Asus’ Tinker Board almost doubles the Raspberry Pi 3’s performance

Pros

• Compatible with most Raspberry Pi cases
• Good choice for audio apps
• Can run Pi code

Cons

• No Google Play store
• Smaller userbase

Not many major tech firms have made a serious challenge to the Raspberry Pi series’ hold on the single-board computer market, with even Intel’s Arduino 101 being discontinued recently. Perhaps Asus will have more luck with the Tinker Board, a more powerful – and expensive – rival to the Pi 3.

For compatibility reasons, Asus has used the same layout as the Raspberry Pi 3. From the 40-pin header (with 28 GPIO pins) to the CSI connector and USB, HDMI and 3.5mm audio ports, everything is where you’d find it on the Pi 3, and even the physical dimensions are identical. This allows the Tinker Board to fit into most Raspberry Pi cases, making it viable as a swapped-in replacement.

While ports and connectors may be in the same place as the Pi, Asus has upgraded many of the components, making the Tinker Board an altogether more premium product. For starters, while the Pi 3 has only 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet, the Tinker Board has both Gigabit Ethernet and its own Ethernet controller; the Pi uses a USB-to-Ethernet bridge.

While both boards have 802.11n Wi-Fi, the Tinker Board has an upgradable IPEX antenna header, should you want to boost wireless performance. The Tinker Board also has a superior sound chip, supporting 24-bit, 192kHz audio. This could make Asus’s product the better choice for audio apps, as could the unpopulated PWM and S/PDIF holes.

Asus Tinker Board review: Performance

Asus has gone all out to boost performance, too. The Tinker Board’s 2GB of RAM is double that of the Pi 3, and a more powerful Rockchip Quad-Core RK3288 processor is fitted as well. As this CPU can generate a bit more heat than the Pi 3’s Broadcom BCM2837 processor, the Tinker Board ships with a stick-on heatsink, which you should fit to stop the processor from getting too toasty.

As with the Pi 3, you’ll need to provide your own microSD card and install an operating system on it. Via Asus’ website, you can download Android 6 Marshmallow or the Debian-based TinkerOS.

Android is an interesting choice. Asus has tweaked Marshmallow to make it play better with a keyboard and mouse, but there’s no Google Play store option. To install apps, you have to download the APK and sideload using the provided installer. Technically, it should be possible to sideload the Google Play Store, but we found it exceptionally hard to do.

Otherwise, though, sideloading apps is not hard, and we soon had Geekbench and Netflix installed. It may look basic, but the operating system works well with a keyboard and mouse.

With a smart GUI and command line, the Linux-based TinkerOS is a better choice for makers. Asus supplies a different range of apps to the Pi, but you can use the sudo apt-get command to install what you want. Given the processor and RAM, TinkerOS turns the Tinker Board into a usable desktop computer.

We had no trouble browsing the web using the Chromium web browser, playing HD YouTube videos or editing simple documents. Certainly, the Tinker Board feels much snappier than the Pi 3 and, especially, the Pi Zero W, and this was reflected in the Sysbench prime number verification test: running on a single thread, the Tinker Board completed the test in just 94.25 seconds, beating the Pi 3’s 182.49s, and switching to four cores cut this down to 45.86s.

Asus Tinker Board review: Graphics

Graphics performance is also better, thanks to the Tinker Board’s Mali-T764 GPU. While you can’t play games on it, this GPU has integrated H.265 decoding so it can play 4K video. Testing in Kodi by streaming the open-source 4K film Tears of Steel, the Tinker Board effortlessly played the file; the Pi 3, conversely, struggled and dropped frames.

Although 4K films can be decoded, the Tinker Board is not actually a true Ultra HD device. With its HDMI 1.4 output and no HDCP support, it’s capable of a maximum resolution of 4K at a fairly jerky 30Hz. Running at this resolution, the Tinker Board upscales 1080p content to fill the screen, bar 4K video played through the bundled video player.

While the Tinker Board can be used as a desktop computer, it’s ultimately designed for projects. Fortunately, most Pi code can be translated to run on the Tinker Board with only minor modifications. This is great news, as there are thousands of example Pi projects online for you to choose from, many of which would benefit from the Tinker Board’s faster processor and networking. Alternatively, if one of your existing Pi projects needs a bit more oomph, you can swap out its existing computer for the Tinker Board.

Asus Tinker Board review: Verdict

Be prepared to do a bit of work, as not all Pi scripts will work out of the box and may need a slight modification to suit the Tinker Board’s environment. For the savvy Linux user, this shouldn’t be a problem, but it does raise a potential issue with the Tinker Board, and one that’s not easily fixed: the community.

The Tinker Board’s userbase just isn’t as large or active as that of the Pi series, which means that if you get stuck and need help, there won’t be nearly as much of a community to call on for support. That’s not to say that things won’t improve in the future, but it’s going to take a while (if ever) for the Tinker Board to match the Pi in this regard.

That’s not to say that the Tinker Board should be ignored; as a Pi-compatible computer that can run more demanding tasks, it fills a helpful role. For less savvy users looking to get into project-based computers, however, the Pi 3 is cheaper and has a better community for helping first-time users.

Source: expertreviews.co.uk