Monday December 01, 2008

Asus Eee Box B202 nettop PC specifications and review

The Asus Eee Box B202 nettop PC is a great complement to your existing stable of computers at home, if all you need is something simple for a bedroom, kids' room, or kitchen for the occasional net surfing, word processing or other light duty. The technical specifications are as follows :

Model : Asus Eee Box B202
OS : Microsoft Windows XP Home
CPU : Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
Chipset : Intel 945GSE+ICH7M
Memory : 1GB RAM
Wired Network : Gigabit Ethernet LAN
Wireless Network : 802.11 b/g/n WLAN
Storage : 80GB HDD Hybrid Storage
Card Reader : SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro
Video : DVI-Out
Ports : USB×4(2 in front, 2 in rear)
Dimensions : 223×178×26 mm (without stand)

I used to have a secondary AMD64 3200+ system setup in my room with an nVidia graphics card, tower casing and the whole works. When the casing started to fall apart from rust, and the motherboard started having problems again despite a relatively recent overhaul, I decided that I didn't have the time nowadays to go and tinker with it further, find replacement parts or such, so the Asus Eee Box looked like the best choice for the situation.

Here it is mounted behind my Philips LCD monitor using the standard 4-point VESA bracket that was actually originally designed for mounting the monitor on the wall :

That's it. Setting this up took all of 5 minutes, and all that was required was a cross screwdriver to mount it onto the back of the monitor. And the price (got it for S$439 which is around US$290) is a bargain, considering that it includes a licensed Microsoft Windows XP Home, already configured and good to go from the box. Here's a top view of the setup :

The Eee Box is a huge contrast to my former noisy setup which had a total of 8 fans (2 in front, 1 on top, 2 behind, plus PSU, CPU and video card fans). It was like comparing a concert hall with a jetliner, or my Civic Hybrid in auto-stop mode with a giant earth mover truck next to it. As far as I can tell, it is nearly completely silent.

For the price and specifications, you can't really expect too much from it performance-wise, and that was pretty much the case when I tried a bit of pushing-the-envelope with a couple of HD video clips encoded in MKV H.264 format. That didn't work out really well. As expected, this wasn't quite designed to be a HTPC or media PC replacement or anything of the sort. Standard definition (SD), up to DVD-quality movies were generally fine, however. By the same token, you wouldn't expect this to pull heavy duty playing 3D-intensive games of any kind as well. The Mozilla Firefox browser ran pretty well, together with most Flash content. Office-type apps ran fine too. And performance didn't take as much of a hit as initially feared even after I installed the AVG virus-scanner.

Overall, it worked out pretty much as expected. The low power consumption is a good bonus as well. The Eee Box uses notebook components, all with low power draw. The power adaptor is also the usual 65W notebook type, so it is actually impossible for the system to draw more power than that. Compare and contrast this with typical desktop PC power supply units that are running into the 400W and 500W range nowadays. According to some tech specs I've come across out there, the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of just 2W. How about that - it's quite a feat. And the entire system including CPU, motherboard, chipset and all have a typical power usage of just about 20W.

The Asus Eee Box B202 nettop PC is a great way to save some green (as in dollars) and to be green (as in power usage) at the same time. As a secondary PC for light usage, it is highly recommended.

See also :

1. Asus EEE Box B202 nettop PC mounted behind LCD monitor

(2008-12-01 18:32:01 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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