And it was temporary. While I once* got an uptime of a little over 3 hours, this image quickly went back to "boot loop and crash". Verified on at least three different sandisk ultra cards.
During the three hours, it did run "ok". No benches (I was busy wasting my time installing stuff). The board felt somewhat "snappy", but nowhere as fast as some lesser boards I have, and way way less than my Odroid XU4.
I found it interesting that sector to sector clones of the SD card would not boot at all, and the amount of heat generated around the SD slot seemed "unusually warm". hmm...
I would really like to see this board work.