The Radxa Dragon Q8B costs $209 and triples the Raspberry Pi 5's Geekbench 6 multi-core score. Built around Qualcomm's SC8280XP with 8 GB of LPDDR4X, it also beats the RPi5 on power efficiency: 3.73 Gflops/W versus 2.75. With the RAMpocalypse pushing the 8 GB RPi5 to $175, Jeff Geerling decided the $34 gap justified a direct head-to-head comparison.
The hardware wins are real: roughly 2x performance across the board, twin 2.5 Gbit Ethernet ports, more PCIe lanes, and UEFI support. The software situation is not. Linux requires Radxa-specific images and their Rsetup tool. The UEFI implementation is unfinished enough that generic OS installs are still blocked. The SC8280XP is a 2021 laptop chip designed for Windows, and that mismatch shows in the Linux experience.
Read the full breakdown in Geerling's GitHub issue and watch the video for the direct RPi5 comparison. The argument worth following is whether Radxa's UEFI work matures enough to support generic images, which would change the value proposition entirely. The board also comes in 4 to 32 GB RAM configurations, but availability is scarce and, given current SBC market conditions, that is not improving soon.
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