It’s that time of year… CNX Software giveaway week! For the 9th edition, we’ll have seven items to give away, five that I will send myself, and two that will be sent directly from two companies that accepted to add their own products to the giveaway.
We’ll start the giveaway with NanoPi R5S router based on Rockchip RK3568 SoC with 2 GB DDR4 RAM, 8GB eMMC flash plus an M.2 socket for NVMe SSD, two 2.5GbE Ethernet ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, as well as HDMI 2.0 video output and two USB 3.0 ports.
I reviewed the NanoPi R5S router with OpenWrt and Ubuntu 20.04 “FriendlyCore”, but I had to call this a “preview” since 2.5GbE was far from optimal, sometimes only a little faster than with a Gigabit Ethernet link. But I can see the company has released new images, including one based on the latest OpenWrt 22.03, so hopefully the performance has improved. Debian with desktop and Android 12 images are now available as well so the HDMI port has become more useful.
At the time of the review, I also tested an M.2 NVMe SSD on the board/router. It could reach about 380MB/s read and write speeds which may seem low, but the values are expected since the router relies on a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface.
The giveaway includes the router fully assembled. So you’ll just need a 5V/3A USB power adapter if you want to boot the pre-installed OS.
To enter the draw simply leave a comment with your country and whatever else you’d like to say (no links in the body of the comment). If the country is missing, I’ll consider the entry void. Other rules are as follows:
- Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address.
- Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 10 am (Bangkok time) every day.
- Comments will be closed after 48 hours. If comments are open, the contest is still going on.
- Winners will be selected with random.org, and announced in the comments section of each giveaway.
- I’ll contact the winner by email, and I’ll expect an answer within 24 hours, or I’ll pick another winner.
- Note that I may not be able to contact people who log in with Facebook, Twitter, or Google, so it’s better to use an email address to enter the draw.
- Shipping
- $18 for registered airmail small packet or ePacket for overseas shipping payable via PayPal within 48 hours once the contest (for a given product) is complete.
- If Paypal is not available in your country, you can still play, and I’ll cover the cost of sending the parcel by Sea and Land (SAL) without registration if you win.
- I’ll post all prizes at the same time, around the 16th of November, except for products shipped directly by companies which will be handled separately.
- I’ll make sure we have 7 different winners, so if you have already won a device during this giveaway week, I’ll draw another person.
Good luck!
If you don’t win and you’d like to buy the NanoPi R5S gateway with the metal case, you can do so on the FriendlyELEC store, Amazon or Aliexpress for $75 and up.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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