If you are a fan of the Raspberry Pi, this will please you. The single-board computer market has a new entrant, ASUS, and while its new ‘Tinker Board’ isn’t made for such a noble cause, it is at least twice as powerful.
The new Tinker Board comes with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz. Alongside is 2 GB worth RAM and Mali T760 GPU. It gets power through a microUSB slot.
This gives it a GeekBench score of 3925, up to two times faster than the 2092 managed by the Raspberry Pi 3.
You can add external cameras and displays with CSI and DSI ports, respectively. The OS running on the Tinker Board is the same Debian OS as the Pi 3.
For connectivity, you have HDMI 2.0 with support for 4K H.264/H.265 output alongside 24-bit/192K audio. There’s also a headphone jack as well as 4 USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and microSD. Wireless connections include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.
Here are the full specs of the Tinker Board:
The Tinker Board is available for a price-tag of $73 (or 55 pounds) for the only configuration available. Compared to that, the entry-level Raspberry Pi starts at $5 (good luck finding one, though), while the Pi 3 (which is more of a competitor) retails for 34 pounds. But hey, at least you got power for your next big project with Asus.
