Tried it. 1080p plays with about 80% dropped frames. At 1920x1200 or 800x600, even with windows desktop optimized for performance (ie no eye candy or effects at all). 720p plays fine at any setting.

SPCR is famous!
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ ... le-09-2008

notice any traffic increase today, MikeC?

We actually get links on many other web sites on a regular basis. Traffic is pretty steady -- there's sometimes a burst of increased traffic from new links at very high traffic sites, but it all evens out so that daily fluctuations are relatively small. Today's traffic... might a bit higher than it's been in recent days.

Nice review. Looks like a very compelling system.

Maybe this is asking a bit much, but did you think about cracking it open and having a look at the innards? It'd be interesting to see whether or not it'd be possible to add more memory, tweak fans and heat sinks, see what sort of internal connectors existed, etc.

Spent about 20 minutes examining it. There's no easy or obvious way to open it up, Just a couple visible screws and removing them doesn't seem to change anything. There's probably some kind of friction / bayonet mounting going on but without know exactly where it's fitted together, I'd probably end up breaking it to get it open. So it's best treated as a black box -- except for the HDD, which you can easily change, like on a laptop. Asus makes no reference whatsoever about upgrades, additional RAM or anything like that in its manual. So unless someone can get a hold of the service manual or is brave enough to risk breaking it...

Actually, it turns out to be feasible. With a little guidance from Asus, I used a utility knife blade and small flat head screwdrivers to carefully pry off one side cover. It's the one to the left as you oook at the "front panel". There's a metail cover over the whole innards, and a small door held on with a single screw. No time to look under the whole thing, but under the little door are two laptop dimm sticks-- 512mb SOD PC2-3200 CL3 (DDRII400 SO-D APACER). Obviously they can be replaced with bigger sticks.



It's very clear that the Eee Box is really an Eee PC in a different box w/o a monitor.

How's the desktop picture quality?

I have an EEE 700, and connected (by VGA) to a secondary monitor the desktop looks pretty shabby.

ASUS Eee Box Dissected

very good. No complaints.

The motherboard layout is a completely different design. The Eee PC only has one memory slot and no digital outputs compared to the two slots and DVI + S/PDIF of the Eee Box.

OK you're right.

Thanks for the review, as informative as ever. Asus are onto a winner with this one, particularly if/when they release a model capable of decoding 1080p with a slot loading optical drive.

Am I the only one who thinks Asus' product designers took a lot of styling cues from Nintendo's Wii? The dimensions are almost the same (except slimmer due to no optical drive) and it even sits on its stand at the same jaunty angle.

I can't help but to think that asus could have made this computer fanless with just a little bit of work, the extremly small Dell inspiron 901 has almost nok heatsinks, and runs fanless with an stom, the chipset doesn't draw as much of course, but this box has much mor room and 11 watt is a pretty small amount to cool.

AtW

I have the impression that the chipset actually runs a lot hotter than the Atom CPU. Too bad they don't have an equally frugal chipset to pair with an Atom in nettops and netbooks. There's of course Poulsbo, but isn't that mostly paired with the lower-power Silverthorne? Poulsbo's driver support is also not quite there yet, judging by some of the tests I've seen.

But still, its a measly 10 Watts, 10 watts isn't that hard to cool passivly.

AtW

Thank you for the link. So it has a blower, plus one heatpipe servicing both the CPU and northbridge.

Aside from the cooling solution, there's not much to see inside. I was hoping to see the PSU, but apparently, that's soldered to the mobo just like everything else, isn't it?

@ATWindsor, you certainly can cool 20W fanlessly, but that would require a larger heatsink. I think Asus struck a reasonable balance between quiet and small, considering to whom they plan to sell the Box.

Relative to this thread and to anyone who has purchased an Eee Box, read the following news article:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2016&tag=nl.e589

A new model is coming, called EEE Box B206.

Intel Atom N270
ATI Radeon HD 3450, 256 MB RAM, HDMI
36 W power adapter

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=52699

A while ago I bought an Asus Eee Box B202. Sometime later I swapped the 160GB harddrive for an OCZ Vertex 32GB SSD. And now finally I made it almost completely silent by using something better than Q-fan to control the fan: lm-sensors

In Debian/Ubuntu they split lm-sensors into several packages:


When I let the system idle and set the fan at full speed, then the temperature sensor in the CPU registers 12ᵒC below room temperature. So in my configuration file I add 12 to the value of that sensor. I also find the reported fan speeds hard to believe, so I divide them by two. Lastly I'm not interested in voltages, speed of fans that are not there and temperatures that go down when I stress the system. The resulting file (/etc/sensors.d/B202.conf) contains:


More interesting are the settings for the fan controller (/etc/fancontrol) I use:


Now I can only hear the fan (from my normal siting position) very late at night. Note however that I use this system only for web browsing, e-mailing and simple text editing.