OrangePi Zero 3W Review: Tiny Yet Powerful

OrangePi has kindly sent us a new board to test, the OrangePi Zero 3W. Our last review with OrangePi hardware was the OrangePi 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 OrangePi 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 OrangePi 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 As usual we will start with specs on paper and discuss what this means in terms of potential setups. Specs Here are the specifications for the OrangePi Zero 3W. Component Specification SoC Allwinner A733 CPU Architecture 2× Cortex-A76 (Up to 2.0 GHz) + 6× Cortex-A55; Xuantie E902 RISC-V Coprocessor GPU PowerVR BXM-4-64 MC1 (Vulkan 1.3 support) NPU (AI) Up to 3 TOPS (INT8); INT16, FP16, and BF16 support RAM 1GB / 4GB / 8GB / 12GB / 16GB LPDDR5 (4800 MT/s) Storage Optional onboard eMMC (up to 128GB), Optional onboard UFS (up to 128GB), 1× MicroSD / TF card slot (up to 128GB) Wireless & Cellular Wi-Fi 6 & Bluetooth 5.4 (BLE) with support for external antenna Video Output 1× Mini HDMI 2.0 (up to 4K@60Hz), 1× USB Type-C (DP Alt Mode up to 4K@60Hz), 1× 4-lane MIPI-DSI Video Codec Hardware decode/encode support (specifics unlisted) USB Ports 1× USB Type-C (with DP Alt Mode), 1× USB Type-C (Power) Camera (MIPI) 2× 4-lane MIPI CSI interfaces Expansion 40-pin Functional Expansion Header (GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI, PWM), 1× PCIe 3.0 1-lane FPC socket Other Interfaces 1× 2-pin fan interface Power Supply 5V/3A DC input via USB Type-C Dimensions 65mm × 32mm × 1.2mm (14g) 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, very small. Limitations Going in The board I received from OrangePi has a limited amount of RAM (4GB) but more importantly the storage is very limited on the eMMC chip (8GB total). There is no NVME port, so very fast onboard storage by default is going to be limited to whatever you buy when you order it. There is however a secret weapon to extend memory: the FPC socket which is actually PCI 3.0. You can easily buy a FPC to M2 NVME adapter and have pretty expandable storage as much as you want since it provides a proper M2 port. And since the FPC is a PCIe 3.0 port (one lane only), it’s still relatively fast compared to the other storage solutions you may consider. This is what such adapters look like: In my case, since I did not get an adapter, I went for an intermediate (hacky) solution: a SATA SSD drive (m2 format), connected via one of the USB3 port. This will be slower than direct PCIe connection, but still plenty fast enough compared to the microSD card. If you really don’t have any other option, the cheap way around is to use the microSD card to expand your storage, but expect things to be as slow as molasses in terms of I/O. You typically don’t buy a OrangePi to get the same problems that a Raspberry Pi has. Power consumption As expected from a tiny board designed for the embedded world, the power consumption is very, 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. Overall this consumption is so low this becomes de facto an exciting heart for a home server, and a very low electricity bill. 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 managed, based on temperature recordings taken during the Geekbench benchmark: By the way, a few days ago I accidently damaged one of the wires linking the fan to power on the board, 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 real 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, as you can see above in the temperature chart. 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 (Jammy for Ubuntu and bullseye/bookworm for Debian) for this piece of hardware, which was going to be something to flag to potential buyers. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to see that they just released in late August 2026 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. Fantastic developement, and completely unexpected. 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 micro-USB hub as well to secure some 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 SOC), 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: Of, course, the OrangePi 6 Plus is in a class of its own with its superb CIX SOC. Server Experience The installation of the newest distro on the OrangePi Zero 3W is very easy: Download the distro on another computer. Flash it to a microSD card Insert the microSD card in the OrangePi 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. To ensure docker does that by default, you need to have “data-root”: “/mnt/ssd/docker” in the /etc/docker/daemon.json file (assuming your external drive is mounted on /mnt/ssd/). 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 usable RAM more or less. And that’s not taking account of a bit of SWAP to make for some buffer. Adding a larger SWAP file than the system default did also helps (I went for a 6 GB swap file). 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