ASUS Tinker Board Finally Launched in North America for $59

ASUS’ compact Tinker Board which is supposed to rival Raspberry Pi 3 is finally available in North America. It was available in the UK as early as January and the North American market was supposed to receive it by early February but was not available anywhere until this week when it finally showed up on Amazon and other online retailers’ listing.

ASUS Tinker Board Features

The board measures a similarly layout and compact 8.5cm x 5.6cm to a Raspberry PI. It also boasts more powerful hardware having a Broadcoam BCM2837 1.2GHz SoC paired with 1GB of system RAM. ASUS also beefs up all other onboard hardware in comparison to the Raspberry PI 3. This includes Gigabit NIC vs 100M LAN as well as HD audio support for 192KHz/24-bit sample rate vs 48KHz/16-bit. Like Raspeberry PI, it also officially supports Debian Linux and adds KODI support. There are four USB 2.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack connection and an HDMI 2.0 port supporting 4K displays.

Head-to-head, ASUS claims a Geekbench score of 3925 vs 2092 which is almost twice as fast.

In terms of pricing, it is available for £55.00 with VAT included in the UK, but in the US, it is now available from Amazon.com for $59.99. . In comparison, a Raspberry PI 3 Model B can be had for £33.98 with VAT or $39.99 in the US Amazon.com.

Ultimately it is the DIY market that is going to decide. Whether the extra price is worth it or if the Tinker Board is a “Stinker” Board. The beauty of these compact solutions is how versatile they can be. Plus, their application is completely up to the creativity of the DIY-er. Raspberry Pi  recently surpassed the Commodore 64 as the 3rd best selling general purpose computer of all time so (right behind Windows and Apple), ASUS was smart to go after a share of this large pie.