Jeff Geerling compared the Radxa Dragon Q8B single-board computer, which sells for $209, against the $175 8 GB Raspberry Pi 5. The board, powered by the Qualcomm SC8280XP chip, uses a chip that was announced in 2021 and originally designed for Windows laptops.
The Q8B offers roughly twice the performance of the RPi5; it scores three times higher than its rival in the Geekbench 6 multi-core test. It also leads in energy efficiency: 3.73 Gflops per watt versus 2.75 Gflops in the HPL test. The board features dual 2.5 Gbit Ethernet and more PCIe connectivity.
Despite Windows and UEFI support, Linux requires Radxa’s custom images and the Rsetup tool; there are still issues in the UEFI BIOS. The board is manufactured with 4–32 GB RAM options, but it is hard to find on the market.
Background
Raspberry is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published a story mentioning this name in the last 90 days; that article is dated September 25, 2026.