ASUS Eee Box Preview & Intel's Atom Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Performance
The Eee Box we previewed shipped with 1GB of DDR2-667 and despite the limited memory size, performance was actually surprisingly good under Windows XP. Windows popped up quickly and the OS itself was snappy; the Eee Box’s Atom processor was more than fast enough for single tasking in the OS. If you’re looking for a PC to surf the web, check email, listen to music and watch standard definition videos then the Eee Box running Windows XP is more than sufficient, it’s actually fast. Start multitasking a lot and you’ll want the 2GB upgrade, but again, 1GB is totally fine if you keep your application launching under control.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for under Vista; while performance between XP and Vista is actually pretty similar within applications, it’s the speed of the UI that really varies between the two OSes. Without Aero, Windows Vista still feels slower than XP despite posting very similar application performance scores. While the Eee Box feels like a fast machine under XP, it feels underpowered when running Windows Vista. Upgrading the memory to 2GB doesn’t have any impact on the feel under Vista either unfortunately.
The Eee Box has no problems running Vista, however we’d strongly recommend against it. The experience is just so much better under XP that we’d suggest keeping Vista on your more powerful machines and leave XP or Linux on the Eee Box.
Power Consumption
Measuring power consumption of the Eee Box is unbelievably simple thanks to a very small difference between idle and load power.
| Phantom Power | Idle Power | Load Power | |
| ASUS Eee Box | 1.2W | 14.5W | 19W |
| Intel Celeron 420 Desktop | 1.2W | 58W | 70W |
The Eee Box consumes 1.2W of power at the outlet when completely turned off, which is pretty high given how low its idle and load power levels are. When sitting idle at the Windows desktop the Eee Box pulls around 14.5W and under load it will peak at 19W.
The Atom processor in the Eee Box is actively cooled using a fan and a very small heatsink connected to the CPU and chipset via heatpipes. While the Atom processor can run without a heatsink, we suspect that the combination of the chipset and the tight operating quarters forced ASUS to use active cooling in the Eee Box. In order to keep costs down however the size of the thermal solution was limited and ASUS ended up relying on a fan to keep the CPU and chipset cool rather than a large heatsink.
Unfortunately during testing the Eee Box was no where near silent, while we could manually reduce fan speed to make the system quiet the BIOS refused to do so by default. ASUS mentioned that there may be issues with the thermal sensor in our unit and the final production systems may be quieter.
Our sample is an early prototype and we expect a final unit by July, but for now ASUS isn’t really capitalizing on the low power consumption of the Atom processor. The Eee Box should be silent and it just isn’t right now.
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Casper42 - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
Gigabit Network with 2 USB Ports means you could make a sidecar that holds a small Power supply and 2 Desktop Drives (1TB Each) and plug them in USB.That gives you a SATA Boot drive and then either 2TB in RAID0/JBOD or 1TB in RAID1
Small enough to not run up your power bill like crazy and yyet still flexible enough to run your OS of choice for the hosting platform and any other little utilities you might want (cough BT Client cough).
erikstarcher - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
Looks like it would make a great car pc. hook up a 7" touchscreen to it for control and you are set. I bet it would do music, video (non hd) and gps without a problem. And it won't kill your battery as fast as some other solutions (like the laptop I am now using).Yooshaw - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
This was my first thought - you could really make a killer Carputer with this thing.strikeback03 - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 - link
I thought that as well, though would almost certainly need a USB audio solution due to lack of other expansion. And the loud fan would be annoying too. I hope some more small devices/components come out for Atom/VIA Nano soon.MooseMuffin - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
Splashtop is a killer idea. There's been plenty of times where I've hosed my OS in some way, and this provides a way to still go online and google a solution.LuxZg - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
I agree, and this is one thing that is nice about Eee Box. But since it IS available on other MBOs as well, it's not huge advantage..pnyffeler - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
How does the Atom perform for Remote Desktop and/or any other remote connections, with or without VPN? I just wonder how well this would work for working from home if your company offers such remote options.Martimus - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
I like seeing that Microsoft isn't allowing Windows XP on machines with larger than 80GB HDs. That should help establish a larger foothold for Linux on these types of computers. Of course when marketshare gets bigger, so will the compatibility which means that an alternative OS might actually be feasible. All this caused by Microsoft's attempt to maximize profits in the short term. Looks more like they are shooting themselves in the foot in the long term. I hope this type of computer really catches on and causes Linux or some other OS to really become mainstream.Griswold - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
Put a VIA Nano (C8) in that thing and I'm interested. Atom looks like s ure loser (but will be punched through with Intels might) for anything bigger than Intels envisioned MIDs.eeebox - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
People go on about it not being usable as a Media streamer, can't do HD yada yada...but is it powerful enough to be used as a SDTV recorder using a USB DVB-T tuner? I'm not even too fussed about record and play at the same time, simply record. It's been confirmed it can play 4.5Mbps 720p H.264 at 90% and 720p Divx fine so that means it should be able to play SD perfectly fine, so how would it handle the encoding side of it for recording?Seeing as though it'll cost only a little bit more than an average HDD TV recorder I want to get an eeebox for use as a compact low power HDD SDTV recorder with easily replacable HDD and a web browser (Splashtop ftw) and the VESA mounting to the back of a TV is perfect as I use my TV as a monitor.