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

[AidanJC]

I think there's something wrong with your wireless configuration.

 

[longinthetooth]

Your quote-
"you could build one heck of a desktop with a lot more horsepower for less money"

So like several other comments, lets see Tom do it!

Tell us what you are targetting, eg, Home Theatre, etc. Why can't Tom build a completely quiet, passively cooled beast for the half the price?

 

[livebriand]

[citation][nom]Pyree[/nom]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.[/citation]
Another thing - if it's also used to play music on your stereo sometimes, you just use the internal screen rather than turning the TV on to select stuff.

 

[nikorr]

10 years ago they would be killer rigs : )

 

[pyite]

My God, these 4 are all completely worthless for media playback.

ATI is a non-starter since their hardware decoding doesn't work at all. Intel is better but still no hardware decoding. I wish there were an alternative to NVidia, but there simply isn't.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]pyite[/nom]My God, these 4 are all completely worthless for media playback.ATI is a non-starter since their hardware decoding doesn't work at all. Intel is better but still no hardware decoding. I wish there were an alternative to NVidia, but there simply isn't.[/citation]

That's not true.

Hardware decoding works on all of these solutions. Who told you otherwise?

 

[jkoltner]

While these systems aren't the best bang for the buck, the folks who just chime in "overpriced!" are naive -- and the manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank: Many people don't purchase these machines based on some sort of objective feature-by-feature comparison with other platforms, but instead whip out the credit card as soon as they're convinced the feature-set is good enough for their needs and the price is "tolerable."

In many ways it's a lot easier to run a profitable business when you're not trying to compete on price alone anyway -- I'd much rather try to build cool-looking, reasonable-performing boxes like this than go head-to-head against Dell or HP on commodity desktops or laptops.

Speaking of laptops... I agree with the poster who mentions that they're often a good alternative to a dedicated HTPC box like this. I think the main drawback is the WAF (wife acceptance factor) -- something like the ZBox looks one heck of a lot nicer than a laptop with cables coming out of three sides of it.

 

[lowezno]

Nice article. Thank you. I've been waiting for the perfect HTPC machine to show up, it seems that we are close but not enough.
What do we need for this? Any HTPC-entussiasthic will tell you:

-ITX form factor
-Stylish, must match your home theater
-Quiet= passive cooling
-minimun power needed
-must move 3D HD bluray without too much hassle
-slim bluray ROM
-multi card reader
-optical SPDIF, outputting 5.1 at minimum
-bunch of usb for periphericals + usb 3.0 for external tera-storage
-gigaethernet+wifi abgn
-min 2GB RAM dual channel
-really don't care for the remote, let me choose
-don't care for SO, let me choose
-max 700 €


Build up a comparison of these machines (is any) and you'll be rocking!