The Tinker is a single board computer by ASUS, a longtime favorite manufacturer of motherboards for gaming computers and overclockers. That heritage shows in the Tinker, which comes with a heat sink you’d be well advised to use.
The Tinker is built to be plug-compatible with the Raspberry Pi, and shares its form factor, with pins and ports in the same places, allowing it to use the same cases and many of the same accessories as the Pi. Where the Pi is built with the goal of making computers cheap enough to be in reach of all, the Tinker takes a larger budget and uses it to make a single board computer that’s downright snappy to use. Web pages load quickly, and apps launch in seconds.
The Tinker brings some other nice touches: For hardware hackers, its GPIO pins are color coded, reducing that little frustration of finding the right pin when physical computing. The headline-grabbing feature of the Tinker is its support for 4k video at a frame rate good enough your home theater.
