Its physical size and GPIO pinout are designed to be compatible with the second and third-generation Raspberry Pi models.

The first released board features 4K video, 2 GB of onboard RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a Rockchip RK3288 processor running at 1.8 GHz.

[25] ASUS originally planned for a late February 2017 release, but a UK vendor broke the embargo and began advertising and selling boards starting on 13 February 2017, before ASUS's marketing department was ready.

[needs update] In March 2017 benchmark testing found that while the WLAN performance is only around 30 Mbit/s, the Gigabit Ethernet delivers a full 950 Mbit/s throughput.

[28] RAM access tested using the mbw benchmark is 25% faster than the Raspberry Pi 3.