Radxa Orion O6 Review – Part 1: Unboxing, Debian 12 installation, and first benchmarks

Radxa sent me a sample of the Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard for review. The system is powered by an CIX P1 (CD8180) 12-core Armv9 processor, equipped with 16GB RAM, and offers features like 5GbE, HDMI and DisplayPort, a PCIe Gen4 x16 slot, and more. It’s one of the most anticipated boards of the first part of 2025 since it’s powerful, offers a good performance/value ratio, and eventually promises to boot any ISO Arm64 image through an open-source BIOS / EDKII bootloader.

I’ll start this review with an unboxing, NVMe SSD and WiFi module installation, and a short tutorial showing how to install Debian 12 operating systems before getting some system information and running a few benchmarks. In a few weeks, I’ll publish a more detailed review with features testing and more benchmarks to see what works and what doesn’t at this very early stage.

Radxa Orion O6 unboxing

I received the Orion O6 “Arm AI PC Motherboard” in a package similar to the Radxa ROCK 5 ITX and MILK-V Jupiter motherboards I reviewed last year.

RADXA Orion O6 Arm AI PC Motherboard
The bottom side of the package has the full specs, but I won’t go through these again since we also listed the detailed specs in the announcement.

Orion O6 mini ITX motherboard specifications
The package comes with the motherboard sandwiched between top and bottom acrylic plates, a rear panel for installation into a mini-ITX chassis (maybe I’ll do that in the second part of the review), and a screw set for SSD and wireless module installation.

Radxa Orion O6 unboxing
I have to say the board looks really neat in the photos below. The rear panel features a power button, two USB-C ports, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.2 ports, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, two 5GbE RJ45 jacks, an audio jack, and a Reset button.

Arm AI PC Motherboard USB HDMI 5GbE ports

One of the sides comes with the PCIe x16 slot to add a graphics card or other PCIe expansion cards.

Arm Motherboard PCIe x16 slot
The other side comes with a 24-pin ATX connector and a 40-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO  header.

Orion O6 ATX connector Raspberry Pi GPIO header
Since the Orion O6 ships with a heatsink+fan combo, I removed it to have a better look at the motherboard.

Cix P1 CD8180 mini ITX motherboard

It has four 4GB SKHynix H58G56AK6B DDR5 chips for a total of 16GB RAM, two Realtek RTL8126 5GbE controllers, a Realtek RTS5453H USB-C PD chip, and a Radxa-branded RA620-1 chip that’s a customized Rockchip RK620-1 DisplayPort to HDMI bridge.

 

Radxa RA620 1

SSD and wireless module installation

I removed the top acrylic cover and inserted a 512GB MAKERDISK NVMe SSD and an Fn-Link 6252M-PUB WiFi 6 & Bluetooth 5.2 wireless module that I got from the Radxa ROCK 5B into the two M.2 sockets on the motherboard.

NVMe SSD WiFi 6E module installation
Nothing much to add here. It was a straightforward operation.

Debian 12 installation on the Orion O6 motherboard

Eventually, you should be able to use the Orion O6 like an x86 machine, getting a random Arm64 ISO to boot it up on the machine including Windows 11 for Arm. But we are not quite there yet, and for now, the only options are Debian 12 or Fedora 14 images that need to be dumped onto a USB flash drive. I went with the orion-o6-usb-install-debian12-preinstalled-desktop-b3.img.gz image download from Mega, and copied it to a USB flash drive using USB Imager, but other tools like balenaEtcher, Win32DiskImager, or even dd could also do. I first used a 7.2GB (out of 8GB advertised) drive but it was too small, so I switched to a larger 64GB drive.

At this point, I connected an HDMI cable to a monitor, a USB RF dongle for a mouse and wireless control, the USB drive with the Debian 12 image, and connected power using the 65W USB-C PD adapter from the Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit.

Orion O6 EDK BIOS
Within a few seconds, the “BIOS” showed up with “Radxa Orion O6” motherboard, “CIX P1 CD8180” procession, and 0.2.2-1 version.

Radxa Orion O6 CIX P1 CD8180 0.2.2 1 BIOS UEFI

I browse the BIOS menu, and we can see that’s indeed TianoCore EDK II (ED2) UEFI implementation.

edk2 BIOS CIX
It has some features that we’d find in a regular x86 BIOS like Restore AC Power Loss, although it’s not quite as detailed.

BIOS Restore AC Power Power
We can also select between Device Tree and ACPI O/S hardware description. I left it to Device Tree.

EDK2 BIOS Device Tree vs ACPI
Let’s now go to the Boot Manager Manu to select our USB flash drive (UEFI Kingston DataTraveler 3.0).

Radxa Orion O6 USB Boot
The display will turn off for a while, but soon enough we’ll get to the familiar Debian 12 desktop.

Radxa Orion O6 Debian 12 USB Boot

Debian 12 is now running on the USB flash drive. The system is rather slow because of the slow random I/O on this type of storage, so let’s copy the image to the NVMe SSD we’ve just installed. We’ll use the balenaEtcher program preinstalled in the image.

Debian 12 BalenaEtcher

Instead of flashing a file, we’ll click on Clone driver and select the USB drive.

BalenaEtcher Clone Drive

For the target, we’ll need to show the hidden system drive “PCIe SSD (config, boot, rootfs)” and click on Select (1).

BalenaEtcher PCIe SSD dev nvme01

A big fat WARNING will pop up since we are about to overwrite the computer’s drive… Select “Yes, I’m sure”.

BalenaEtcher Confirm Erase System Driver

balenaEtcher will clone the USB drive to the NVMe SSD. It took about 10 minutes in my case, and once done it will show “Flash Complete”. We can now shutdown the board, remove the USB drive, and boot Debian 12 from the much faster NVMe SSD.

Debian 12 Orion O6 installation success

Debian 12 system information and sbc-bench.sh benchmark

I could connect to 5GHz WiFi easily since the WiFi 6 module was properly detected and browse the web.

Radxa Orion O6 Review Debian 12

U’ll test all/most features in the second part of the review, but since it will take a couple of days to complete, I’ll just report system information from inxi first:


The system indeed comes with a 12-core processor clocked up to 2.5 GHz, and it looks like there are five clusters of Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A510 cores each operating at different maximum frequencies.  The board is running Debian 12 with Linux 6.11 and there are ten mali-valhall and linlon-v8 graphics devices… Not sure what that means in practice just yet.  The two 5GbE ports are detected, as well as the Realtek RTL8852BE wireless card I’m using.  It also shows 476.94 GB local storage, but the rootfs partition is only 54.57 GB in size, so I’ll have to resize it. The idle temperature is only 38°C thanks to the integrated cooling solution that’s fairly noisy…

Let’s run sbc-bench.sh to evaluate the performance of the CPU:


Ah… it won’t start because the reported load average is too high even when the system is idle…

Radxa Orion O6 Load Average Idle

I modified the script to skip that part and ran the benchmark on the Orion O6 motherboard again:


No throttling is reported, but we’ll notice the temperature is not reported correctly.   Checking the CPU clusters’ frequency in the full log confirms that no throttling occurred.

The system achieved 31,060 MIPS in 7-zip on average with three runs: 31114, 30905, and 31152. Since the performance did not decrease in runs 2 and 3, we can be further assured no throttling happened. The CIX P1 achieved 1402186.41k  in aes-256-cbc. Let’s compare the results to Armv8 boards we’ve tested in the part including the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC.

Orion O6 vs Raspberry Pi 5 SBC Armv8 boardsI used the results of CPU10 (Cortex-A720) for memory bandwidth, and even though it was not the fastest core, it’s clear the Orion O6 has the fastest memory bandwidth of all the boards. Unsurprisingly, the CIX P1 destroys the competition in the multi-core 7-zip test thanks to its 12 Armv9 cores, being 2.84 times faster than the Raspberry Pi 5.

AES-256 Orion O6 vs Raspberry Pi 5 SBC Armv8 boards

OpenSSL AES-256 is a single-core benchmark that mostly follows the CPU frequency, and while the Orion O6 is still the fastest here, it’s not overly so. We’ll do more benchmarks in the second part of the review to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Orion O6 board and CIX P1 SoC.

I’d like to thank Radxa for sending the Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard for review. The 16GB model tested in the review sells for just $251.90 on Arace. Even though they target different applications, that’s competitive against the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC with 16GB RAM ($120) that also needs an M.2 HAT+, an active cooler, and a 26 TOPS Hailo-8 AI accelerator ($110) to get closer to the features set, but still with fewer features and lower performance.

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Radxa Orion O6 Armv9 mini-ITX motherboard
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