I recently ordered an Orange Pi 3.

Why an OPi3 rather than a Raspberry Pi? Because:

• Onboard storage (eMMC is faster & more reliable than an SD card)
• Faster GBit networking
• USB3

However it is obviously less mainstream. I bought it from AliExpress with a case (& fan / heatsinks) & a PSU (although it can be powered up with a decent USB cable / supply). You’ll also need a micro SD card to install different OSes.

I wanted to run console / server Linux & the images supplied by OrangePi aren’t up to much so I’m using an early Armbian image. Follow this thread for more details and builds are available here.

So far I’m very impressed, it boots very quickly and seems stable. Only used wired networking so far.