BUTLER, PA – Round 2 POS is a hot new point-of-sale solution focused on the retail and hospitality industries. It is the brainchild of POS veteran, John Giles, who you may remember from his prior company, Future POS. This is a completely new approach to point-of-sale that is lightning fast while being rock solid because unlike most POS products, it’s based on Linux. When creating the Stress Lab, we had three goals in mind:

1. To stress test our point-of-sale solution in the lab (not a customer’s site) to find any potential bugs and see how our software performs.

       2. To showcase the speed and reliability of a Linux base POS versus a Windows, iOS or Android solution.

       3. To give the VAR community real performance data for the point-of-sale all-in-one terminals that we all use.

The Testing Method:
To start with, we purchased a Dell 5000 Optiplex Tower to be our file server. The specs are as follows: Intel i7-12700K, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD (purchase price was $932.79). This is the same file server we would have purchased back in my Future POS days to run 10 POS clients. In order to showcase the speed and power of Linux, we connected 24 POS clients to this server. We then setup the POS software to do what we call a “beer, beer, cash” loop where the POS automatically rings up two items, then settles the sale to cash and repeats. This is a comprehensive real-world test of point-of-sale all-in-one terminals, as it very closely mirrors how the POS software is used in day to day operations. It also tests 4 different aspects of the POS hardware:

1. CPU/Motherboard speed.
2. Network throughput.
3. Local hard drive performance.
4. Video performance (settlement screen has a slide out animation).

We let all 24 POS terminals ring sales for 24 hours straight and then did a count of how many sales each terminal was able to perform during that time. The results came as a bit of a surprise…

2024 Test Results:
For starters, the Dell server was never above 3% CPU during the entire test and was around 1.8% CPU utilization the majority of the time. We could easily have run another 24 terminals on this server without it even breaking a sweat!

As for the point-of-sale all-in-one’s, the winner shocked everyone in our office:

The top performers came in very close with regards to the number of sales they were able to complete, but the real surprise came when we saw who came out on top. The HP RP7 7800 is an all-in-one we have here for compatibility testing, and that product line was discontinued in 2017. Brand new all-in-one terminals straight out of the box had been beaten by a terminal that was over 7 years old!

I know several of the all-in-one manufacturers were none too happy with the results and have vowed to reclaim their rightful place next time we run this test. Lucky for them we’ll be doing it again for 2025, probably in the January/February time frame. If you feel like your company was underrepresented or not represented at all, simply reach out to me and we’ll get your newest/best hardware included in the next test. But just be forewarned: HP has told me that they intend to give me their newest/best hardware as well, and they don’t intend to lose.

You can watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p70KbYI6-Wo