PC Pro, Issue 297

PC Pro Issue 297The Labs Test in this month’s PC Pro is something of a bumper one: I ran a whopping 14 miniature PCs, from a cleverly cased Raspberry Pi up to a behemoth of a system squeezing in an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, through a gamut of tests including size and weight, power draw, productivity and gaming benchmarks to see which would come out on top.

The work of a solid few weeks, the Labs saw system after system bouncing onto and off the test bench. As well as requiring the actual testing, all photography was carried out in-house – with thanks to my wife, who served as a hand model for the article’s hero shot – with each system photographed from all angles and internally, plus a smart isometric view in which the scale is maintained so the reader can easily compare the relative sizes of each machine on test. Given that the feature is about miniature PCs, such easy at-a-glance comparison is key to knowing which machine meets the readers’ personal requirements.

A Labs Test like this wouldn’t be possible without the cooperation of a range of companies, of course, and I’d like to thank the suppliers of machines for the test: ASRock, Asus, Intel, Mini-ITX.com, Lenovo, QuietPC, Raspberry Pi, and Shuttle. Additional thanks go to Intel, Nvidia, and Overclockers UK, who provided components required to build up the bare-bones systems on test.

As is traditional for a PC Pro Labs Test, the content is split between reviews – four 700-word focus reviews and ten 350-word supplementary reviews – and features, including an interview with Intel’s Ed Barkhuysen on the company’s modular vision for the future of computing, a buyer’s guide covering things to consider when making the move to an ultra-small-form-factor (USFF) system, a two-page features table covering everything you could want to know about each system on test, a look at external GPU (eGPU) products as a way of expanding the performance of mini-PCs, and a “View from the Labs” opinion editorial to round things out.

This feature also marks the first time the in-house PC Pro benchmark suite – which measures system performance for image editing, video playback, and multitasking workloads – has been run not only on Linux-based, rather than Windows, systems but also on a Raspberry Pi. To achieve that, I worked to port the PowerShell-based suite to the Bash shell while using the same cross-platform applications to ensure each platform can be compared as fairly as possible.

PC Pro Issue 297 is available now at all good supermarkets, newsagents, and digitally via Zinio and similar services.

Custom PC, Issue 172

Custom PC Issue 172That this month’s Hobby Tech column includes the review of a single-board computer should come as no surprise; that it’s a Windows 10 machine, though, certainly shakes things up a bit – as do a guest appearance by my trusty Cambridge Computers Z88 and an interview with Indiegogo’s Joel Hughes on the topic of crowdfunding.

The DFRobot LattePanda isn’t a new device, but it’s new to me. While I’ve probably reviewed more single-board computers than any other device category – and written the book on more than one – the LattePanda stands out from the crowd for two reasons: it uses an Intel Atom processor with considerable grunt, and it runs Microsoft’s Windows 10 Home operating system. Add in to that an on-board Arduino-compatible microcontroller and you’ve got a very interesting system indeed – and one which only got more interesting when I popped it under the thermal camera.

My interview with Indegogo’s Joel Hughes, meanwhile, took place in the spacious hall of Copenhagen’s former meat-packing district as part of the TechBBQ event. “We want to democratise funding as much as possible and level the playing field for great ideas,” he told me, before I threw a few tricky questions about some high-profile campaigns that had perhaps fallen short of greatness – or even mediocrity. “I don’t feel, the majority of the time, that it’s malicious,” he claimed on the topic of campaign operators who fail to keep their backers in the loop on post-fundraising progress. “I think they’re busy doing their own thing and almost forget about the comment section a little.”

Finally, the Cambridge Computers Z88. Although it’s been in my possession for many years, has a bag-friendly A4 footprint, and runs for a full day’s work on a set of double-A batteries, I’ve shied away from using Uncle Clive’s portable for serious work owing to the difficulties in actually getting documents off its internal memory and onto something more modern. The purchase of a PC Link II kit and some clever open-source software, though, has solved the problem, and if you see me out and about at events don’t be surprised if I’m taking notes on a rubber-keyed classic.

All this, plus a bunch of other stuff, is available at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or digitally via Zinio and similar distribution services.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 163

Linux User & Developer Issue 163This month’s Linux User & Developer includes my review of the Arduino-produced and Intel-chip-toting Genuino 101 microcontroller and the final five-page news spread, with publisher Imagine shuffling things around and taking the news coverage in-house after lo these many years.

Kindly supplied as a press sample by Intel, the Genuino 101 is special for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s one of the first commercially-available devices to be sold under the new Genuino brand outside the US – a necessity thanks to some hairy legal wrangling between two competing companies who have a claim to the Arduino trademark. Secondly, it’s the first outing for Intel’s new Curie module, a wearable-centric system-on-chip that combines microcomputer and microcontroller functionality.

Where Intel’s previous efforts at developing boards for the maker market have been somewhat hard to love, it’s definitely doing something right with the Genuino 101. The board is based on the popular Arduino Uno layout, includes 5V-safe pins despite running 3.3V logic, and can run most Arduino sketches unmodified. Better still, the Curie module includes integrated Bluetooth Low Energy support and an accelerometer sensor.

The design of the chip, though, is odd, and it’s something on which I focus during the review: the Curie uses two processors, an x86 Quark based on the old Pentium microarchitecture to run an underlying real-time operating system (RTOS) and an Argonaut RISC Core (ARC) which takes care of being a microcontroller and actually running the Arduino sketch. At the time of writing, the divide was stark: the Quark is entirely locked off from user access, taking over automatically for tasks like Bluetooth communication when requested by the ARC. While Intel has promised to release the source for the RTOS, allowing users to run their own code on the Quark as well as the ARC, this has yet to materialise.

Despite this, I was impressed with the Genuino 101 – but to read my full conclusion, you’ll have to hie thee hence to a supermarket, newsagent, or snag an electronic copy via Zinio or similar digital distribution services.

Custom PC, Issue 152

Custom PC Issue 152In this month’s Hobby Tech column I review the Proster VC99 multimeter, the Intel/Arduino Genuino 101 microcontroller development board, and discuss the challenges in developing meaningful benchmarks for testing devices where memory is measured in kilobytes.

Unusually for a hardware review, the multimeter was actually a personal purchase: I’d been using a Maplin-branded multimeter for quite some time, but the low cost and seemingly broad features of the Proster VC99 – also known as the Vichy 99, and sold under a variety of badges – convinced me it was time for an upgrade. While doing so cost me a back-lit display, I gained a variety of functions from frequency counting up to a neat analogue bar-graph on the display for seeing spikes and dips that would otherwise be lost on a numerical output.

The frequency counter came in particularly handy for my Genuino 101 review: writing a simple Arduino Sketch which does nothing more than toggle a pin on and off as fast as possible, I was able to read how quickly that happened to give me an idea of the IO performance of the Genuino compared with other Arduino boards I have lying around. Coupled with a look at the Intel Curie module which powers the device, providing Bluetooth connectivity and an integrated accelerometer, that’s enough for a solid review.

I don’t want to do solid reviews, though, I want to do great reviews, so the last page of this month’s five-page spread looks at how I benchmarked the compute performance of the Genuino 101 against an Arduino Nano for a direct, head-to-head comparison. It’s not as easy as it sounds: with mere kilobytes of memory, it’s not like I could just install PC Mark and be done with it. Interested parties will find a detailed explanation of how I went about modifying the traditional Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks to run on both devices, including trimming things to fit into the Arduino Nano’s tiny memory allowance, and how to interpret the results.

All this, plus stuff by people who aren’t me, is available at your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or from the comfort of your home via digital distribution services including Zinio.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 161

Linux User & Developer Issue 161To say this month’s Linux User & Developer is a bumper issue is something of an understatement: in addition to my usual four-page news spread, you’ll find a three-strong group test of Steam Machines and a detailed step-by-step guide to building your own Linux box from a pile of parts.

First, the group test. Editor Gavin Thomas contacted me with the news that they had an Alienware Steam Machine in, and asked whether I would be able to source and review a rival device for a head-to-head. I went one better, the overachiever that I am, and thanks to the very lovely people at CyberPower and Zotac I was able to pick up a Syber and NEN to be run through their paces alongside the Alienware.

For Linux User & Developer, the Steam Machines were very new territory. The magazine has previously focused largely on professional uses for Linux, but the launch of mainstream-targeted console-beating gaming PCs running Steam OS – Valve’s gaming-centric customisation of Debian Linux – couldn’t be ignored. I started by designing a series of benchmarks which could be run across all three machines in order to provide a performance comparison, which then needed to take into account the price difference between the two entry-level machines from Alienware and CyberPower and the top-end Zotac NEN. The winner? Well, you’ll have to read the review.

A major group test like this would normally be enough, but Gavin also asked me to come up with a cover feature for the issue: building your own Linux machine. As with the group test, this issue marks the first time Linux User & Developer has strayed into the PC-building arena, and Gavin was looking for someone who could lend an expert eye to the hardware side of the feature.

After an initial hiccough with a parts supplier that let me down, the wonderful people at Overclockers UK were kind enough to loan me a shopping cart full of hardware, including an Intel Skylake processor. The specifications of the machine were kept low enough to appeal to buyers on a budget looking for a future-proof bargain, while having enough poke to ensure a pleasant experience. Naturally, the hardware was chosen specifically with Linux compatibility in mind – though the Skylake family of processors does require the Linux 4.4 kernel or newer to run at its full potential, which is covered in the software-centric second half of the feature.

Issue 161 is definitely a personal highlight, containing as it does such a large percentage of contents from my trusty keyboard. You can see the result for yourself with a trip to your local supermarket, newsagent, or through digital distribution services such as Zinio.

Custom PC, Issue 148

Custom PC Issue 148My regular Hobby Tech column is undeniably review-heavy this month, with three separate items spread across its five pages: the CompuLab Fitlet, the Bare Conductive Touch Board Starter Kit, and the Widdop.

To deal with the latter first, the Widdop is a bit of an odd thing to review at first glance as it was available exclusively to those who attended this year’s Wuthering Bytes festival. There’s method in my madness, though: it’s a variant of the Cordwood puzzle designed by Saar Drimer at Boldport, and a review of the Widdop is equally applicable to its predecessor. In short, it’s a soldering kit sans instructions: two artistically designed and matching circuit boards are supplied along with a fistful of components, and it’s up to the user to not only work out how it should be assembled but then how to interface it to a microcontroller or other controlling system – great fun!

The Bare Conductive Touch Board, by contrast, is readily available. I had previously experienced the delights of the Touch Board, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller with built-in capacitive touch sensing and audio playback capabilities, at the Manchester MakeFest where the Manchester Arduino group were demonstrating Touch Board-powered musical food bowls. The Starter Kit, though, is something else entirely. Packed in an oversized box it contains everything you need to get started, from the conductive paint which made Bare Conductive famous to the Touch Board itself pre-loaded with a voice-led 12-step tutorial.

The booklet is the real prize, though. Walking the user through three projects, it’s one of the best I’ve seen: well produced with exciting photographs and a great attention to detail. The primary project, too, is innovative: a stencil and overlay in the shape of a house demonstrates how the conductive paint can be used to create interactive art, with the remaining two projects offering an intruder alarm – for bare-footed intruders, at least – and a look at adding interactivity to household objects.

Finally, the Fitlet. I’ve been a fan of CompuLab’s tiny Linux-compatible PCs for a while, but the Fitlet is the first I’ve had a chance to review. Supplied in its top-end form with an AMD A10-Micro6700T quad-core processor, it has the grunt of a low-mid-range office desktop but in a passively cooled form factor little larger than a cased Raspberry Pi. Compared to the already diminutive Intel NUC, it’s absolutely tiny: the smallest NUC has a volume of 0.417 litres, while the Fitlet is just 0.215 litres in volume.

Despite its size, there’s a bit of everything: as reviewed, the Fitlet offers on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, three USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, powered eSATA, and even a GPIO connector – which, sadly, lacked driver support at the time of my review, an issue CompuLab has now resolved with the release of an official Software Development Kit (SDK). Running Linux Mint 17.2 but compatible with most any operating system that would run on an x86-64 desktop, the CompuLab is definitely one of the most exciting devices I’ve had the privilege to test recently – although that excitement is tempered by a £300 selling price in the UK, putting it on-par with the more computationally powerful Intel NUC.

All this, plus interesting stuff written by people who aren’t me, can be found between the covers of Custom PC Issue 148 at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or from the comfort of your own home via digital distribution services such as Zinio.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 151

Linux User & Developer Issue 151This latest issue of Linux User & Developer magazine includes, in addition to my usual four-page news spread, a two-page review of Intel’s latest entry into the embedded market: the Quark-based Edison, an ultra-tiny single-board computer the size of a postage stamp.

Sadly, the Edison I reviewed isn’t quite the Edison that Intel originally unveiled. The original Edison was to use the SD Card form factor, making it easy to build expansion boards by using a standard SD Card slot component. It was also to run exclusively on the Quark, a low-power x86 processor built from the old Pentium microarchitecture. The latter feature was nixed when feedback from users of the Galileo, another Quark-based embedded development board, revealed that it was too underpowered to be of much use; the former when Intel discovered it didn’t have enough pins on the SD Card layout to make useful connections.

The result of these last-minute modifications is the Edison you can buy today. The SD Card layout has been ditched for a stamp-sized board featuring a high-density Samtec connector on the underside, making it more awkward for hobbyist development, while the Quark chip is still present but relegated to coprocessor status while an Atom processor handles running the operating system.

My review sample, kindly provided by Intel UK, came with the Arduino-compatible break-out board. When connected to the Edison, this creates an overly expensive and extremely large development board with Arduino-compatible headers – but one which, the promise goes, you can use to refine a design which can then be implemented in a far smaller footprint using a bare Edison board and your own custom break-out board.

As for how I got on with the Edison and whether I rate it as any better than Intel’s previous offerings – the Galileo and MinnowBoard families – you’ll have to buy the issue to find out. If you do, you’ll also be treated to my regular four-page spread of all the latest news in the world of GNU/Linux, open-hardware, open-software, open-governance, and open-anything-else-that-catches-my-eye, plus a bunch of articles written by people who aren’t me.

Linux User & Developer Issue 151 is available in all good supermarkets and newsagents, many bad ones, and digitally via services including Zinio now.

Linux User & Developer, Issue 150

Linux User & Developer, Issue 150This month’s Linux User & Developer includes both my regular four-page news spread and a review of the MinnowBoard Max single-board computer from Intel.

The MinnowBoard Max is the latest in Intel’s increasingly scattershot efforts to make an impact in the hobbyist-grade single-board computer market. Like its predecessor, the MinnowBoard Max is open hardware and produced in partnership with CircuitCo – the company behind the BeagleBoard and BeagleBone Black – and features the x86 instruction set architecture. Where it differs is in how easy it is to use and how much power it can offer.

I reviewed the original MinnowBoard design back in Issue 131, and found it lacking on a couple of levels: the single-core Atom chip was woefully underpowered compared to rival boards like the Gizmo, and its 32-bit UEFI firmware made it near-impossible to boot any operating system bar the bundled and extremely cut-down Yocto Linux installation.

The MinnowBoard Max clearly demonstrates that Intel is listening to feedback, though. The 32-bit single-core Atom is now a 64-bit dual-core model, and comes complete with a 64-bit UEFI implementation. The result: significantly improved compatibility and performance. A single-core version, slightly cheaper and drawing less power, is also available but not something I have yet tested.

As to whether the MinnowBoard Max is a worthy investment in a market near-monopolised by chips based on the ARM instruction set architecture, you’ll have to read the full review to find out.

The review, my four-page spread of all the latest happenings in the world of open-everything, and a whole bunch of stuff written by other people is available now from your local newsagent, supermarket, or digitally via Zinio and similar distribution services.

Custom PC, Issue 136

Custom PC Issue 136This month’s Hobby Tech column for Custom PC magazine reviews a next-generation version of the Fuze Powered by Raspberry Pi kit, previews the upcoming MinnowBoard Max from Intel, and publishes an interview with Sam ‘MrSidC64’ Dyer, author of Commodore 64: A Visual Commpendium – the spelling a deliberate pun on ‘Commodore,’ if you were wondering.

First, the Fuze T2 review. I’d already looked at the original Fuze, courtesy its inventor Jon Silvera, back in Issue 124, and little has changed from the aerial view: it’s still a robust steel case inspired by the BBC Micros of the 80s, designed to house a keyboard, Raspberry Pi and a break-out board for the general-purpose input-output (GPIO) pins, sold either on its own or as a bundle with child-friendly electronics tutorials and a handful of simple components for experimentation. Looking in more detail, however, shows that plenty has changed: following feedback, Jon has redesigned to case to include the ability to mount the Pi sideways to prevent little fingers pulling out the SD card, added Lego-compatible holes to the side, and best of all included a four-port USB hub with integrated power supply that provides proper 5V/500mA ports while simultaneously powering the Pi itself. A much-improved GPIO break-out board is another welcome addition, featuring compatibility with existing add-on boards as well as integrated analogue-to-digital and hardware pulse-width modulation (PWM) pins – something the Pi alone sorely lacks.

The MinnowBoard Max, meanwhile, is easily recognisable as a new design entirely. Designed to replace Intel’s old MinnowBoard, reviewed back in Issue 122, the Max features a proper 64-bit dual-core Atom processor with 64-bit UEFI implementation – meaning that the limited compatibility of its predecessor is a thing of the past. The design is more compact, the entire platform more accessible to beginners, and as usual it’s entirely open in both software and hardware – even the UEFI BIOS is based on Intel’s open-source code. For those who find ARM development boards too much of a stretch after years of x86 programming, it’s certainly worth investigating and I was impressed with the pre-release prototype I was provided. Sadly, the release of the final production model has hit a few last-minute delays – although I’m expecting stock of both the dual-core and single-core variants to appear in the channel before the end of the year.

Lastly, my interview with Sam Dyer. A graphic designer by trade, Sam launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowd-fund a new coffee table book all about the software available for the Commodore 64, his first real computer. As a massive Commodore fan myself, I was a backer and when the book arrived earlier this year I knew I would have to write about it. Sam was kind enough to give me some of his time to answer questions about his early days of computing, the technology behind capturing the images that make up the book, and its at-the-time impending successor Commodore Amiga: A Visual Commpendium – which yesterday closed funding with a massive £130,000 raised from fellow Commodore fans. Yes, including me.

All this, plus a variety of words written by people who aren’t me, can be yours now with a trip to the newsagent or supermarket, or from the comfort of your home or office via Zinio or similar digital distribution services.

PC & Tech Authority, Issue 201

PC & Tech Authority Issue 201It’s always a pleasure to get your name in a new publication, and doubly so when it’s in foreign climes. As a result, I was thrilled to find that my recent review of the Intel Galileo has been reprinted in Australia’s PC & Tech Authority, making the first time to my knowledge I have been published in the region.

The original review appeared in PC Pro Issue 238, and if you’re thinking that the cover stories look similar you’d be right. PC & Tech Authority’s publisher, NextMedia, operates a republishing agreement with Dennis Publishing which results in the magazine being an Antipodean rewrite of PC Pro.

The review itself is unchanged, beyond a switch to the local price of the Galileo. It has also been published on the official website, while you can pick up a copy of the magazine itself in a variety of formats if you’d like to see what else is on offer.