The Asus Tinker Board 2 is a Raspberry Pi-shaped single-board computer powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor and featuring 2GB to 4GB of RAM. First announced almost a year ago, the Tinker Board 2 is finally available for $99 and up.
Asus also offers a Tinker Board 2S model that’s pretty similar except that it has 16GB of eMMC storage. Prices for that model start at about $120.
All models feature HDMI 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, three USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port, plus a 40-pin GPIO header and MIPI-CSI and MIPI-DSI connectors for cameras and displays.
There’s also a wireless module with support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0.
At 3.4″ x 2.1″, the little computer is about the size of a Raspberry Pi Model B (or a credit card). But it’s significantly more expensive – Raspberry Pi 4 prices start at $35 for a model with 2GB of RAM, while these are the current prices for the Asus Tinker Board 2 and 2S:
- Asus Tinker Board 2 with 2GB of RAM for $94Â – AliExpress (or $107 from Amazon)
- Asus Tinker Board 2S w/2GB RAM/16GB storage for $120 – AliExpress
- Asus Tinker Board 2S w/4GB RAM/16GB storage for $134 – AliExpress
Or if those prices seem a bit steep for a single board computer with a processor released five years ago, there are other options. Pine64’s RockPro64, for example, has the same RK3399 processor, but sells for $60 and up, while the Rock Pi 4 from Radxa currently sells for around $75 and up (for a model with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage).
via CNX Software
For what it’s worth, the Raspberry Pi has a 1.5 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor while the Tinker Board 2 and 2S have a 6-core chip with two 2 GHz Cortex-A72 CPU cores and four 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 cores.
Maybe they had lots of RK3399 inventory that they wanted to get rid of… I would expect large price cuts in the months ahead. The goods news for them is that raspberry pi 4 is sold out everywhere.
For desktop use, the extra cores on the 3399 can be pretty useful. However, Pine64’s offerings are usually the better buy for two reasons: they are cheaper in the first place and they have a larger community writing code for and improving support for the hardware. I don’t know what Asus provides as default options, but buyers may find themselves limited to using those or building from scratch whereas the Pine64 boards have several distro options with support.
Pine has terrible reputation of buggy unfinished hard and software. Don’t listen to the sales stooges, do your own internet research.
They certainly have a reputation for leaving software support to external devs, but that’s not exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, they also have a reputation for attracting some users who don’t understand hardware and make unreasonable complaints, which I have seen from a number of people. I’m not including you in that group, but I warn that the reputation you think they have may be affected by unreliable reports.