MinnowBoard Max vs ASUS Tinker Board

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.

The MinnowBoard Max has 2 USB ports, one of which is a USB 3.0.

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.

The ASUS Tinker Board offers performance that outclasses other single-board computers in this price range. It can easily be used as a daily PC substitute and it can easily handle some tasks that competitors (like the Pi 3 for example) find difficult. Things like image editing, streaming Full HD videos, and even playing some simple browser-based games can easily be done on the Tinker Board.

This single-board computer copies the form-factor of the raspberry pi to a T. The size is about the same and most of the connectors are at the same spots as the Raspberry Pi.

You can get the official Linux image for the Tinker Board website. It's actually a customized version of Debian that's changed to work as smoothly as possible on Tinker Board's hardware.

It comes with all the essential applications every PC has nowadays (web browser, text, editor, etc.) and some more specialized tools that are used to control the GPIO pins and that allow more advanced users to "talk" to the hardware.

This board has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.

Yes, you can add an external WiFi adapter to most SBCs but the ability to connect an external antenna to the embedded WiFi is a pretty rare feature.

Unlike most boards on the market, the ASUS Tinker Board is rather aesthetically pleasing as well. It has an array of colours which help distinguish the different connectors. Especially nice are the GPIO pin headers which are all colour-coded to identify the various types of pins.

And since it has a dedicated controller which is not shared with USB it's very fast an the speed doesn't depend on USB usage (and vice versa).

The Tinker Board uses the same GPIO libraries as Raspberry Pi does. This means that users coming from Raspberry Pi who want to play around with the Tinker Board's GPIO pins will find it very easy to do so.