Asus Tinker Board
Is it a board? Is it a Pi? No, it’s another contender for the Raspberry Pi’s crown. Les Pounder sees if it’s any good.
Les Pounder tries a new SBPC that thinks it’s a Pi beater from big-name Asus.
The Asus Tinker Board arrived on the scene with very little fanfare, and seemed to catch everyone by surprise. This was reflected by the lack of software when the board was released: for the first few days there was no operating system publicly available to run it. But let’s put that behind us and take a look.
Powered as it is by an RK3288 System on a Chip, featuring a quadcore ARM Cortex A17 running at 1.8GHz and 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, we can instantly assume that this board is meant to be a ‘Pi Killer’ and computationally it is. Running the sysbench prime number test for a single core, it took only two minutes and two seconds to compute all the prime numbers up to 10,000, versus the Pi 3 time of three minutes two seconds. A full minute quicker! We repeated the test utilising all four cores and the Tinker Board completed it in 31.34 seconds and the Pi 3 in 45.7. So we can see there is plenty of power in the Tinker Board’s CPU.
The board provides four USB 2.0 ports along with HDMI, micro USB power, and a 40-pin GPIO, which is not fully compatible with boards produced for the Raspberry Pi, but can be used with electronic components (LEDs, buttons, etc) to build your own projects. The software to control the GPIO has to be downloaded separately, quite why it can’t be included ready for use we don’t know. It is called ASUS.GPIO and you’ve guessed it, it is a fork of the RPI.GPIO library which has powered thousands of projects. It works in the same manner, but you won’t be able to connect any SPI/I2C devices just yet as the software isn’t ready.
Networking comes in the form of the built-in 802.11(b/g/n) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, which uses a PCB antenna for reception, but you can replace the antenna with an externally mounted option to boost your signal. There is also “Gigabit” Ethernet, but when we tested the bandwidth using iperf we only managed to record 35.3Mbits/s. However this is still far higher than the Pi 3 which only manages 11Mbits/s as it comes via a USB 2 interface. The Tinker Board does not share the Ethernet bus with USB, enabling the higher bandwidth, but still short of true Gigabit speeds.
The Asus Tinker Board runs a version of a Debian-based distribution, called TinkerOS. It is lightweight and works really well as a desktop, giving the user access to a traditional menu and widgets to control wireless connectivity. You will find the Chromium web browser present, and it did an admirable job with everything we threw at it – except for YouTube. This board is able to play video at 1080p but YouTube videos ran poorly, even after installing a patch from Asus. Our test of the Star Wars Rogue One trailer at 1080p crawled along in windowed and fullscreen mode.
We installed Kodi on our test unit and we were able watch HD movies and stream HD content to our device. It worked flawlessly and means that the issues observed are only with streaming content via the web browser, which can be fixed with a future software update.
The Asus Tinker Board is undisputedly a powerful platform for makers, but no matter what power it may have, it has not managed to claim the crown from the Raspberry Pi, which offers greater documentation and support for those wanting to learn more. This is a board for experienced hardware hackers only.