Orange Pi Zero 3W Review: Tiny Yet Powerful

Orange Pi has kindly sent us a new board to test, the Orange Pi Zero 3W. Our last review with Orange Pi hardware was the Orange Pi 4 Pro SBC - a powerful, low wattage board, low-cost alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 (while a little less powerful). This time the Zero 3W sits in a very different category. It’s absolutely tiny, and it’s hard to believe that this thing actually has pretty much the same hardware specs as the larger Orange Pi 4 Pro!

Of course, you don’t get as many ports, and there is no M2 extension on this one. But this is some serious punch packed into a super small footprint. Personally I find it very cute.

It comes with a custom-made fan that sits on top of the board, and this time you are absolutely going to need it. The Orange Pi 4 Pro has a tendency to overheat very easily - something you could somewhat mitigate with heatsinks - and we are going to be facing the same problem here if we don’t have active cooling. Now, the question is whether or not this tiny fan is effective, but more on that later.

Hardware

Specs

Here are the specifications for the Orange Pi Zero 3W.

The board is absolutely tiny. It’s hard to imagine if you just look at it out of context, so comparing it with other regular boards can give you a better idea of how small it is.

First the Zero 3 W versus the massive OrangePi 6 Plus:

Then against the more regular OrangePi 5 Ultra, which is almost the same as the footprint of a credit card:

And yet another closer shot focusing on the extension ports:

Small, hey?

Limitations Going in

The board I got has a limited amount of RAM (4GB) but more importantly the storage is very limited as UFS. There is no NVME port, so very fast storage by default is going to be limited to whatever you buy when you order it. There is however a secret weapon, the FPC socket which is actually PCI 3.0 - you can easily buy a FPC to a M2 NVME adapter and have pretty expandable storage as much as you want. And since the FPC is a PCIe port (one lane only), it’s still relatively fast compared to the other storage solutions you may consider.

In my case, since I did not get an adapter, I went for an intermediate solution: a SATA SSD drive (m2 format), connected via the USB3 port. This will be slower than direct PCIe connection, but still plenty fast enough.

The other (cheap) option is to use the SD card to expand your storage as long as you don’t mind your interface to be as slow as molasses.

Power consumption

As expected from a tiny board designed for the embedded world, the power consumption is very low. We are between 2W and 2.5W in idle, which is great! Under load, it can go up to about 6.6 W, which is still reasonable. Most of your time will be spent in idle anyway, unless you really need to push this server constantly.

Temperature Control

With the included heatsink and fan, the temperature control is very good. Idle, the temperature stays between 55 and 60 C. Under load, it will progressively increase to 70 C and 80 C, and then the fan will activate and take care of dissipating the heat as much as possible, so that the temperature does not exceed 80 C.

You can see under load that the temperature is well controlled, based on temperature recordings taken during the Geekbench benchmark:

By the way, a few days ago I accidently damaged one of the wires that is linking the fan to power, and the fan stopped working. Nevertheless, the heatsink alone was typically able to keep things fairly cool on the board, even without the fan. Not having the fan made a difference under full load: when all cores are at 100 % for several minutes, the temperature ends up reaching 90 C without the fan, and you end up with deep throttling (falling back to 400 Mhz instead of the maximum 1.8 Ghz) to keep temperature down. With the fan, no such problem occurs and it can effectively keep things running at full load for a very long time.

The fan is extremely quiet. You only know it’s running when you look at it. It is barely noticeable and you really need to put your ear close to the unit to actually hear the flow of air. Very nice despite the small size. Also, the heatsink is extremely effective at dissipating the heat. You can see that as soon as the processor stops being under full load, the temperature drops by 10 C in a very, very short time.

You need to be very careful about one thing however: the heatsink being able to clear the heat also means that the heatsink is itself very hot at all times. When you place your finger on it you feel it immediately, and you probably want to be careful about what it might be in contact with. And keeping your finger on it for too long will certainly cause burns.

User Experience

Let’s talk more about what you can expect from everyday usage with this SOC.

Software Support

As I was preparing this article over the past few months, my initial conclusion was that OrangePi was only providing fairly old images for this piece of hardware, which was going to be something to flag for potential buyers. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to see that they just released in late August new images with very recent distros and kernels. So at the time of writing, I am running the latest Ubuntu stable 26.04 (Resolute) server edition on the OrangePi Zero 3W.

Desktop Experience

There is no full size HDMI port on this device, so you will need a micro-HDMI to HDMI adapter in order to connect to a regular display. Unless you connect everything with bluetooth, you will probably need to attach a USB hub as well to get more USB ports. So, it’a bit more involved than regular, larger SOCs, but this is expected if you want to get something that small in the first place.

The base image I used a few months ago comes with a fairly old distro (as expected). But it’s still very impressive to see this board managing to run a full fledged desktop without sweating one bit. You can actually browse youtube with this! But realistically speaking most people are going to want to use a server distro instead.

The main reason why I would not use this as a desktop computer is because most of the ports are missing on this kind of form factor, and it’s really something that makes a lot more sense as a server, or in embedded hardware contexts.

Benchmarks

We rely once more on Geekbench to give us some sense about the hardware performance. First, the overall results:

As you can see it managed to secure a slightly better performance than the much larger OrangePi 4 Pro (that is equipped with the same chip), but remains a little slower than a Raspberry Pi 5, albeit in the same class of hardware.

The single core benchmarks in detail below:

And the multicores ones:

Server Experience

The installation of the newest distro on the Orange Pi Zero 3W is very easy:

• Download the distro on another computer.
• Flash it to a microSD card
• Insert the microSD card in the Orange Pi Zero 3W (when its off)
• Power it on, it will automatically boot off the SD card
• once in the distro (command line), just to sudo sata-to-nand service and it takes care of everything. Smooth!

Here’s what available in terms of Ubuntu variants at the time of writing:

In order to fully make use of this little board since you may have fairly limited eMMC storage like me, is to use docker where possible, on a USB drive or a external SSD/NVME drive in order to push docker images on there so they don’t touch your root storage at all.

At 4GB RAM, you will be somewhat limited in terms of the number and footprint of applications that you can run in parallel, but that’s sufficient for running a BUNCH of things still. The barebones Ubuntu server edition will eat 317 MB of RAM after booting, leaving you with 3.5 GB of RAM available more or less. And that’s not taking account of a bit of SWAP to make for some buffer.

Right now I am using for testing the OrangePi Zero 3W to run simultaneously:

• PiHole to remove ads and trackers by acting as a custom DNS server
• Jellyfin for video streaming
• Rstudio server for data analysis within the browser…
• Immich for serving photos a la Google Photos: It will take another 1.2 GB or RAM to run at least, and when uploading pictures the machine learning model will run and require another extra GB or RAM when it’s running.
• A Minecraft server (Paper) with 1GB RAM allocated

I have actually created the temperature control chart displayed earlier in the article entirely on this machine, with the Rstudio server.

It worked perfectly and was fast and responsive, as you’d expect. (using a docker image with tidyverse for ARM64).

And it’s running extremely well. Without Minecraft, these 4 services running and kind of idle, we are at 1.5GB of RAM usage. Here’s Immich in full action:

Running a Minecraft server on top is actually really demanding: there’s a lot of multicore activity to make things moving for Minecraft, and this is by far the most demanding application of the bunch, almost filling the available RAM to the max.

But eventually, you can make all of this fit in 4GB of RAM, at the same time, and it will keep chugging along nicely, with the fan keeping things nicely running at good temperature.

Overall

Extremely happy with this little SOC. It looks like a toy, it’s incredibly powerful for its form factor, and OrangePi aced the design with a fan that is just right to avoid throttling and keeping things between 70C and 80C under heavy load, while being almost completely silent. You really have to put your ear against the thing to hear it. Since it’s so small, you can virtually put it anywhere, even inside other appliances (like inside a keyboard!)! And best of all, it consumes very little power. What’s not to like?

Price and availability

It’s available and ready for purchase.

• Amazon US 74 USD for the 4GB version (the one I got), 85 USD for the 6GB version, and 128 USD for the 12GB version. It comes with the heatsink+fan module.
• It’s cheaper on Aliexpress, with 55 USD for the 4GB version, 66 USD for the 6GB version, and 106 USD for the 12GB version. Of course, they come with the fan as well.

Note that this is at the time of writing, and price/availability is always subject to change. But at this price this thing is a no brainer. Not sure if I’d go for a 12GB version (for server use), the 6GB would be the sweet spot in terms of price and capabilities: enough headroom to host a bunch of services without worrying. With 4GB, you need to be somewhat careful, but as you have seen above it’s still very good to host a bunch of demanding applications.

I’ve had a bunch of SOCs over the years, and while I have some preferences here and there, I’m totally sold on this OrangePi Zero 3W. It’s really well done and cheap enough to recommend it easily to anyone who wants to play with a home server or a small desktop attachment. And this time, with the latest distro support, all my objections about new hardware sold with old software is gone; OrangePi did the right thing by working on newer distro support months after the initial release of this hardware.

Well done.