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Sapphire Edge-HD Mini PC review

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Verdict

Aside from its size it's unremarkable and, thanks to its lack of OS, not as good value as it might look

Review Date: 24 Feb 2011

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Price when reviewed: £204 (£245 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
4 stars out of 6

Value for Money
4 stars out of 6

Performance
2 stars out of 6

The humble nettop can only be improved in so many ways, with the Intel Atom processor and integrated graphics restricting it to basic tasks and media playback, so it’s natural that manufacturers have been looking to innovate elsewhere. Sapphire has decided miniaturisation is the way to go with its new Edge-HD.

It’s the firm’s first nettop, and is rather ambitiously touted as “the smallest PC in the world”. We’d argue that the Anders fit-PC 2 has a volume of 313cm³ to the Sapphire’s 558cm³, but the Edge-HD is certainly smaller than most and, at just 20mm wide, will be able to slip into the smallest of crevices. Note the need for an external power supply, though.

Despite the small size, the port selection is excellent. A pair of USB 2 sockets are hidden behind a flap on the front, and the rear serves up two more ports next to D-SUB and HDMI outputs as well as Gigabit Ethernet.

It feels reasonably solid for such a small machine: the centre of the chassis is a bit flexible, but we’ve seen more expensive machines look and feel cheaper. It’s coated with a matte-black finish, and when the neat power buttons, minimal lines and ripple-effect base are factored in, you have one of the sleekest nettops around.

The Sapphire is powered by an Intel Atom D510, which used its pair of 1.66GHz cores to return a score of 0.40 in our application-based benchmarks. That’s what we’d expect from an Atom, although bear in mind that similar systems based on AMD’s Brazos platform should offer more juice when they appear – in our tests, the AMD E-350 was about 20% quicker.

Sapphire hasn’t settled for Intel’s integrated graphics, instead opting for Nvidia’s latest Ion chipset, which has 16 graphics processing cores and 512MB of DDR3 memory. While it won’t play top-level games – our Low quality Crysis benchmark crashed before it could finish – it’s powerful enough to handle 720p video playback smoothly, with only the most demanding sections of our 1080p test clips stuttering.

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Sapphire Edge-HD Mini PC review

has any one tried a linux distro.
At 89 deg that is nearly a pot of tea

By invalidscreenname on 24 Feb 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=U6IvsZnPtsY

By stokegabriel on 24 Feb 2011

OS choice

FreeDOS is probably not the best choice of an OS for this, but Windows would be worse. They should at least have an option to have it come with Ubuntu or one of its derivatives. There is so much you can do with software on Linux to turn this into a really useful device at very low cost.

By kingdavid7 on 24 Feb 2011

OS choice

By kingdavid7 on 24 Feb 2011

OS choice

By kingdavid7 on 24 Feb 2011

Called HD and "stutters"?

Surprised you play this comment down! There is no amount of stuttering that is acceptable when watching an HD movie with your other half. If a machine calls itself this, chooses a separate graphic card and offers HDMI output (implying media center duties), stuttering should be an immediate exclusion point.

Ever tried to explain to the missus that your new purchase (brought at the expense of her new shoes) is a PC and she should therefore expect the jitters when watching Dirty Dancing? It doesn't end well.

By jefferson30 on 25 Feb 2011

nothing on the fitpc

with FitPC having announced their 2 new versions - 1 which is significantly smaller than this one with Nvidia TEGRA and the other with AMG G Series, i'm afraid Saphire HD is dead in the water...

By lowenergycomputing on 25 Feb 2011

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