Intel based Hackboard 2 SBC a crowdfunding success

[HEXUS]

US$99 board offers Celeron N4020, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, twin NVMe slots and more.

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[3dcandy]

I'm sure this kind of debate has spilled over numerous posts recently - but this is kinda what you get for £100 in the UK as a SBC capable of Win 10 with acceleration and Linux if needed.
Problem is it is "only" dual core and a bit slow, but has nvme storage. X86 though will help some

[KultiVator]

Fair price, but Windows 10 Pro on a board with less then 8GB of RAM and less than 4 cores probably won't set the earth on fire.

Really hope AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs hit the SBC form-factor... with all guns blazing. Suspect there'd be a lot of enthusiasts lining up for a slice of that particular 'pi'.

[3dcandy]

Fair price, but Windows 10 Pro on a board with less then 8GB of RAM and less than 4 cores probably won't set the earth on fire.

Really hope AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs hit the SBC form-factor... with all guns blazing. Suspect there'd be a lot of enthusiasts lining up for a slice of that particular 'pi'.

Would be too expensive... around £200 for an sbc? would be a hard sell

[Glyce]

I really can't see any upside on this thing. I have a j4205 with 16gb DDR3 ram and an SSD on win 10 and it kinda crawls as soon as you throw something heavier at it, let's say, a video.

With half the cores, I can see this half decent for Word, as long as the files are small.

[3dcandy]

I really can't see any upside on this thing. I have a j4205 with 16gb DDR3 ram and an SSD on win 10 and it kinda crawls as soon as you throw something heavier at it, let's say, a video.

With half the cores, I can see this half decent for Word, as long as the files are small.

I've been saying this on other threads. Win 10 isn't the right OS for an SBC imho. And word lol that bloated piece of rubbish!
Debian is much better for an SBC or Android. Much lower footprint for cores and/or memory. But the drivers are needed for gpu acceleration else youtube and other programs crawl. But to get enough cores for Win 10 and a decent enough gpu means an sbc would be like £200 and an impossible sell over a laptop because simple economics of scale

[philehidiot]

I've been saying this on other threads. Win 10 isn't the right OS for an SBC imho. And word lol that bloated piece of rubbish!
Debian is much better for an SBC or Android. Much lower footprint for cores and/or memory. But the drivers are needed for gpu acceleration else youtube and other programs crawl. But to get enough cores for Win 10 and a decent enough gpu means an sbc would be like £200 and an impossible sell over a laptop because simple economics of scale

Aren't there cut down versions of W10 which may be useful for niche applications? As in needing to run a simple application which isn't resource intensive and just needs a functional computer with Windows. This would allow you to do that in a small and cost effective manner. Surely they must have figured there was a market before even bothering to build it?

[3dcandy]

Aren't there cut down versions of W10 which may be useful for niche applications? As in needing to run a simple application which isn't resource intensive and just needs a functional computer with Windows. This would allow you to do that in a small and cost effective manner. Surely they must have figured there was a market before even bothering to build it?

It has Linux support - nuff said. Yes there are cut down version of Win 10 but factor in cost and the fact that Android and Debian (for example, other flavours are available) would run much better and I cannot see the point. Win is a great OS if that's what you need, but there is no need with an SBC. It's like all the Apple fanbois going the M1 is great, best thing since sliced bread. Nope it's a competent design that is good because they will sell millions on a nice small process and they throw transistors at tasks to make it run well. There is nobody else who could make an M1 style SoC and run with it. Apple controls everything, the OS, the design of the cores/chips the kernel, the thermal design everything. They will be paying less for M1 chips yet the price of the devices has actually risen slightly and the customers choice is totally shot as nothing is upgradeable and even a lot of the devices are now unrepairable to boot. Get a dram fault on an M1 and the whole chip is shot

[sinhaomar]

I hope, that AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs hit the SBC form-factor, but let's see! Today it is fair price, but Windows 10 Pro could fail.

[KultiVator]

Would be too expensive... around £200 for an sbc? would be a hard sell

There's plenty of enthusiasts that would slap down £200+ for a stellar little game emulation / media streamer box that can also do a lot more. It'd also make a great little board for driving electronic signage and other media-rich embedded applications.

Board of Dreams: If they build it, punters will come ;-)

[3dcandy]

There's plenty of enthusiasts that would slap down £200+ for a stellar little game emulation / media streamer box that can also do a lot more. It'd also make a great little board for driving electronic signage and other media-rich embedded applications.

Board of Dreams: If they build it, punters will come ;-)

I beg to differ - but each to their own. Why would you spend £200 when a Rasp Pi 4 does most of that for a quarter of the cost?
Download Retropie for a pi 4, flash to sd card, find some roms (or an image cough cough) and off you go

I mean a pi 400 is half that and has keyboard/mouse/psu/sd card in the box

[rave_alan]

Good stuff for typing machine.Why not, guess cheapest laptop still will cost more.

[DevDrake]

its great to see the rise of x86 dev boards, but its late and expensive.
And no, i remember black Friday deals something like $59 laptop at Walmart.

[Xlucine]

Would be nice if someone imported a batch - the only UK x86 SBCs I can find are odroid (£140 for one like this but quad core and no built in memory or W10 licence) or cpc (£100 for a 2GB RAM / 32 GB flash lattepanda V1 with windows key, and trying to install windows on that should be illegal)

Fair price, but Windows 10 Pro on a board with less then 8GB of RAM and less than 4 cores probably won't set the earth on fire.

Really hope AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs hit the SBC form-factor... with all guns blazing. Suspect there'd be a lot of enthusiasts lining up for a slice of that particular 'pi'.

Sapphire tried with zen+:
https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer...integrated-cpu
https://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboar...0-motherboard/

I guess it's not a true SBC as it lacks the rpi 40-pin header, but same idea. I'd hazard a guess that zen2 and zen3 APUs are/will be solder-ball-compatible so sapphire probably could make a ryzen 5000 SBC if they thought there was demand - till then I believe our only option is the asus zen2 based mini pcs (sure, it comes far too assembled to be a proper SBC, but it's close enough). I'm starting to suspect that even with the ITX tax, you can put together a ITX system for less than a zen2 mini pc (probably with a 3000G but that's a usable chip on W10)

[3dcandy]

Would be nice if someone imported a batch - the only UK x86 SBCs I can find are odroid (£140 for one like this but quad core and no built in memory or W10 licence) or cpc (£100 for a 2GB RAM / 32 GB flash lattepanda V1 with windows key, and trying to install windows on that should be illegal)



Sapphire tried with zen+:
https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer...integrated-cpu
https://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboar...0-motherboard/

I guess it's not a true SBC as it lacks the rpi 40-pin header, but same idea. I'd hazard a guess that zen2 and zen3 APUs are/will be solder-ball-compatible so sapphire probably could make a ryzen 5000 SBC if they thought there was demand - till then I believe our only option is the asus zen2 based mini pcs (sure, it comes far too assembled to be a proper SBC, but it's close enough). I'm starting to suspect that even with the ITX tax, you can put together a ITX system for less than a zen2 mini pc (probably with a 3000G but that's a usable chip on W10)

3000G more than acceptable for Win 10. The cpu is not what makes Win 10 great, decent ram both in size and speed, a decent nvme boot ssd and acceptable gpu are far more important than cpu as most people at a minimum will go for quad core. With the SBC's Win 10 struggles more because the gpu's are weak than the CPU in a lot of ways but then they don't have decent amount of cores or memory to help out.

Again I'll say it - £300+ for a small board setup is never going to happen when a Pi is a fraction of that price and you can run a free distro and do 90% work for 25% cost

[Core2Extreme]

Fair price, but Windows 10 Pro on a board with less then 8GB of RAM and less than 4 cores probably won't set the earth on fire.

Really hope AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs hit the SBC form-factor... with all guns blazing. Suspect there'd be a lot of enthusiasts lining up for a slice of that particular 'pi'.

I wouldn't expect AMD to dedicate 7nm space to an SBC chip - they can make a lot more money with their desktop and mobile Ryzen chips and Epyc.

But they could have some interesting options at 12nm, where there's likely to be more fab space. The 1600AF was Zen+ based, and retailed for $80 with 6 cores. Cut that down to two or four cores, lower the clocks for thermals, and you might be able to get a Ryzen-based SBC for a price that is is compatible with the category.