The idea of the Eee Box is similar to Asus's successful Eee PCmini-notebook. For a low price, the Eee Box will provide you with a tiny, basic Windows XP-based computer for web browsing, word processing and other general computing activities. Its size, affordability and pared-down configuration lend the Eee Box an air of approachability and ease of use, making it a potentially suitable desktop for novices or those in need of a second PC.
The Asus Eee Box on its side with the stand removed.
On its included support stand, the Asus Eee Box measures 21.6cm high by 10.2cm wide by 24.1cm deep. Unscrew the base and lay the unit down flat and its dimensions change to 4.4cm high by 17.8cm wide by 22.2cm deep. In either configuration, the Eee Box is roughly the size of the Apple Mac Mini in overall volume. Laying flat, the Mac Mini is taller, but it has a smaller footprint.
Unlike the Mac Mini, according to Asus, the Eee Box comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard. The input devices were not ready in time for this review, so we can't comment on them. Even if they're only half-baked, we applaud Asus for including them in the box. Wireless peripherals help preserve the sparse design these small PCs strive for. Of course, you also have to connect the unit to the wall for power, as well as to some kind of display. This configuration takes up much less space than a typical mid-tower PC, but if your goal is saving space, we find notebooks — even cheap ones such as the Eee PC — far more flexible because of their portability and their freedom from peripheral hardware.
If you're not looking for space flexibility, you might instead be interested in the Eee Box as a small media PC. It would certainly disappear next to the rest of your living-room hardware because of its small size. While the Eee Box lacks an optical drive of any kind, we found that it handled 480p, DVD-quality video easily. Asus suggested that it would also play 720p video, but in our testing, we found it unwatchably choppy. You could use the Eee Box to play audio, photo slide shows or lower resolution video, but a cheap notebook can do all of those things and more. If you're serious about buying a small computer as a home-theatre PC, you'll need a higher-end system such as the Dell Studio Hybrid, which starts at £399 (inc. VAT).
We'll also risk belabouring the obvious here and point out that the Eee Box is embarrassingly under-featured compared with any number of budget mid-tower desktops in the same price range. Throw in the fact that you can upgrade the latter with a graphics card and other peripherals, and the gap is plain. Perhaps this disparity doesn't need spelling out. After all, it's long been understood that small form factor desktops and all-in-ones typically require trade-offs to achieve their unique designs. However, with such a wide chasm in performance and capability between the Eee Box and its competition, it seems worth noting again.
To hammer the point even further, take a look at how the 1GB Intel Atom N270-powered Eee Box performed on our benchmarks.
If it's not clear, we do not recommend the Eee Box. Still, it does a few things that some of you may appreciate. The first is that Asus includes a Draft-N Wi-Fi adapter, which gives you a lot of range and provides ample bandwidth for transferring or streaming files. With only an 80GB hard drive, chances are you won't be storing a lot of data on this system. You can also pop the hard drive out from the bottom of the unit for upgrading or servicing — another useful feature that's not common in these tiny PCs.
The removable hard drive slides out from the bottom.
We also like the Eee Box's start-up software layer, called ExpressGate. Approximately seven seconds after you power the system, ExpressGate presents you with a pre-Windows operating system with applications for browsing the web, instant messaging, looking at photos and making VoIP calls with Skype. The ExpressGate screen gives you a button to load Windows XP if you need to go into the more robust operating system, and if you do nothing once ExpressGate loads, it will move on directly to XP as well. This software is so handy we'd like to see it on every PC.
The small power brick is easy to hide.
We mentioned the removable hard drive bay, which is probably the most interesting hardware feature of the Eee Box. The removable stand comes off easily enough with a single screw. You get plenty of external inputs as well, with four USB jacks between the front and the back, a 4-in-1 media card reader and headphone and microphone jacks on the front, and DVI, digital audio, Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi antenna inputs on the back. The small external power brick that comes with this system is a testament to its low power consumption, common to most small PCs. And also like those others, the Eee Box is almost completely silent. On start-up, the fans spin audibly for a second or two, but that's the only noise we heard from it.
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