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Sapphire EDGE-HD mini PC review

by Tarinder Sandhu on 23 February 2011, 08:31 4.0

Tags: Sapphire

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Putting the mini PC to the test

There really is little point in comparing the EDGE-HD PC to full-blown Core i5 or Phenom rigs. Rather, better comparisons are made with systems that ship similar components. This is why we've put the EDGE-HD PC in amongst netbooks and ultraportable notebooks, to gauge just how well it performs.

Handily, we've got a dual-core Atom and ION 2 rival in the form of the ASUS Eee PC 1215N netbook, while AMD is represented by a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 11 laptop equipped with a Neo K325 chip and MR 4225 GPU.

The quoted price for Sapphire's system excludes the cost of Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit, which we've installed for demonstration purposes. Got all that? Yup? So here are some more details on the systems.

Comparison systems
Laptop/PC Acer Aspire One D260 Sapphire Edge HD mini PC ASUS Eee PC 1215N Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 11
Processor Intel Atom N450 (1.66GHz, 512KB L2 cache, single-core) Intel Atom D510 (1.66GHz, 1MB L2 cache, dual-core) Intel Atom D525 (1.8GHz, 1MB L2 cache, dual-core) AMD Athlon II Neo K325 (1.30GHz, 2MB L2 cache, dual-core)
Memory 1GB DDR2 2GB DDR3 2GB DDR3 4GB DDR3
Graphics Intel GMA 3150 NVIDIA ION 2 (535MHz core, 1,580MHz memory) Intel GMA 3150 + NVIDIA ION 2 AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4225
Graphics driver Intel 8.14.10.2117 NVIDIA Verde 266.89 Intel 8.14.10.2117 + NVIDIA Verde 260.89 AMD Catalyst 10.11
Display 10.1in - 1,024x600 None 12.1in - 1,366x768 11.6in - 1,366x768
Battery 6 cell, 49Whr None 6 cell, 56Whr 6 cell, 57Whr
Weight 1,202g (including battery) 577g (excluding charger) 1,523g (including battery) 1,513g (including battery)
Wireless Atheros AR5B95 WiFi (802.11bgn) AzureWave (802.11bgn) Broadcom WiFi (802.11bgn) and Bluetooth ThinkPad 1x1 WLAN Half-Mini Card (802.11bgn) and Bluetooth
Disk drive Western Digital Scorpio Blue 160GB HDD, 5,400RPM, 8MB cache 250GB HDD, 5,400RPM, 8MB cache Seagate Momentus 250GB HDD, 5,400RPM, 8MB cache Hitachi Travelstar 320GB HDD, 5,400RPM, 8MB cache
Optical drive None None None None
Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Starter, 32-bit Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, 32-bit Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit
Approx. price as configured £250 £265 (ex. Windows) £430 £480
Benchmarks
Geekbench 2.1.6 A cross-platform benchmark used to measure memory and processor performance. Run using high-performance mode.
Cinebench 11.5 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses as many cores as possible. Run using high-performance mode.
3DMark06 A PC benchmark used to test the DirectX 9 performance of a system's graphics card. Run using high-performance mode.
Power consumption Using balanced power settings, we record mains power draw whilst playing back a 720p movie trailer.