ASUS Eee box

By now most of the readers of bitolumns may know of ASUS, a very established, inventive technology company. You may know of their very famous, and also very good, netbook the Eee PC, of which a review can be found here. Once again ASUS are firing another product at us. This time: A desktop PC. But not just any desktop PC, the ASUS Eee Box, a small, lightweight, low-power-consumption PC. The Eee Box is released on the 25th November of this year (2008). It will be available in black or white.

The Eee Box specifications:

1.6 GHZ Intel Atom Processor N270
Windows XP Home Operating System
Intel Chipset Motherboard
WLAN WiFi 802.11b/g/n and 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
1GB DDR2 RAM
WLAN: 802.11 b/g/n
80GB or 160GB HDD (Hard Drive)
SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro Storage Slots
DVI-Out/USB×4 (2 in front, 2 in rear) (Input/Output)
223×178×26 mm (Dimensions without stand)
Comes complete with ASUS wired mouse and keyboard
N.B. This system does not come with an optical drive (CD or DVD reader/writer) and an external one must be bought separately if needed.

The Eee Box will retail at around £200. BitColumns best price offer has so far been found at http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148886 for the Black Eee Box, and http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149899 for the White Eee Box.

The Eee Box is an innovative little desktop system. It’s mostly been created for the light PC user, someone who won’t intensively use their desktop system or doesn’t need to do anything intensive with their desktop. It itself is very small, about the size of 2 DVD cases stacked next to each other. This for a desktop PC is astonishing. It is also whisper quiet in operation. You would struggle to hear it even while using it to its maximum potential, despite this fact it doesn’t get very warm either.

The looks: It’s visually very appealing. Our particular test model was the black version which looked very nice and would fit well into any room in the house while looking stylish. The stand that attaches to the bottom of the Eee Box also has a designer look to it, and perhaps even makes the Eee Box look a little bit like a piece of art, but that’s a matter of opinion. Other than this the Eee Box is very minimalistic in looks. It’s just the box, a stylish stand and the WLAN aerial at the back. On the front is the on button, illuminated blue, and a front panel. This panel folds out to reveal the on button, the reset button, the HDD activity light, 2 USB ports and the card reader. The card reader takes a range of formats including SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro so can be useful for permanent or temporary storage. And another last nifty little feature is that if you don’t want the Eee Box to be seen (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t, it looks quite cool) is that it comes complete with an attachment so that it can be attached to the back of a TV or monitor thus turning your TV or monitor into an all-in-one PC. And with the Eee Box being so small and light it becomes essentially invisible and can easily be taken with the TV wherever it goes.

What’s inside: Inside the processor is the same as the processor from the Eee PC 901, saying that it is a very good processor, it handles running programs, games, and the OS very well. The 1GB of RAM is also plenty of memory to keep the system running smoothly and efficiently. The Hard Drive at 80GB or 160GB is plenty of room for a home PC, for a light user. In any case the 160 GB hard drive is sufficient enough for any user. In any case 16GB SD cards are becoming very cheap nowadays and to buy and insert one into your machine as extra permanent data wouldn’t be very expensive. The wireless aerial isn’t too noticeable and is very good. It provides very good wireless connection, found in our testing, and finds connections, connects to them and stays connected very well. Some of the best wireless connections I’ve seen in a while. 4 USB ports is sufficient enough, 1 for a keyboard, 1 for a mouse and 2 others left for other USB devices, such as a printer or a USB flash drive etc. By now everyone should know what Windows XP is like, and it runs very nicely on this machine, having no problems at all. Having said that though any distribution of Linux would have run very much better and would’ve used the resources much more efficiently, which is why I favour the Eee PC with the Linux on. Also if it had Linux on instead the price would probably be less as ASUS would not have to pay for the Software License for Microsoft’s Windows XP (compare the prices of the Eee PC with Windows XP to those with Linux on). Having said that…

The Express Gate: The Eee Box features a feature called the Express Gate. This is where the Eee Box boots in 7 seconds (that’s right 7 seconds!) to a splash screen where the user can then access a few basic features very quickly, such as web browser, instant messenger client and some others. This will then load the user into a VERY basic Linux operating system which has the basic features such as web browser, messaging client, system options etc. available, if the suer just wants to use these basic features. However if the suer wants a word processor or any other features they must then go to boot to OS in the options menu. This Linux operating system is very basic keep in mind. Very basic options are available. It is quite easy to use, because it is so basic, however we did have problems with the wireless configuration to begin with, though these were eventually solved. It works quite well, but as we said it’s very simple so very hard to flaw. Windows can then be booted from here without having to restart the PC and can be found under the options menu.

Performance: We ran a few tests on the Eee Box to test the performance of it and we can say it performs quite well. The hardware inside isn’t top specced hardware, as can be seen from the price, however it is sufficient and works very well for what it is. It runs the word processor included with the OS (OpenOffice) very well and loads it up quite quickly. This goes for all the OpenOffice software. All other applications such as web browsers, file manager and media players all ran very well on the hardware and the system didn’t struggle with any of it. It even handled running multiple applications quite well for the hardware it was using. We then tested out a well know MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) called Guild Wars. We installed this on the system and ran it with minimum graphics. The game worked perfectly. SO we decided to up-step the graphics, it ran fine. Eventually we ran the game at top graphical mode, with the shadows and shaders turned down as they take up a lot of system resources and the game was working very well at high graphics mode (with the shadows and shaders turned down) with minimal (if any) lag. So the graphics and performance of this system are very adequate for playing mid-level PC games. We at bitcolumns were very impressed by these results.

So in conclusion we thought the Eee Box is a bargain! A very good catch for the money you pay for it. Only £200 for a very small, stylish, whisper-quiet and all-rounder PC that can be used for any day to day task and, as we found out from our tests, can play some mid-range games very competently. This would be recommended to: those of you who don’t use a desktop very much, for example you use a laptop mostly, and just need one as a base unit, to those of you who are very casual PC users and so don’t want to dish our £500+ for a PC, this is perfect and to parents for a child’s first computer, or for a teenagers computer as they are cheap, good build, small and have a decent specification. Overall another satisfying product from ASUS, cheap, stylish and small but best of all simplistic!

Score: 4.5/5