Radxa Orion O6 brings Arm to the midrange PC (with caveats)

Summary

...with caveats. TL;DR The Radxa Orion O6 is an Arm ITX motherboard with up to 12 cores, 64 GB of RAM, and Armv9.2 support, starting just over $200 USD The board has a SystemReady SR-certified BIOS, which allows running Windows on Arm and many Linux arm64 ISOs unaltered The firmware still has many quirks, enough that I wouldn't recommend it if you don't enjoy tinkering with drivers (remember how I said to temper your expectations in February?) Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500). The rest of this post is a version of today's video, modified to suit the blog. You can watch the video version below: Radxa Orion O6 I pre-ordered the $300 32GB 'AI kit' the day the Orion O6 was announced. And... it never arrived. I'll discuss why at the end of the post, but you may wonder: if it never arrived, how did you review it? Well, Radxa sent me a 16 gig version of board for testing and review. I always disclose when something is provided, so I'm disclosing that here. See all my sponsorship and review policies on GitHub. They sent a 16 GB kit to many hardware testers and reviewers, and for months, we've had what Radxa calls a debug party. People post their issues, and hopefully Radxa fixes some of those things before the public launch. Except, the public launch already happened, and there are still fundamental problems with the board. I'll talk about those after I walk through the hardware. Hardware In the box, you get the O6 board itself, with a heatsink/cooler combo. It also has an acrylic case that looks nice and provides adequate ventilation, though it gets in the way of PCIe card brackets, if you don't remove them. It's powered by a soldered-on CIX CD8180 SoC, with the following specs: Armv9.2 12 CPU cores (4x 'big' A720 at 2.6 GHz, 4x 'medium' A720 at 2.4 GHz, 4x 'little' A520 at 1.8 GHz) 12MB L3 shared cache Arm Immortals G720 MC10 GPU Cix 30 TOPS NPU The CPU is backed by up to 64GB of LPD...