bottom of the case comes with 4 small pads to make it sit nicely on any surface to avoid scratches.

The top cover is secured by gravity and 4 small magnets. So with a little strength you can easily pull it off and access the internals. This can be very useful if you do some GPIO work, or if you want to clean the fan and repaste the Soc beneath.

Overall, a very nice case that looks very professional, while being very affordable. It costs about 20 USD (before shipping) while there are many resellers with slightly different prices.

If you want to make your OrangePi 6 Plus cool, look no further!