Sapphire Edge HD Mini PC ~ Gadget NOVA

Journey with me through the recesses of time, if you will, back to 2007. If u recall, the PC enthusiasts was being all enthusiastic about the Asus Eee PC, a cute little ‘netbook’ with solid state storage and an unprecedented price point under $500

Since then manufacturers have been going crazy trying to redefine our relationship with portable and home computing, flogging US giant iPhone, consoles-like media centre beasts and notebooks small enough for a jockey’s bum bag.

Is the Sapphire Edge HD a PC? Without any optical drive, it certainly isn’t a thoroughbred media centre, but its netbook-like CPU and GPU capabilities mean it falls a little way short of what you’d normally deem ‘PC’ and as portable as the tiny little black box is at a diminutive 193x148x22m, the end user is going to be singing it beneath the warm glow of the telly or in the office, rather than carting a wheelbarrow full of peripherals down to Costa Coffee to get a few chapters done.

It’s a versatile if not entirely mobile, creature then-as suited to being in the front room as part of your media centre as it is in the office, watching you add another row to the great, sprawling spreadsheet of your life.

The Intel Atom D510 running at 1.66GHz with 2GB o
f DDR2 RAM can certainly can hack any office suits and web browsing activities, and 250GB of storage is generous at this size. It’s also useful to have lots of space for optical drive, means you’ll need all your media on a flash drive or streamed from elsewhere.

It does seriously lose grounds to entertainment rigs that offer to ease of an optical drive, and is priced rather higher than other systems that deliver a similar package without breaking the $300 barrier, such as the Zotac Zbox and Shuttle XS35.

Since there’s no operating system included bar the existentially terrifying black nothingness of DOS, you’ll either need to shell out for Windows or install Linux OS such as ubuntu, on the Edge HD. At this price, and considering how hard that 2GB that 2GB of RAM will be strained to run Windows 7, Ubuntu is the more enticing prospect.

Drivers then become an issue, so you may get sub-par performance compared to Windows, but the flipside is that the limited resources of the Edge HD won’t be struggling quite so hard to run the OS.

The real bad news is that HD video playback is choppy. Given the HDMI output on the Edge HD and clear entertainment-centre learning, this lack of video performance rules out one of its obvious purposes. And as for its possible gaming leanings-well, you’ll have to hope the rise of Facebook games continues.

As it is your left with a desktop version of the Asus Eee PC, but four years late and minus the portability. It is extremely eco-friendly. Consuming just 22W under load (which is 10x less than the greenest full-sized PC), but there are other ways to save the world, and there are simply better machines for the price.