The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro is a router board with a lot of features. Like the original BPI-R4 the new board features a quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 processor, support for WiFi 7, and a bunch of ports for high-speed wired network connections.

But the new model has twice as much RAM, more M.2 slots for storage, wireless cards, or other add-ons, and a more versatile set of Ethernet and SFP+ options.

Banana Pi hasn’t announced pricing or availability for the BPI-R4 Pro yet, but the company has published details about the upcoming board in the Banana Pi Forum and on the Banana Pi wiki.

The board features a MediaTek Filogic 880 (MT7988) processor with four ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores at 1.8 GHz and integrated support for WiFi 7. It’s combined with 8GB of DDR4 memory and 8GB of eMMC flash storage, plus 256MB of SPI-NAND flash.

Wired network connection options include:

  • 1 x 10 Gigabit WAN (SFP or RJ45)
  • 1 x 10 Gigabit LAN (SFP or RJ45)
  • 4 x 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
  • 1 x Gigabit Ethernet LAN
  • 1 x Gigabit Ethernet LAN (via FPC connector)

Note that while the board has seven RJ45 ports and two SFP cages, I believe you can only actually use seven network cables at a time since the 10 Gb WAN and LAN interfaces each let you use either the SFP or RJ45 connector, but not both at the same time.

There are also USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 ports, a USB Type-C port for debugging, and two 13-pin headers for expansion plus a microSD card reader.

And the Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro also features:

  • 2 x M.2 2280 M-Key slots for PCIe 3.0 x1 NVMe SSD
  • 3 x M.2 B-Key slots with PCI 3.0 x1 or USB 3.2 for a 5G module (there’s also a nano SIM slot)
  • 2 x mini PCIe 3.0 x2 slots for WiFi cards

The board measures 194 x 132mm (7.6″ x 5.2″).

via LinuxGizmos

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  3. Couldn’t they just have SFP for the 10 gigabit ports and include a couple rj45 adapter plugs? It’d be less confusing that way.

    Reply

    1. Problem is, SFP adapters that support 10GbE seem to retail for ~$40 each, minimum. So they’re presumably a lot more expensive than adding two extra RJ-45 connectors to the motherboard.

      Reply

  5. It looks amazing but it all comes down to software. When will it be supported by OpenWrt? And it looks like it’s gong to be expensive as you have to buy the radios and nvmes.

    Reply