UP Squared 7100 fanless SBC Review – Part 1: Unboxing and first boot to Ubuntu Pro 24.04

AAEON sent me a sample of the UP Squared 7100 fanless industrial SBC for review. The board is powered by an Intel N97 or N100 Alder Lake-N SoC (Amston Lake processors will be offered soon), and is equipped with up to 16GB LPDDR5 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash, plus two M.2 sockets for wireless and storage expansion. You’ll find the full specifications in our earlier article.

I’ll start the review with an unboxing to check out the hardware, before booting it to Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS to check out some basic system information. In a few weeks, I’ll report my experience after in-depth testing in Ubuntu in the second part of the review which will include features testing from gigabit Ethernet to GPIO, some benchmarks, and power consumption measurements.

UP Squared 7100 unboxing

I received the UP Squared 7100 board in a retail package that reads “Are you UP for UP2 7100?” and also got a separate package for a 12V/6A (72W) power adapter.

The bottom side of the package lists general specifications for the UP Squared 7100 family, and I can also notice a sticker for my specific sample “UPS-ASLN100-A10-0864” that confirms I received an Intel Processor N100 model with 8GB RAM and a 64GB eMMC flash.

The package includes the board itself, four standoffs, and a safety manual.

One side of the board features a lockable DC jack, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. You’ll also notice a red “Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS” sticker to confirm the board is certified/supported by Canonical. The three wafers on the right side are for the front panel and RS232/RS485 interfaces.

From another angle, we can see another USB 3.2 Type-A port, a 40-pin GPIO header, and one more wafer for audio. The RTC battery is stuck to the HDMI/DP combo.

There’s also a large heatsink at the bottom for passive cooling.

The 12V/6A (72W) power adapter features a screwable jack, but the power cord is not included. It’s a standard one like the one used in a tower PC, and I’ll borrow one from a projector.

I also took a photo of the UP Squared 7100 with the Raspberry Pi 5 and the UP 7000, another fanless Intel N100 SBC from AAEON, but in a business card form factor. The Squared is almost twice as large which allows it to have two M.2 sockets, a Key M one for an NVMe SSD or AI accelerator, and a Key E one for wireless.

UP Squared 7100 cabling and boot to Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS

We’re now ready to try the board out. I added a 256GB NVMe SSD to the M.2 Key M socket and left the M.2 Key E socket empty. I also removed the three screws securing the large heatsink and replaced them with three of the four standoffs provided in the kit. The remaining standoff can be added to another of the two remaining mounting holes. But the company did not provide nuts, and I don’t have a spare one of that size…

While the UP 7000 has its heatsink facing down after installing the standoffs, the UP Squared 710’s heatsink faces up which should allow for even better heat dissipation. It’s also larger, so I would expect lower operating temperature and no thermal throttling since the UP 7000 had some minimal throttling under heavy loads like cpuminer.

I finally connected the board to an HDMI monitor and added a USB RF dongle for a wireless keyboard and mouse combo before turning on the power. After a  few seconds, I was greeted with Ubuntu’s setup wizard asking me to choose the language, select a timezone, create an account, and so on.

After going through the setup wizard, I could confirm Ubuntu 24.04.1 was indeed pre-installed on the board. It’s a slightly customized image and comes with a link to the UP Community Wiki on the bottom right side of the desktop.

About menu in the Settings window shows we have Ubuntu 24.01.1 running on an AAEON UPS-ALS01 hardware model with an Intel N100 CPU, 8GB RAM, and 318.7 GB disk capacity since both the onboard eMMC flash and my 256GB NVMe SSD are included.

We can get more details in the terminal:

We can confirm Ubuntu Pro is installed and the version with the following command line:

Inxi has more details:

Everything looks to be detected properly. The idle CPU temperature is reported to be 59°C, a little higher than I had expected since the smaller UP 7000 idled at 54°C.

That will be all for today. I’ll test Ubuntu Pro 24.04 further on the UP Squared 7100 in the second part of the review in a way similar to what I did for the UP 7000, and I may also check if there are direct benefits of using the Ubuntu Pro version apart from guaranteed support.

I’d like to thank AAEON for sending the UP Squared 7100 SBC with an Intel N100 CPU, 8GB RAM, and 64GB eMMC flash for review. The sample reviewed here can be purchased for $306.99 including the 72W power adapter ($15.99) and Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS license + installation service ($30 + $17.99), meaning the price is $259 without those before taxes and shipping.

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