Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC?

The Radxa Q6A was Radxa’s first Qualcomm-based SBC release last year, and even though we’re still deep in the midst of RAMageddon, Radxa are announcing the Dragon Q8B today, the very same day you’re reading this. Even I don’t know how I’ve managed that in 2026.

At its core, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC running at 3GHz provides the horsepower, and provide it does. Well, in a sense. If you’re wondering whether this is the same chip that we saw in laptops a couple of years ago, wonder no more, it’s the same one, and oh boy, it’s a ride.

Want the TL;DR? It brute forces its way to the top of the comparison list in this review, leaving the Raspberry Pi 5 in its dust, and also takes the top spot (for now) over on sbc.compare for a large number of tests, so I think Radxa might be on to something? Has this blossoming partnership finally produced an SBC without compromise?!

If you want a bit more than a TL;DR though, buckle up, I’m bringing the waffley ranty first look of yesteryear back, and on the bench we have the 32GB RAM model (I should really increase the valuation on the contents insurance after this) and I’ll be comparing numbers against a range of Radxa’s range, the industry “standard”, and the (previous) number one over on the sbc.compare leaderboards.A quick word before we get stuck in, mind. This board is only being announced today, and the sample on my bench is an early one running OS builds that are still being tweaked. So this is more of a first look with some initial benchmarks and my early thoughts than a board I’ve lived with for months. The numbers are a snapshot in time, and I’d expect them to shift a touch as the software settles, though I wouldn’t expect anything to change dramatically, it’s mostly a case of polishing what’s already here.s.

Sample number 6.. The early bird (me) gets the worm (32GB RAM) but at what cost?

Disclaimer! To get it out of the way nice and early, Radxa supplied this board ahead of launch for testing (it’s an early sample, and the OS images are still a work in progress, so do bear that in mind throughout) but no money exchanged hands, there was no obligation for a review, and I’m writing this because I want to. As always, all words are my own (nobody would be dumb enough to claim them) and Radxa have had no editorial say before, or after publishing.

Table of Contents

What Is the Radxa Dragon Q8B?Radxa Dragon Q8B SpecificationsMeet Today’s CompetitionSetup and the State of the SoftwareWhat’s Not Quite Working (Yet)Benchmark MethodologyRadxa Dragon Q8B BenchmarksCPU PerformanceStorage and I/OGraphics and the Adreno GPUPower Consumption and ThermalsRadxa Dragon Q8B Pricing and AvailabilityClosing Thoughts What Is the Radxa Dragon Q8B?

To get straight to the point, the Dragon Q8B is packing a laptop SoC in an SBC form-factor, which is great for performance, as the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC still has plenty in the tank (4x Cortex-X1 cores at 3GHz, and 4x Cortex-A78, at 2.4GHz), and packs one hell of a punch.

Radxa’s Qualcomm steam train seems to have no sign of stopping, and it’s great to see boards actually being launched in the current climate. Heck, they even announced they were working on consumer NAS products based on Qualcomm SoCs this week…

Where things get a little dicey for the Dragon Q8B is software support, annoyingly. The Snapdragon SoC was used primarily for Windows on Arm laptops, and Linux support can be patchy and hacky, but we got there in the end with the help of Armbian (shout out to Meco from sbcwiki.com for working on that!) and after my initial testing, Radxa had an Ubuntu 26 build available.

Before we get to the meaty part of the review, let’s quickly confirm the specifications of the Radxa Dragon Q8B, as I think people will be pleasantly surprised.

Radxa Dragon Q8B Specifications

From speaking to others and seeing public results in places like the Geekbench Browser, we know there are 8, 16, and 32GB SKUs available, all of which offer the same I/O and features overall.

2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C connectors with DP Alt Mode is rather nice, and packed in a relatively small footprint is a lot of powerful hardware. You get 2×2.5GbE RJ45 ports, a further 2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, this time in Type-A format, 2 M.2 M-Keys on the underside, and a UFS connector for a small, fast, replaceable storage option.

Not seen in this Radxa photo on the underside, is the switch to choose between 12V and 20V USB-PD for the input. You can see the pads for it above the USB 2.0 Type-A ports, along with the silkscreen text, but on the actual board, it looks like this.

PSU only does 12V? No problem!

Meet Today’s Competition

I’ve decided to keep it an (almost) all Radxa affair for testing and bring in the Dragon Q6A, the ROCK 5B+, CIX P1-powered Orion O6N, and for good luck, a Raspberry Pi 5.

I’m hoping they’ll cover all of the bases for comparison, but to quickly justify my choices, the Dragon Q6A is the less powerful sibling of the Q8B, the ROCK 5B+ has one of the most popular SBC SoCs in the Rockchip RK3588, the Orion O6N is one of the most powerful ARM SoCs available in boards like this, and it has 32GB of RAM. The Raspberry Pi 5 gets a spot at the table because, well, everyone knows what it is, and given the pricing at the moment, people are definitely looking alternatives more and more. Do we approve?

Setup and the State of the Software

At the time of launch we have an Ubuntu 26 build from Radxa directly, and it’s fair to say things are still moving quickly, the builds were being updated even as I was testing.though it only comes in a desktop flavour.

Armbian will have you covered if you’d prefer Debian, or server/CLI builds, though it’s not an officially supported OS just yet and you’ll need to build it yourself. All of my testing was done on a Debian 13 build of Armbian, and I cross-checked against Ubuntu and saw nothing out of the ordinary. A week after completing my testing, Radxa also released Debian 13 (Trixie) builds with Gnome/KDE options, and these booted just fine.

It’s not a particularly new SoC, however, and I know others have alternatives like Arch Linux running already, so I imagine we’ll see other distros become available shortly, and once Armbian (hopefully) gets official support, you’ll see a range of pre-installed software options too.

I suppose I do also have to mention that Windows 11’s Windows on ARM (WoA) will work out of the box with this, and this is really what the Qualcomm SoC sees as its bread and butter given than this chip found itself in a range of Windows laptops a few years ago when it came onto the scene. Performance is around what you’d expect from laptops with the same chip, though I imagine Meco on sbcwiki will be checking out Windows and gaming in a little more details, so keep an eye out for his piece too.

Will you have as much support for things as the Raspberry Pi? No, but then again nearly no SBC has it. If you’ve dealt with any of the alternatives before, you’ll have no problem here, and with Armbian, you can be up and running incredibly quickly, with an interface and base that you’re used to if you’ve used it before.

It’s nice hardware and it’s been around for a few years now (the SoC that is), we just have to hope that we can get the most out of it. There’s mainline Linux support for the chip, so let’s see?

What’s Not Quite Working (Yet)

I should quickly mention a few things to look out for if Radxa announce, and release this board for sale shortly after. As of Friday 29th May (2026) the Radxa OS builds do not have functioning RJ45.

At the time of testing, only a build of Arch Linux that Sophon at Radxa kindly supplied me had the Qualcomm Ethernet ports in a functioning state, but that means that it shouldn’t be too long before we see things ported over to the Radxa OS builds.

The Dragon Q8B also unearthed something in my Linpack testing in the sense that it found a way to draw 50W, almost cook itself, and then hard crash each time. After some digging, I realised that I’d been using the more intensive OpenBLAS algorithm, and I build for all of the optimisations I can detect for the SoC. This has worked fine on over 100 SBCs, but none of those had been laptop SoCs in a small SBC layout. This meant that the PMICs had a really, really bad time, cooked (not in a good way) and gave up after 10s each time.

Not even an industrial Noctua fan and a big ol heatsink could keep things under control

The BIOS currently has the USB ports disabled due to bugs, so the only way to access the BIOS options is via serial. Perhaps Radxa already have an update that handles that that I couldn’t get my hands on in time.

Finally, I was unable to get UFS to be detected on any of the OS builds I tested, and whilst Radxa list UFS and normal OS builds for download on their GitHub repository for the Q8B, it’s not detected when you try to boot from it and it throws you into the BIOS.

Again, I want to stress that this is nitpicking, this is not meant to be an in-depth 6 month in review, but I thought it may be interesting for some to see what the cycle is like during these types of launches/announcements.

Benchmark Methodology

Into the heart of things we go, and let’s have a quick run down of how the testing is going to go down.

All testing was done over on sbc.compare in a controlled environment with everything set up for maximum performance. The performance CPU governor is in use, the stock cooler was blasting its fan at 100%, and a Noctua industrial fan was blowing across it for good measure too.

A few caveats, if I may.

Ollama doesn’t really handle big.LITTLE setups very well, and it’s CPU-only, so take the LLM tests with a pinch of salt as always, though they give us a good enough rough idea. We also have some wildly different RAM configurations on show, and performance may vary slightly depending on your particular work loads, so bear that in mind.

Power was measured using a TC66C USB-C power monitor, with power being delivered by a 21V5A capable USB-C power supply to ensure we had enough juice to give this sneaky laptop in an SBC.

Radxa Dragon Q8B Benchmarks

We’ll kick off with the CPU-focused benchmarks (oh, I’m also using new graphs for this review, do we like? Do we hate? Please tell me in the comments..) and it’s mostly as you’d expect. The 12 cores of the CIX-powered Orion O6N give it an edge in multi-core workloads, but there’s not much in it. Single core workloads on the other hand are ahead by nearly 27% in Geekbench 6, and the pattern continues throughout. Nice.

CPU Performance

Geekbench 6 Higher Scores are Better Single-Core Radxa Dragon Q8B 32GB 1,682 Best Radxa Orion O6N 32GB 1,327 79% Radxa Dragon Q6A 6GB 1,180 70% Raspberry Pi 5 8GB 902 54% Radxa ROCK 5B+ 16GB 813 48% Multi-Core Radxa Orion O6N 32GB