Up Core now working but what an effort

I got a replacement UpCore from Aaeon, and was pissed off when I tried to fire it up, no OS...ok, ok thats not a problem, this is a new one, so lets stick on an OS...

and nope.

try another

nope.

oh ffs...how much of a pain is this, I reflash the bios...
nope

So its dead Jim.

I open up another RMA request to send this one back, and get a slightly stroppy response that I havn't fully explained the issue, and I need to reflash the Bios, here's a link...hmm they clearly didn't read my mail when I pointed out in detail the issue and that flashing the bios did nothing.

I am mid way through typing my not too sarcastic reponse when I notice the link they send me is to a new BIOS....17, the one I used was 13.
I go to the link and notice 1 download has occured, so its a very new upload...

So putting the reponse to one side, I download and reflash with the new bios.

And so I try to install Ubuntu...and wow, its happening, its installing...nice graphical interface and everything..but it gets stuck after the region selection.

Hmm annoying but encouraged that it went further than before, I noted someone on the forums mentioned that the 1Gb models (I have a 1Gb) can suffer from over sized GPU allocation. So I reduced the memory allocation from max to 256MB, more than enough for my kind of work and tried again.

This time...it worked..no problems at all, installation took a while bit it did everything as expected. And at the end of the install, I followed the wiki's directions on installing the Up board Kernel.

It now works fine, totally awesome in fact. the Intel HD400 graphics are fast, it reports as a 3.1 system though it has extensions or tesselation (not compute though) and it absolutly blasts any of the current fast ARM chips out the water. Massive scores on GLMark2-es2
Quad cores, and a 16?? core GPU give it a lot more GPU and CPU grunt than even a rockchip 3399.

Its amazing.
It does suffer a little for lack of memory though, Ubuntu 18.04 is a bit greedier on memory than older OS's so sometimes there's a pause as the swap buffer kicks in, but overall its running all my test demo's just fine once libs are installed.

Amazing bit of kit for $99. a 2G is only $10 more. Their top of the line model with $4Gb and 64Gb eMMC is $169 represents something close to the power of a micro laptop, on a tiny PC board.

It even keeps up with its slightly more powerful Up^2 board, at least my 2G dual core celeron with Intel HD505 graphics.

But one thing about these boards, is they are basically small PC's really genuine PC's they can indeed load and run Windows 10. While the lower end ones represent great value for money for SBC fans, as the specs go up, so does the price and its hard to see why you should buy one unless its for a specific project, that needs a small board, rather than one of the many mini/budger or even 2nd hand PC's which can totally destroy these in sheer power/performance terms.

But for $99 I have a tiny board that can outperform a raspberry by a factor of 10 in every dept, and run OpenGLES3.1 so its a fun thing to mess with. It is without doubt the fasted sub $100 board in my collection, and by some margin. It can't quite match my base model Up*2 board (CPU is better, GPU is worse), but thats $150 for the base model, and considerably more if  you want more ram/better CPU.

There's also an UpCore+ model due next month, same form factor, much more powerful CPU, and base 2G 32GBeMMC mode, for $149 is a total bargain, but its over my $100 limit so I will pass on it.