Under laboratory conditions, the Jadetec Micro PC proved that it is capable of providing a pleasant working environment if office applications are what's mostly being run. The lab engineers put the Micro PC through a whole course of hoops, including our well-known CPU stress test that includes about 30 hours of uninterrupted operation at maximum load. The result was that the P4 CPU didn't at any time go into back-burner mode. The platform also proved to be remarkably stable processing DV video material. The PC compressed almost 30 GB of data with a frame rate of just under ten images a second. It must be said that the procedure took almost nine hours, though. The technicians uncovered one anomaly when they deactivated all the COM ports.

After that, Windows refused to start. This can be assigned to the original configuration at installation and is comparable to the behavior of some Asus motherboards. All the same, the Micro PC performed all tests without a murmur and, despite the high load, the system temperature rose only slightly. Acoustically, too, the PC hummed softly in the background. This is something that cannot be taken for granted for such a compact system.

The type plate informs us that it's an EZ1 - whatever that means.

The casing, with its high-gloss finish, deserves some criticism. It fails to leave an impression of high quality. But it would be unfair to linger on this point, since the remaining system details, all finely crafted, certainly carry the day. There's no doubt that a lot of manual labor goes into assembling the Micro PC, because its construction is much trickier compared to conventional systems.

The case is from this designer, not a household name yet.