Nettop Round-Up: Four Tiny PCs, Benchmarked And Reviewed

MISTAKE

IDK, $800 for the ASRock CoreHT 252B. A laptop cost less, has better performance for that price range, better mobility and space saving plus you have everything (screen, speaker etc). I rather get a laptop for a small office.

These all seem expensive to me, considering you could probably build a better mini itx slim form factor system from scratch for about half the price.

Remote?

Thx, fixed!

Nettops? These things are far too expensive to be nettops.
They are small form factor PCs or home theatre PCs, but they are not nettops.

btw: Mac mini should be in this lineup.

Very nice article. I was about to request something like it

Mac Mini should be in this lineup? Actually, a good idea. I'd love to see how it compares to similar Wintel boxes.

I'm through with these small boxes because they're a pain in the a$$ to service and the hardware isn't good for the price ($800?! gimme a break!), but I see value in them for people who are ready to pay more for the small size.

If I would build a small form-factor box myself, I'd use something like this new Lian Li case which was in Tom's news recently - it can fit proper PCI/PCI-E cards.

Again, lovely article. Keep it up.

P.S. The ASRock box is great.

I second the sentiment that these aren't really nettops. Luckily, the next iteration of Llano should rectify that, creating the golden triangle of CPU , GPU, and low cost. At least that's what I expect anyway. These reviewed units are more HTPC solutions than low cost nettop. Intel has a new half height miniITX initiative with a rare and relatively expensive 1155 mini ITX to match. However, once Intel's iGPU gets a serving of HTPC friendly features, you could build your own full featured, passively cooled system to take these units on performance and price as well. The move to 22nm should make low powered passively cooled CPUs easy to get right. As it stands, each of the solutions tested are pretty good, but I'm not sure that any of them are worth the asking price. In particular, I've always avoided Atom like the plague, and I don't think they're appropriate in small form factor systems that cost more than about $200.

Can we now have a comparison against a couple of ITX builds? Choose an nice looking case and show us what can be put together for similar money.

I've owned an E350 - struggles with HD playback in a linux system, there doesn't appear to be any support for the amd hardware decoding. So if you were thinking of making a linux htpc out of it, go for something more powerful... It will perform better though as in the article above if using Windows (Using I think - Media Player classic which allows hardware h.264 decode.)

I agree; I had to deal with E-350 (great mini-ITX Gigabyte board, btw, has everything) two weeks ago. It's a fail in Ubuntu, I barely got Compiz to work there without issues and my 900 MHz Celeron M can usually max it out...

Thanks for including the Starcraft II benchmark! Please test more systems with this game!

My E-350 w/ Win7 running inside an old Nintendo makes for a fine HTPC.

[IMG]http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn87/max40watt/NESpc/IMG_1739.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn87/max40watt/NESpc/IMG_1725.jpg[/IMG]

Also would say my E-350 system is fine, was under $300 to build with Windows and no Bluray drive. Plays back anything but 1080P mkv files from WMC (which works fine in other software) and handles all of my HD recording/playback from WMC as well.

Why no MacMini in the comparison?

I'd also like to see an ITX system marathon.

The prices are just too high. It shouldn't be possible for me to just buy a superior performing laptop instead, and actually SAVE money.

In that vain, it's difficult for me to even build a llano based system myself, at a low enough cost to justify doing so.

OVERPRICED!

I wanna see how good some undervolted Llano performs against anything else when set on an ITX heatsink-like case. I have a feeling running Crysis on a silent rig with system power comsuption below 80W is the deal of the decade.

I completely agree -- this was a large omission as the Mac mini is actually the class leader in this segment. Surprisingly, it is even price competitive with the PC options listed above! (weird for Apple)

This comparison would be more valuable than typical PC/Mac because OS is largely irrelevant for a websurfing/netflix nettop. The lighter footprint of Mac OS would probably yield better performance.