Product Reviews

Anyone who's seen a Mac mini will find the Evesham Mini PC strangely familiar. When the former first arrived in the office, we lamented that no PC manufacturer had tried anything so innovative or brave, concluding that there was simply 'nothing in the Windows world to touch it'.

But in June of this year, AOpen demonstrated a concept PC at the Computex trade show in Taipei, setting tongues wagging throughout the media. It's taken this long for the final creation to appear, with Evesham taking up the gauntlet to build AOpen's barebones chassis into a finished product.

Externally, it's exactly the same dimensions as Apple's offering, albeit in a slightly less jazzy casing. Inside, though, it's a very different story. The Mini PC takes advantage of an Intel 915GM-chipset laptop motherboard in order to squeeze so much into a small space. The processing side is looked after by a 2GHz Pentium M 760 processor backed by 512MB of RAM. It's a perfectly respectable specification for everything from web browsing to photo editing, and we had no complaints ploughing through a day's work on it - the overall benchmark score of 0.83 is exactly what we'd expect from a comparably specified notebook. Graphics are handled by the distinctly modest Intel GMA 900 chip - you won't coax any modern 3D titles to run on this particular box.

While you'll have no issues with everyday performance, there are more space-related compromises here than you'll find on the average notebook. The back of the unit sees the same shortcomings as the Mac mini: just two USB ports (with no PS/2) means you'll probably need to invest in a USB hub, adding clutter to your desk, although Evesham will also be offering a wireless keyboard and mouse that require only a single port for £28 exc VAT. There's a six-pin FireWire port, which will prove handy should you need to boost your disk space or transfer DV footage, although we'd gladly sacrifice it for another USB connection. There's also Gigabit Ethernet to look after your wired networking needs, but basic 3.5mm inputs and outputs are all you get on the audio front. Thankfully, video outputs are slightly more generous, with the sensible choice of DVI-I and S-Video outputs catering for most displays, including TVs.

The internals are similarly sparse. The picture (see left) shows the Mini PC

There's a single half-height PCI Express socket, for which Evesham is offering a wireless LAN upgrade (add £42 exc VAT to the base price), but apart from that no real room to manoeuvre - there's only a single SODIMM slot, so you'll have to remove the existing 512MB stick for any upgrade. Even then, it's best done by Evesham itself, as the EMI shielding covering the motherboard is hard to re-attach. Other options include an external USB hybrid TV tuner, which will make the most of Evesham's installation of Media Center Edition 2005 (now included on all its consumer PCs). But even without these options, you're still getting a very competent PC in a box not much bigger than an external optical drive.

This isn't quite a Mac mini killer, though. Sat on a desk, the Mini PC looks smart enough to be on full display. Put a Mac mini next to it, though, and it's obvious which is the ugly sister: the silver-metallic plastic finish simply can't compete with the Apple; the glaringly bright neon blue power light, pulsating wildly during access, looks a little overblown; even the button to eject optical discs looks superfluous on something so wee. There's also the price to compare: £595 exc VAT for a system without a screen, keyboard or mouse is a sizeable blow to its appeal - you can get a Mac mini for about £320, albeit one with a significantly lower specification. As a second computer, that's extremely tempting, even for die-hard Windows users. To compete with the Mini PC's specifications, you'll need to spend more like £500 on a Mac mini, but that's still a hefty saving. However, it's worth noting that Evesham will also be offering a Celeron M 360-based version of the Mini PC, with 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard disk, for £425.

But looking in the context of other Windows PCs, it's equally true of the Mini PC that there's nothing in the Windows world to touch it - at least not yet. As such, if you're after something a bit different, it's a perfectly good purchase. But what the Mini PC has really done is to show what's possible. Next to this, a Shuttle system looks bulky, and a standard desktop tower simply ridiculous. It raises the standard of what we should be expecting from manufacturers and is the advance guard of a form-factor revolution - yes, another one. With the release of Intel's Viiv PCs just around the corner, expect to see a good deal more like it.