ZimaBoard 216 for $83.90

[foureight84]

1100 passmark 2016 cpu for 80$+... who in their right mind would buy these.
Its the cliche kickstarter product, obsolete already at the planning point but buzzwords sell.

The most suprising is that they still exist, afaik Intel has "politely requested" that they stop using their chips and branding.

These were shilled by cosplay sysadmin YouTubers a few months ago. It was also annoying that YouTube kept suggesting these videos on my feed.

 

[foureight84]

Interesting. I was just thinking about posting here to ask what people are using these days for small SBCs…and here this was.

When I go on vacation with the family, I usually take something small and compact to tinker with, and an SBC is usually easy to haul along.

I’ve got RPis, 1 through 3b. But they are all 1G or less RAM, so a bit limiting, and 4s are still crazy expensive. This trip, I took some Onion Omega stuff, from a Kickstarter a couple years back, to play with, but looking for something else for the next outing. Preferably with enough RAM to do some virtualization.

Since I’m looking for tinkering, and not “production” some of the limitations of boards like this (slow, PCIe 2.0, older gen CPU) are less of an issue I suppose.

With the rpi shortage, I've been using the Libre Le Potato. Downside is that it doesn't have built in wifi/Bluetooth, but upside is that it supports emmc. Performance is on par with a 3b+ but has higher memory capacity and the emmc makes it feel a lot faster. The GPIO are compatible with rpi.

The rockchip sbcs aren't that great with software support so I've been staying away from that. They have huge potential but dampened by spotty software.

You could look at sbcs made for the 3d printing community using allwinner soc like the Bigtreetech Pi v1.2. These are very affordable and good debian support out of the box (if you use debian, of course).

 

[Cruzader]

These were shilled by cosplay sysadmin YouTubers a few months ago. It was also annoying that YouTube kept suggesting these videos on my feed.

I think the "shitty board makers union" require all members to pay off some youtubers to praise stuff they either dont even test or just complete a install on, and then never mention again.

Can really tell a shitshow is coming to the market when 5+ youtubers that generaly dont go indepth on boards like this all come out with a single video on them.

 

[oneplane]

I have seen fake chips that simply don't work. They look the part (well, often not laser-engraved but silk-screened instead), but between the heat spreader (different kind of metal too) and the LGA PCB (interposer?) there is no actual silicon inside. And then there are falsified specs, so they get a low-end CPU, remove the heat spreader, and put on the heat spreader from a real (but broken) high-end CPU. Now the package looks like a high-end one but actually is just a low-end chip and works (And is reported as such).

What I personally haven't seen yet (but might be funny) is a fake BIOS or UEFI stack that falsifies the setup screen CPU readout and fakes the ACPI tables or DMI data. Doesn't prevent the OS from using the MSR of course.

On one hand you can also get totally fine fakes, i.e. the 'third shift' runs where the silicon and packaging is all the same, done on the same production lines with the same parameters, except the package doesn't get officially branded. It essentially means the production company can create a batch for themselves at cost, and make a huge profit even when sold for half the retail price.

On the other hand, that's more effort than most scammers are willing to put in. Changing labels is the easiest. Sending a clay brick is even easier, but the scam can go on longer if you can pretend to be resolving "oops, sent the wrong CPU". Same as with USB drives that are configured to fake the NAND or HDD size. Even the external HDDs that internally contain a USB mass storage device and a couple of hot-glued metal washers was apparently lucrative. Maybe the cost of labour and materials is super low and you can afford to setup a 'fake production line' that does everything except use the actual storage device that matches the specs... And stretching the time you can keep a fake brand running, that's where all the scams have been looking for improvement, essentially a ROI calculation.

At the end of the day, if people want to get into it (fakes/scams/marketing/brand trust) it makes wording and semantics very important since people tend to have different ideas of what a fake or scam product entails.

 

[Samir]

The NICs have genuine Intel silicon. We classify them as fake as they are trying to pass themselves off as Intel OEM cards. Anyone can buy Intel silicon and slap it on a PCB to make a NIC. If they were being sold as OEM "xyz", then they wouldn't be called fakes.

As for CPUs, no one is counterfeiting anything. Modern CPUs can be produced by all of 3 fabs (and that's including Intel) and process sizes that are old enough that others have the capability to produce have no monetary value for things like this. You know you can just buy embedded Intel CPUs from Mouser/Digikey/etc by the thousand, right? Mouser still has N3160s in stock...

Yes, OEM is different than being a fake.

Suspected that the CPUs in this item could still be bought at the usual mouser/digikey, hence why Intel having an issue with them is unusual.