Since the Raspberry Pi was launched what seems like many moons ago now, plenty of similar tiny computer boards have hit the market, and now big-name PC vendor Asus has its own offering.
The Tinker Board has a name designed to appeal to the sort of computing hobbyists who are the target audience of Raspberry Pi-alikes – and indeed this effort is very much alike, although it beefs-up bits of the hardware (and also the price, sadly).
If you go the Asus route for your tiny computer, you’ll get a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 processor backed up with a chunky 2GB of LPDDR3 system memory. (Compared to 1GB of RAM on the Pi 3, and a 1.2GHz Cortex A53 CPU – although note that the latter is a 64-bit offering).
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Getting connected
Other specs for the Tinker Board include wireless connectivity comprising 802.11n Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 4.0, and it has a Gigabit LAN connector along with four USB 2.0 ports and a microSD slot.
There’s also an HDMI 2.0 port here, and the board can support the output of 4K footage if you’re planning to use it as a miniature media PC. On the software front, it supports Debian Linux with Kodi (media player software).
The Tinker Board is available to purchase right now, and in the UK you can pick it up for £55 (about $70, AU$90) – coming on for twice as expensive as the Pi 3 which retails at around £33 (about $40, AU$55).
Via and Image Credit: Engadget
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