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

By Don Woligroski
published

We're testing four nettops: Arctic Cooling’s MC001-BD, ASRock’s CoreHT 252B, Giada’s i50, and Zotac’s Zbox AD03BR-PLUS. All of these tiny, quiet systems take a very different approach to compact computing, and we fill you in on what makes them unique.

Power, Temperature, And Noise Benchmarks

With a well-defined idea how each of these nettops performs, it's also important to consider power use and noise. Especially when it comes to enclosures without much airflow, cooling is a particular challenge that we need to evaluate.

We've finally found something that the ASRock CoreHT 252B struggles with in comparison to the other three competitors. The results are expected given a desktop-class processor. However, all of the machine's components still use less than 60 W with a full GPU and CPU load applied, so that power number hardly seems extreme.

The rest of these systems just sip power. It’s interesting that Arctic’s Atom D525/Mobility Radeon HD 5450 combo is more power hungry than the E-350- and Core i3-430UM-based machines.  

The temperatures are so close that the differences are barely worth mentioning. Arctic's MC001-BD does exceptionally well when you consider that it’s passively cooled.

Although Arctic is the shoo-in given its passive cooling system, the other models hardly generate enough noise to notice. We wouldn’t mind having any of these systems in close proximity on our desks.

Don Woligroski
32 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jdwii
    MISTAKE

    But at $504 with no operating system (and $399 for a version without an operating system, hard drive, or memory),
    Reply
  • Pyree
    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.
    Reply
  • chumly
    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.
    Reply
  • AMD X6850
    As mentioned, no remove comes bundled with the Zbox.

    Remote?
    Reply
  • cleeve
    AMD X6850Remote?
    Thx, fixed!
    Reply
  • molo9000
    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.
    Reply
  • amk-aka-Phantom
    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.
    Reply
  • compton
    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.
    Reply
  • ruban71
    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.
    Reply
  • 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.)
    Reply