Quote from: stevegee58 on December 02, 2012, 12:26:47 PM

Regarding power consumption, I did some research and here's what I found from various Interwebs sources:

Raspberry Pi Model B: 3.5 Watts (Wikipedia)
BeagleBone: 1.5 @idle, 2.5 @peak during boot (BeagleBone reference manual PDF)
MK802: 3 Watts peak (Couldn't find definitive source. This from http://romanrm.ru/en/a10/mk802-server)

All of these devices are designed to be powered from USB which puts a hard limit of 500-900 mA @5 volts = 2.5-4.5 watts.
So based purely on the USB power you can put a high estimate of power consumption at 4.5 watts for all of these little USB-powered board computers.
The BeagleBone has lowest power consumption probably because it doesn't have a video output.

If someone wants to get all patriotic about it, Raspberry Pi is developed in the UK, BeagleBone is manufactured in the US and the MK802 is Chinese.

You really press for that BeagleBone don't you? haha. There is something to be said about the cost of each thing though. Isn't the BB more than double the cost of the RPi? And the MK802 is only a little bit less than the BB. Though crazyates they got theirs for 41 shipped. I don't know where they got theirs though.

And any time anyone talks about another alt, such as the odroids that were just posted, they are always like 100 bucks. Why would anyone want any of those options when you could spend under 50 dollars on something that will work just as well. I understand the want for something better if you are going to toy around with it a lot and use it for many different projects, but we are talking about buying something that by all rights should be sitting in a drawer forever.

As I posted before, I picked up SYLVANIA SYNET7WIC for 47 shipped. Anything that I could find that had better specs cost at least double. And unlike the RPi and a few others that had the same exact specs, this idea/product has a build in screen/keyboard/mouse as well as full wireless out of the box. It also has 3 USB ports on it instead of the 1.

I'm obviously a little bias here as this is the one that I ended up buying, but I did look at all of the alternatives posted here as well as a few other ones.

I'm actually really glad I got it when I did too because it went out of stock only a day or two after I got mine. I know that you can get it for pretty much the same price in a few other places though, so it might still be an option for other people depending on where you live.

I think I'm going to take a little time today (probably right after I post this) to get a proper OS onto the device and get a miner on there. I really wish I had a USB miner to test out as well. I'm thoroughly impressed with the build quality too. I expected it to feel like really cheap plastic, but it doesn't. It feels solid, like any other netbook.

I also can't currently comment on the watt usage but seeing as it's not even a full netbook (I guess they call it a smartbook, like a cross between a netbook and a smart phone?) and those use very few watts, I'm going to assume that it's quite low. It will take it quite some time before it costs me that extra 40+ dollars that I didn't spend on another option. I might even mod it a little bit to see if I can save a few watts here and there, but the effort that would take might outweigh the savings. We are really talking about cents per year here.

I do think this thread is evolving a bit as well all start to get our hands on our purchases. I think we should stop comparing models and products, especially ones that we already own, because we already have all of that information. I would love to start seeing pictures of setups and devices here. I will be taking some today I guess.