When searching for a product in the likes of the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black, I came across a much lesser known board known as the Cubieboard. The board is made by CubieTech, a company headed by a former employee of Allwinner technology, Tom Cubie. Recently a new model of the board went up for sale, known as the Cubieboard2.

The Cubieboard2 costs $59 and is well worth the extra money over the aforementioned products. The Cubieboard2 sports a dual core ARM Cortex A7 CPU at 1GHz (the Allwinner A20), a Mali 400MP2 GPU (more on this later), 1GB of DDR3 RAM, full-sized HDMI up to 1080p with audio, 100Mbps Ethernet, 4GB NAND flash onboard with a microSD card slot for up to 64GB cards, 2 full size USB ports, 1 USB OTG port (mini USB B), 1 SATA II port, 1 IR transceiver, analog audio in and out, 2 user configurable LEDs (green and blue), and 96 expansion pins plus a TTL serial port. The board can only power a 2.5″ HDD or SSD (as they only use 5V power) but a 3.5″ drive can be connected with external power. The device runs on 5V and can be powered from USB. It draws less than 500mA alone but with a drive and USB devices plugged in it can use up to 2A. The box contains a somewhat custom SATA cable with support for the power out on the board, a USB to DC power jack cable (but no actual power supply). You can buy a really nice 2A power supply from their store for $8, or just use a spare phone charger.

The first thing that makes this board stand out is the plethora of features. Unlike the Raspberry Pi which is built to a very strict cost, or the BeagleBone Black, which is sadly a failure in my eyes due to the numerous design fails, the Cubieboard2 does not skimp on connectivity or performance. The board is capable of decoding 4K UHD video at over 30FPS! It can also do Blu-ray and 3D 1080p decoding and has full OpenGL ES support. The CPU is exceptionally powerful too. It can easily do software rendering of HTML5 canvases in Chrome and can load web pages magnitudes faster than its competitors. It ships with Android 4.2 on the NAND flash but many other system images can be downloaded from their website including Ubuntu and even Raspbian.

The other great selling point of the Cubieboard2 is the support. The wiki contains a great deal of what developers like me want to see. It gives information on building custom kernels and Debian images, which is exactly what I need for the projects I’ll be using these for. I also find that building OS images is much more straightforward for this board than other credit card sized computers. I highly recommend this board and can’t wait to see what other people do with them.

You can find more on their official store pages at http://store.r0ck.me/collections/home-slide/products/cubieboard2