Minnowboard Turbot Review

I purchased a Minnowboard Turbot last month as, while I was very happy with my Raspberry Pi 2 and was looking at the 3, I wanted something that was significantly faster and, more to the point for me, used an x86 CPU. The Turbot is the 3rd iteration (that I’m aware of) of the Minnowboard, and the first one that I ever considered buying. Things like having the RTC battery holder soldered on already (although I am skilled at soldering), and improvements with HDMI output compatibility, along with performance improvements in both graphics and raw speed, garnered enough of my interest to warrant a purchase.

After putting it through its paces and installing a good half dozen Linux distros on it, I have to say that this would make an excellent low-end media center PC as, with a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM, it can handle 1080p video without a problem, as well as low-end gaming & emulation. While Higan bounced between 10 -45 fps so often even SMW was unplayable, ZSNES (which I remember running SMW at playable speeds on my dad’s 486 SX 25mhz under DOS 6.22 18 years ago) offered a wonderful experience. Early MAME games were playable, but anything past 1989 is hit and miss.

Power usage is impressive, with idling watts as low as 2.9, though ~3.5 seems to be the norm under Lubuntu 16.04. Running the Nexiuz benchmark, I managed to get the power usage (as reported by EZ Watt at least) up to 10.1, although it was hovering in the high 9’s most of the time. I’m currently having it connect to my security camera via rtsp and it still hovers around the 4.5w mark.

When you factor in that this little unit makes no noise, and while it can get a bit warm, it could still be handled, even while compiling MAME, which took 12 – 18 hours (I fell asleep and it was finished when I checked after waking up).

While I am very impressed with the Turbot and have noticed the company behind them are coming out with faster (and quad core) versions, I am looking onward towards  the Intel Core M CPU’s, as they appear to offer remarkable performance, albeit at a higher price point than the Atom x64 CPU the Turbot uses.

I don’t regret getting the Turbot and enjoy having a computer that is always on and yet makes no noise and uses almost no power.

Turbot-Box-01 Turbot-Box-02 Turbot-AC_AdapterTurbot-In_the_Dark Turbot-Mighty_Mouse Turbot-Thumb_DriveTurbot_Mix_Power_Usage Turbot_Max_Power_Usage Turbot_Nexiuz

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