We usually focus on the Hardware Libre since for many it offers more possibilities than proprietary hardware, but in this case we are going to make an exception. Asus Thinker Board is a sbc board from Asus company which shares some features of Raspberry Pi. This means that it is not a free board but we can work with it for certain projects or functions, such as Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi.
Asus Thinker Board belongs to Asus and that is a guarantee as the company is an expert on boards, but it is not very fond of releasing many of its products.
Asus Thinker Board is an inexpensive board, at least if we take into account the rest of copies and alternatives to Raspberry Pi, a plate that will cost us 60 dollars, compared to $ 35 for the Raspberry Pi. Your processor is Rockchip RK3288, a quite powerful processor and compatible with more Gnu / Linux distributions than the ARM platform. The GPU of this device is the Mali-T764. Like Raspberry Pi, The Asus Thinker Board features a 40-pin GPIO port that will make possible many of our home projects.
Asus Thinker Board is a great proprietary alternative to Raspberry Pi 3
Asus Thinker Board comes with 2 Gb of ram, an HDMI port for screen output, a built-in wifi and bluetooth module, an ethernet port and four usb ports. The internal storage will depend on the microsd card that we use and the operating system, for the moment it will be Debian or Kodi, which will allow us to have a multimedia center with this board.
If we compare the specifications with Raspberry Pi, It is striking the difference in the ram memory and also the GPIO port. Which indicates that the Asus Thinker Board is ideal for those looking for a minipc but Raspberry Pi is ideal for those who want to use a board for free projects. Do not you think?