Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite: New single-board computer has advantages over the Raspberry Pi 5

The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite is now available for purchase. Specifically, the SBC is being sold on Youyeetoo for a price of around $86, but customers should review the shipping conditions and fees before placing their order. This is a single-board computer that could potentially serve as an alternative to a Raspberry Pi 5 (from $66 on Amazon).

However, it has a slightly different focus and is particularly well-suited for networking applications. For instance, it could be the basis for an OpenWrt router. Banana Pi’s latest SBC features an SFP port with a bandwidth of 2.5Gbps, along with a total of five Ethernet ports. One of these also maxes out at 2.5Gbps, while the others offer regular Gigabit speeds.

Additionally, there’s a mini-PCIe slot connected via two PCIe 3.0 lanes, which allows users to install a WiFi 7 card, for example. The board is further powered by a MediaTek MT7987A SoC, which has four Cortex-A53 cores and is paired with 2GB of DDR4 RAM and 8GB of eMMC storage. A microSD card can also be used. A typical GPIO pin header is not included, but sensors and actuators can be connected via UART, I2C and SPI. Moreover, a cellular modem can be installed in the M.2 slot. There is no HDMI port, but a single USB 3.0 port is available. Lastly, the Raspberry Pi 5 competitor is powered via a traditional barrel plug.