8 - The Verdict

The Verdict

Cute .. that's what this gear really is. Though we tested an engineering sample and did not have the final price at our availibility we expect a sales price of roughly 75 to 99 USD. Face it .. throw in a few bucks worth of components like a slice of memory, PSU, HDD, chassis and for what .. 150 maybe 200 USD you have a working net PC. Pure value. And surely you need to respect what this really is supposed to be for .. standard average PC usage, which will work fine with the PC and for that purpose it's fast enough, and nothing more.

See, you do not get the upgrade path available as you'll have only one DIMM slot, a CPU that is soldered into the mainboard to save on costs and really no additional expansion slots. So yes, that is a negative factor for sure. But come on .. to put it in perspective, you guys spend this money on an entry level graphics card.

Atom 330 does not look like anything particularly stellar for the desktop it should do the job better than the alternatives by Via. We ran it with Windows Vista perfectly fine, and once you have tried it for yourself, it will be very hard to resist the temptation. Just because it's such fascinating material, yesterday I have it a try with Windows XP 32-bit which is actually runs pretty fast.

Atom 330 dual-core itself then, two is always better than one. And that surely goes for the Atom 330 with it's two logical cores running at 1.6 GHz. The Atom processor is a perfectly decent CPU for web browsing, email, showing friend's your holiday snaps, listening to MP3s, watching DVDs etc. It doesn't need any more performance and all that at 8 Watt ...

My few trivial hints to ECS would be; what it really needs is a fanless motherboard to go with the fanless CPU to cut the noise down a bit more. The board we have is actually a engineering sample, and the cooler on there is a tad too noisy for something so low-level. Other stuff I really would like to see is a PCIe slot, two DIMM slots and preferably a DVI output. 

Other than that, I'm impressed by the features and value you get for this platform, it's not at all high-end, but definitely interesting and fast enough as a low-level desktop or Net PC to browse the web, listen to music or even watch a DVD. Good & fun stuff folks.

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