When comparing Orange Pi PC vs Intel NUC Kit NUC7i3BNH, the Slant community recommends Orange Pi PC for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers?” Orange Pi PC is ranked 14th while Intel NUC Kit NUC7i3BNH is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Orange Pi PC is:
The Orange Pi PC is extremely cheap, especially compared to the SBCs it competes against.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Extremely cheap for what it promises
The Orange Pi PC is extremely cheap, especially compared to the SBCs it competes against.
Pro Supports almost all OSes supported by Raspberry
Orange Pi supports Raspbian, Ubuntu, Android and many more operating systems. It claims to support all OSes supported by Raspberry Pi and it seems to be true most of the time.
Pro Great value for the price
Great little linux box for the price
Pro Comes with appropriate case and mounting hardware for storage drives
While the cost may seem steep compared to other SBC options, seldom are those other options sold with a case that will also house your storage drives and provide adequate cooling for the entire setup.
Pro SATA III port and M.2 NVMe connector with on-board RAID-0/RAID-1 controller
The ability to harness the power of a standard 2.5" SATA III drive and an M.2 NVMe drive with four PCI Express 3.0 lanes means that sequential read rates in excess of 3GB/sec if both are SSDs. Add to that hardware RAID support and it's hard to imagine a more powerful digital storage platform anywhere near this size.
Cons
Con Has some thermal throttling issues
The Orange Pi can get pretty hot, up to the point where it needs to shut down cores to keep it from locking up.

Con First Party OS support is practically non-existent
Con no wifi
Con Has problems with slow microSD cards
Anything less than a class 10 TF/microSD card will probably not work with the Orange PI. Since the testing and production of the Orange Pi was rushed massively, as a result it cannot step down to be more compatible with slower SD cards. Although it should be mentioned that this is not that much of a problem since you can get class 10 microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays.
Con No video connector natively
Must use RPIO equivalent to wire any video.
Con Higher initial costs than most other options
It's clearly not a budget option for building a home NAS, but if you want performance and more importantly, scalability, then you'll reap the benefits of the extra upfront costs many times over as you upgrade the memory, add peripherals via USB-C and put that 7th Generation Core i3 processor to work.
