I recently discovered that a Raspberry Pi-based thin client can effectively run the full version of Windows 10 almost as well as a dedicated PC.

During my time using NComputing’s RX300, I found the $99 Raspberry Pi 3-based machine to offer an experience largely identical to that using my relatively recent Intel Core i7 laptop.

To demonstrate how well the system runs relative to a Windows 10 PC, I captured video of the thin client and my laptop performing the same everyday tasks on Windows 10.

Watch the video above to see how the performance of the two compares. In many sections you can see how long each action took on the stopwatch in the bottom right-hand corner.

SEE: Hardware spotlight: The Raspberry Pi

As you can see from the video, the only task the thin client struggled with relative to the laptop was transferring a file to a USB stick, possibly due to the bottleneck of the Pi 3’s shared USB and Ethernet data bus.

An obvious caveat is that Windows was not running on the RX300, but on a server, and being streamed over the internet to the thin client as a virtual desktop. In this instance, Windows was being run on a relatively beefy virtual machine, an Extra Large T2 instance in Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud that was hosted on a server running on a 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 processor.

For reference, the laptop is Toshiba Portege Z30 laptop running a 64-bit Windows 10 Insider Preview system. The machine has an 2.1GHz Intel Core i7 4600U processor, with 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD.

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