Asus EeeBox EB1012. Intel Ion chipset with a dial core Atom 330 CPU, 2G of RAM and a 250G HD. Very small box, with hardware support for MPEG2/4 video decoding. Very quiet. Able to decode HD video at 1080p using hardware rather than CPU.
Impressions as a HTPC:
I’d been looking into HTPCs for about a year. My requirements were simple. I wanted something OEM, small, quiet, power frugal and able to decode 1080p with ease. Oh and I didn’t want to spend too much. When I was looking around in January I found 3 possible options. The Asus, the Dell Zino HD or the Acer Reno R3610. I chose the Asus mainly because it was cheaper than the other two. It was a tough call though. All up it cost me $730incl.
The 250G 2.5” SATA drive might be a bit small but then it has an eSATA connector for an external drive. It also comes with WiFi (802.11b/g/n), S/PDIF audio jack, 4 USB ports and a card reader. It doesn’t have an optical drive though but that didn’t bother me at all. While it came with a wired keyboard and mouse I instead used my wireless keyboard and mouse. I’ve plugged it into my 46” 1080p Sony via HDMI and didn’t use the S/PDIF plug as my amp is already plugged into my TV via this method.
Setup was very simple however took about an hour for the Windows 7 setup process. Surprisingly there was very little bloatware installed by Asus and what had been installed was able to be uninstalled quickly and easily.
H.264 1080p video files plays perfectly on the PC. CPU hovering around 20-30% CPU usage. 5.1 sound works perfectly over HDMI. I bought a USB DVB-T tuner a few weeks later (AverMedia Volar X for $99incl) and plugged that in. Using Windows Media Centre I can watch all TV channels perfectly. TV 1-3 in HD works fine with the Ion chipset taking care of the decoding. Recording to disk works fine too with the AverTV software generating H.264 format files. All very usable with no delay or glitches.
I hid the Asus behind my TV and you can’t even see it while watching TV. You can’t hear it either with no fan noise. In fact I’m not even sure if it has a fan.
Apart from watching digital TV and HD recorded content my only other requirements were for general purpose PC jobs, web browsing and running a BitTorrent client. It does all this just fine. I’ve got another PC for playing games so I don’t care about gaming performance. Neither am I going to be transcoding or editing video on it.
Summary:
If you’re after a general purpose PC for video, games and Photoshop or video editing then the Asus is not for you. If you’re after a brand name HTPC which works out of the box which can handle 1080p with 5.1 audio as well as doing general purpose Internet duties then the EeeBox is certainly worth consideration. When compared to the Acer and Dell it’s very good value for money. Build quality is excellent and power consumption is very low (around 20-30W). The only thing they could have improved on would have been a larger HD and a bundled remote. Both limitations are easily and cheaply overcome though.
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