When comparing ODROID-C2 vs MinnowBoard Max, the Slant community recommends ODROID-C2 for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers?” ODROID-C2 is ranked 20th while MinnowBoard Max is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose ODROID-C2 is:
The C2 has pretty decent support for Ubuntu and it can be used with it for basic day-to-day operations such as browsing the web and editing documents with LibreOffice among others.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Good support for Ubuntu
The C2 has pretty decent support for Ubuntu and it can be used with it for basic day-to-day operations such as browsing the web and editing documents with LibreOffice among others.
Pro Superior performance compared with other boards
Pro Built-in heatsink
The ODROID C2 has a built-in heatsink which covers the CPU and two of the RAM chips.
Pro Can fit inside Raspberry Pi cases
Since its shape and size closely mimic that of Pi 3, it can fit on most Raspberry Pi cases available.
Pro Will have mainline kernel support
Pro Relatively low power requirements
The board by itself needs about 0.5A to run, but it's advised to use a 2A power supply for when peripherals are attached.
Pro Completely open source
MinnowBoard is a non-profit backed by Intel. meaning it gets advice for its architecture by Intel. But all hardware and software parts, including all drivers are completely free and open source.
Pro USB 3.0 available
The MinnowBoard Max has 2 USB ports, one of which is a USB 3.0.
Pro Great for hacking away
Other than releasing all drivers as open source, Intel has also made the schematics of the board available to download. This way, hackers can give it a try and build anything they want without restrictions.
Cons
Con No built in WiFi
There is no built-in WiFi, and kernel headers for 3.14 are almost impossible to find, making driver compiling very difficult.
Con Old kernel available
Only the 3.14 branche is available
Con Early revisions use a 2.5mm power socket instead of a USB port
Early revisions of the C2 use a 2.5mm power socket instead of the micro USB port available on the board or any of the other USB ports. While not a drawback in terms of strength of the board, it's a bit annoying having to order a new power supply to work with the C2.
Later revisions of the board can use the USB port for charging. However, ODROID recommends using the power socket if there are several devices attached to the board because they can increase the draw up to 2A and a lot of cheaper USB power adapters won't do 2A.
Con Might have problems with default HDMI resolution when first starting up
It's not unusual for the C2 to have a "Mode not supported" message when first booted up and connected to a monitor through the HDMI port. This can be fixed by logging through SSH and editing the boot.ini on a FAT partition on the SD card to set the correct HDMI resolution and the process is detailed pretty well on the ODROID wiki but it may be out of scope for some users and pretty annoying for the rest.
Con Multi-USB hub almost a necessity
Because it has only two USB ports, one of which to be used for charging, a multi-USB hub is needed to connect a keyboard and mouse which are the absolute minimal external devices to be able to use and configure the MinnowBoard.
Con No official OS images have the kernel with GPIO enabled
Although this is not the board's fault per-se, no official OS image has enabled support for GPIO. But if the kernel is compiled from source, it can be compiled with GPIO and PWM enabled.