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Thread: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

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    Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    Not much bigger than a book and sporting ION graphics, we take a close look at this £250 nettop PC.
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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    Rebranded Acer product with a 50% price rise... You can get the Acer one starting at £160

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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    I just had a scout around and the Acer Revo available for £160 only gets you 1GB RAM, an 8GB SSD & Linux. A customer review on Play said he received a linux model with a 160GB HD though which he claimed Acer were replacing the 8GB SSD model with when stocks ran out.

    @ Tarinder: I'm assuming that although it's not powerful enough to replace a 2yr old desktop, it would be comfortably faster than a 7yr old Athlon XP2000 1.6GHz single core desktop for freeview recording & BBC iPlayer duties?


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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    Quote Originally Posted by will101 View Post
    I just had a scout around and the Acer Revo available for £160 only gets you 1GB RAM, an 8GB SSD & Linux. A customer review on Play said he received a linux model with a 160GB HD though which he claimed Acer were replacing the 8GB SSD model with when stocks ran out.

    @ Tarinder: I'm assuming that although it's not powerful enough to replace a 2yr old desktop, it would be comfortably faster than a 7yr old Athlon XP2000 1.6GHz single core desktop for freeview recording & BBC iPlayer duties?
    Will101,

    I wouldn't assume that, no. If we say that the HEXUS.PiFast test is reasonably indicative of single-threaded performance, and it seems that way, then going back in the database shows an Athlon XP-M 2500 (remember them?) returning a time of 75.63s:

    http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=722&page=5

    We know that the XP 2000 will be slower, so maybe 90s. An Atom takes around 200s for the same task.

    Single-core Atom 230 has pants single-threaded performance, and it's not cut out to be a desktop processor, IMHO. Fine in netbooks, where you can kind of mentally compensate for its lack of performance.

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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    Seems like it doesn't tick all the boxes of what its meant to be designed for.

    The Atom chip as great of an achievement it is, has no place in a home PC yet. Its needs more power
    and the GPUs need a little more power too that go with them.

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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    I think the uptake of the Atom surprised Intel a great deal. I think it was merely a stepping stone for them toward a lower power x86 processor for smart phone type machines. 7" 800x480 Netbooks (the original Asus EeePC) were really at the top of the range for Atom in terms of processing power whilst running Windows, and these machines are pretty much fine.
    Beyond these specs, the Atom's lack of oomph is plainly evident, Flash is choppy due to it's dependence on CPU power and the introduction of Ion has only highlighted this. Indeed, Ion has turned the Atom into something of a co-processor for many tasks that machines running the nvidia graphics chip are now being used for.
    For a desktop machine, there is no real reason, that I'm aware of, to run Atom other than the pretty form factor. I'm quite sure that if the manufacturers put a fraction of the effort into putting under-clocked AMD processors into the same space that they're putting Atom, then you could have a large increase in performance for not that great an increase in cost. The only issue I can conceive is that Microsoft may only allow XP to be licenced for use on machines it classes as netbooks and nettops, preferring to have OEMs pay full whack for Vista/Windows 7 on desktops which would, at least in the case of Vista, up the minimum requirements required.

    (Why AMD processors ? because I'm aware of single-core AMD processors reportedly being run at the same wattage as Atoms whilst being quicker in terms of performance. Intel may well be able to do the same but I'm unaware of it.)

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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    Quote Originally Posted by Tarinder View Post
    an Athlon XP-M 2500 (remember them?) returns a time of 75.63s:
    That pretty remarkable when a 1.3GHZ Core 2 Solo returns 75.5s and the much-vaunted Athlon Neo 82.6s. I thought processors were meant to get faster over time...

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    Re: Reviews - Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

    I use an atom 230 for a router / firewall with pfSence and it does that very well, its a huge boost over my old WRT54G but as a desktop / nettop my Dell Mini struggles even with basic flash games with cpu load at 100%
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