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> Poor board thermals - a good SBC will have a copper layer below the SOC to spread the heat across the PCB

If that's the only thing wrong you can buy a few chip heat sinks and set it in a thermal epoxy to turn the entire thing into a thermally massive block. Even crap air flow should clean that up and then you don't need a case. You can also thermal glue it to a large bit of metal if you have a metal desk or something

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That is both added cost and your still missing cooling the underside of the SOC. Most people will not take steps like that, so you end up with boards clocked at 900mhz instead of 1200mhz cause groups like Armbian don't want to burn up the SOC on users boards that don't have a heatsink.

Other bad moves are dumping 1.3v or 1.4v into the SOC and not allowing the user to adjust that voltage, cause then the board is just generating heat needlessly instead of running at 1.1v or so.

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