Product Reviews

The race to the bottom just got a new leader. Not content with undercutting - and in the process revolutionising - the laptop market with the Eee PC, Asus is now taking aim at the desktop with the predictably named Eee Box. But be warned: it's a desktop PC in the very loosest sense of the word.

Yes, it sits on a desk. It's a small, thin box that's remarkably light, around the size of a textbook, and it balances delicately on a circular foot stand. It's a little wobbly for our liking, although you could always just lie it down. It also comes with an interesting bracket for screwing the Eee Box to the VESA mounting holes on the back of any standard monitor, which is a great way to save on space.

But really the Eee Box is little more than an Eee PC in different clothing. The same 1.6GHz Atom N270 powers it, along with 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk. Intel's old GMA 950 integrated chip powers the graphics, Windows XP comes as standard - running without a hitch during our testing - and you get the same draft-n wireless. Notably, the shared core specification also means it lacks an integrated optical drive - a weakness almost unheard of in today's desktop PCs.

In fact the only differences we can spot in the specification are the presence of Gigabit Ethernet, and the support for the Memory Stick format to add to the SD and MMC cards of the reader on the front. The chassis does allow for some extra ports, though, with DVI the main addition. Two USB ports sit on the rear with a further two on the front, and there are audio outputs for speakers and headphones.

Cool and quiet

There are cooling vents on the top and bottom edges, but the Eee Box didn't rise above mildly warm during our intensive tests. And given the laptop components, it's also remarkably quiet in use - it's a good job the power button glows blue or you may struggle to tell if it's on in all but the quietest of environments.

As you might expect given the use of the Atom processor, power consumption is impressively low. When idle we measured just 17W, and this only rose to 20W when pushed hard - the lowest figures of any PC we've seen.

The

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flipside to this is that the Eee Box performs pretty similarly to the Eee PC 901 and 1000H. It tiptoed through our 2D benchmarks with a score of 0.38, pulling slightly ahead of its laptop brethren only in the Office test.

The Atom's Hyper-Threading is the closest we'll get to dual-core until it is upgraded in the future, and for the first time this becomes a bit of an issue. When you're working on a 9in or 10in laptop, opening several windows and multitasking is awkward, so by its very design you're railroaded into not pushing the Atom very hard.

But connect the Eee Box to a proper monitor, even a small 17in or 19in one, and you inevitably start trying to use it as you would a normal PC - open several apps at once and you'll very quickly find the Atom grinds to an unsatisfying halt. This is not a processor designed for the rigours of normal desktop life, and it shows.

When you add the price into the equation it all gets a bit more muddled. As it's basically an Eee PC without a screen and keyboard we expected quite a hefty saving, but £170 just isn't as low as we'd hoped. The inclusion of XP doesn't help matters, and there's currently no Linux option to save valuable pounds.

Linux front-end

There is, however, the instant-on ExpressGate front-end. With the option to browse the web, play with photos, chat and use Skype, all without booting XP, the primary functions of a so-called "net-top" can be accessed in under 30 seconds - you may not need Windows at all. Whether many of the targeted market will be comfortable not using the familiar XP interface is a different matter.

The Eee Box is still a very, very cheap PC, though, which will appeal to schools and libraries. For web browsing and basic word processing it's more than capable, and of course it can be added to existing monitors with ease - attaching it to the back of a screen is also a simple way of reducing the chances of it being damaged or fiddled with by wandering hands.

But will it appeal to most users? It's comfortably the cheapest desktop we've reviewed, but a quick look at Dell's website shows it's certainly not the cheapest out there. Amazingly, a Vostro 200 PC with a Pentium Dual-Core CPU, 2GB of RAM and an optical drive would actually cost you less than the Eee Box, and that's including Dell's rip-off shipping fees.

The Eee Box is also not the status symbol the first Eee PC was - you won't be able to whip it out on the train to show what a trend-setter you are. And when you consider you're getting all the disadvantages of the Eee PC (poor performance, no optical drive, small hard disk) without the main advantage (portability) we just can't see the Eee Box gaining the mainstream appeal of its laptop sibling.