July 8, 2025
For those of you who are new to this, my name is John Giles, and in my former life, I was the creator of Future POS. I sold that to Shift 4 in 2017 and took that opportunity to reimagine POS for the modern day. No Microsoft Windows, no Microsoft SQL – just the best technology that is available today. After creating Round 2 POS, we immediately wanted to find a way to measure the performance of our hot new POS system. The obvious decision was to load it up on a bunch of computers (24), and then point it at a file server that would have been woefully underpowered to run that many terminals in the Future POS days.
So, to that end, we have virtually “one of everything” in our fleet of test computers, and our file server is a Dell 5000 Optiplex (Intel i7-12700K, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, purchase price was $932.79). Our initial goal was just to test our POS, but we quickly realized that this test data gave the industry’s all-in-one manufacturers a way to be performance tested against their peers in a real-world scenario. The POS testing method is essentially what we call the “beer, beer, cash” loop, where it rings sales in an automated fashion continuously (in this case, for 24 hours straight).
The Field:
After the 2024 Stress Lab, we had several long-time POS hardware partners who wanted to showcase their latest/greatest hardware instead of the older units we currently had in our fleet. On that note, a BIG thank you to PartnerTech, CRS, Hanasis, and HP for sending us eight brand new units to test. So we removed some of the poorer-performing, older units from 2024 and replaced them with the fresh hardware our friends were kind enough to supply.
Honorable mention goes out to ELO and Pioneer POS; they both wanted to be included but were in the middle of releasing their next generation hardware and didn’t want to be judged by their last generation hardware. We’ll expect some entries from them in next year’s Stress Lab.
Initial Impressions:
In an office full of “geeks”, it’s always exciting to unbox new hardware. When we pulled the HP units out of the box and set them up, everyone was impressed with the quality of the units. Then we set them up for testing and realized that in a field of 4 Core CPUs, the HP’s had 8 and 12 cores respectively. We were 100% sure that the HP’s would simply dominate the competition. But if you’ve ever heard the old saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, that’s on full display in the 2025 Stress Lab. Here are the Overall Rankings from the performance test:
If you compare the results of the 2025 Stress Lab with the 2024 results, one thing is abundantly clear - everyone performed better. While I wish I could say it was some amazing performance improvement we made to Round 2 POS, I think the real lift came from the temperature difference. When we ran the Stress Lab in 2024, it was in August, and the Stress Lab was probably about 80 degrees. This time we ran it in March/April, and it was a comfortable 65 degrees, which helped far more than I would have guessed.
Make |
Model |
# of Sales |
| Partnertech | A5-2-T | 46,120 |
| Partnertech | G5-1-E | 45,849 |
| Partnertech | J14-1E | 45,835 |
| SAM4s | Sapphire 710 | 45,811 |
| HP | EngageOne Pro I5 | 45,681 |
| Histone | HK578 | 45,558 |
| Histone | HK650 | 45,507 |
| HP | EngageOne Pro I3 | 45,301 |
| HP | RP7 7800 | 44,980 |
| PioneerPOS | Stealthtouch M5 | 44,536 |
| Partnertech | A7-1-K | 44,403 |
| Touch Dynamic | Breeze | 44,214 |
| Touch Dynamic Breeze | Breeze Performance 17 | 44,183 |
| Posiflex | XT-4015 | 43,979 |
| Microsoft | 1901 64GB | 43,723 |
| Posiflex | XT-3815 | 43,040 |
| Aures | Yuno | 42,963 |
| PioneerPOS | Stealthtouch M | 42,915 |
| Touch Dynamic | Atlas J1900 | 42,876 |
| Touch Dynamic | Atlas J1900 | 42,691 |
| Partnertech | SP 5514 | 42,582 |
| TeamSable | 15S BT | 42,544 |
| Partnertech | SP 820 | 42,140 |
| Hanasis | Hit 9 | 42,105 |
| Total: | 1,059,536 |
If you compare the results of the 2025 Stress Lab with the 2024 results, one thing is abundantly clear - everyone performed better. While I wish I could say it was some amazing performance improvement we made to Round 2 POS, I think the real lift came from the temperature difference. When we ran the Stress Lab in 2024, it was in August, and the Stress Lab was probably about 80 degrees. This time we ran it in March/April, and it was a comfortable 65 degrees, which helped far more than I would have guessed.
Another thing that stuck out for us was that the same model from the same manufacturer could actually perform significantly different. You may have noticed that the Touch Dynamic Atlas J1900 is included in the test twice. We had another AIO that didn’t work out, so we had to fill in for it at the last minute, and that was the only unit we had in stock. We thought they would be next to each other in ranking, but never thought one would ring ~200 more sales than the other. I have no explanation for how or why that is, but it is.
The Value Proposition:
Another consideration that we didn’t include last year, but decided to include this year is the “Value” component. If you look at the Overall Rankings, the top is at 46K sales rung and the bottom is at 42K sales rung. If you go to a potential customer and say “do you want the computer that can ring 46,000 sales in a day or the one that can only ring 42,000 sales in a day”, the most common answer will probably be “the cheaper of the two”, because no business on the planet will ever need to ring anywhere close to 42,000 sales in a day on a single workstation. So we got VAR pricing for the new units (and a couple that were still current models) and used that to create a “Value” rating that is based on the cost of the unit versus performance. Here’s what those results look like (the highest number being the best value):
Rank |
Make |
Model |
Warranty |
Value |
| 1 | TeamSable | 15S BT | 3 Year | 100.00 |
| 2 | Hanasis | Hit 9 | 3 Year | 93.17 |
| 3 | Partnertech | J14-1E | 5 Year | 71.27 |
| 4 | Partnertech | G5-1-E | 3 Year | 68.02 |
| 5 | SAM4s | Sapphire 710 | 3 Year | 63.88 |
| 6 | Histone | HK578 | 3 Year | 63.53 |
| 7 | Partnertech | A7-1-K | 5 Year | 36.70 |
| 8 | HP | EngageOne Pro I3 | 3 Year On-Site | 33.33 |
| 9 | Partnertech | A5-2-T | 5 Year | 33.02 |
| 10 | HP | EngageOne Pro I5 | 3 Year On-Site | 32.30 |
In Summary:
It’s great to see the apples-to-apples numbers of how all the different POS all-in-one workstations stack up, but that’s only a piece of it. There’s also the “how reliable is it?” and “how easy is this company to work with?” component that needs to be factored in. There is one AIO manufacturer from whom we purchased 10 units and had 4 of them fail in the first year – hardly a great deal. There’s also the hardware manufacturer who didn’t want to talk to us unless we were ordering more hardware; he didn’t care about how things went after the purchase in the least.
I can confidently say that I’ve been dealing with CRS, Hanasis (Nash Kumar), and PartnerTech for decades, and they have always stood behind their products. Performance is great, and reliability is even better, but knowing you have a partner who will stand behind their products when things go wrong is probably the best foundation for a long-term hardware relationship.
See you next year for Stress Lab 2026, and if you attend RSPA RetailNow, please stop by our booth and say hello. We’re always looking for quality VARs that need a reliable product. You may never need to ring up a million sales in a single day, but if you’re looking for the most rock-solid POS in the market, Round 2 POS is clearly your best option.
You can watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/RrVFadLcDVE
Sincerely,
John Giles
President
Round 2 POS
John.Giles@r2pos.com
