Radxa's 2026 Qualcomm hardware: Dragon Q8B and Q5E SBCs, DragonStation and DragonBay NAS systems
Posted by sr_local@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 15 comments
Idkwatnam@reddit
The upcoming Dragon QX5 ITX board there sounds interesting. Shame it sounds like they're going for the 8 core X Plus rebrand rather than the X Elite. The latter actually has a PCIe Gen 4x8 connection which went unused in all devices as it was likely intended to be populated by a dGPU (and well no GPU vendor ever made ARM64 drivers). In an ITX form factor that runs Linux a PCIe x16 slot that's electrically x8 would've been fun to see.
-protonsandneutrons-@reddit
Unfortunately, all of these are Arm Cortex cores, as far as I can see.
Qualcomm will label their cores “Oryon” instead of “Kryo” if they’re custom, sans the very old Kryo.
Idkwatnam@reddit
I think you mistook the QX5 for the Q5E, it's on their 2026 roadmap and not shown off yet
-protonsandneutrons-@reddit
That I did. Thank you for the correction.
basedIITian@reddit
All X1 series SKUs have 8 lane PCIe Gen 4 and 4 lane PCIe Gen 3 support afaik, even the lowest end X1-26.
Idkwatnam@reddit
Purwa (8 core X1 models) seem to have cut off 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 4:
IQ-X Series | Qualcomm
basedIITian@reddit
That's interesting and disappointing, yeah.
hollow_bridge@reddit
$209 for 8gb ddr, $569 for $32gb, really prices it's self out of the sbc market and into regular computer pricing.
Gwolf4@reddit
Yeah insta buy a Intel N system and be done with it, also x86 with high better software support.
basedIITian@reddit
This is hardly a concern on Linux.
-protonsandneutrons-@reddit
TrueNAS (Linux) famously does not officially support any Arm CPUs.
basedIITian@reddit
There are plenty of workarounds and alternatives though, and this kind of thing is pretty uncommon.
-protonsandneutrons-@reddit
It is uncommon, but probably important for DIY NAS builders to know.
For those hopeful, TrueNAS' recent private build script changes will make the few third-party Arm forks even less supported, but first-party Arm support is on their roadmap (in the indeterminate future).
Slasher1738@reddit
Very Interesting. If ram hadn't gone crazy, this would killer
zopiac@reddit
The Q8B looks like it may be a nice addition to my SBC collection. I've happily had the Orange Pi 5B in use for years, although I regret not getting one that has m.2 support.
Not sure how efficiency or support will be, and those'll be the deciding factors alongside price. "Pleasantly surprising" prices don't sound as good in 2026 as they may have in years prior.