We tested the mini PCs' 3D performance with racer Dirt
Showdown and platformer Trine 2, which has sumptuous 3D backgrounds, and is the
kind of game you might play from your sofa in your living room. We played
around with various settings in each title in order to reach the magic 30
frames per second (fps) mark, where a game can be considered smoothly playable.
We noted the frame rates we saw in each review.
SCAN 3XS NUC N16
Spaced Out
You'll need plenty of hard disk space if you have a lot of
documents, photos, music and videos. While we expect to see a 1TB hard disk in
most desktop and all-in-one PCs, mini PCs usually have less space. The models
with room for 2.5 inch laptop hard disks have more room, with 1TB or 500GB of
storage, but some of the tiniest mini PCs only have room for mSATA drives; tiny
SSDs that look more like a stick of RAM than a normal SSD or hard disk. If a
mini PC only has a small mSATA SSD, you can always add more storage with an
external disk. All the mini PCs on test have USB3 ports, so you'll be able to
attach the latest super-fast external disks. Most mini PCs lack an optical disc
drive. If you need to install software only available on DVD, you can try
copying the contents of the disc to a USB flash drive, or invest in a USB
optical drive, such as a Buffalo 8x Ultra-Slim for $35. If you need to install
Windows from a USB drive, you can use the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool to
copy a Windows 7 or 8 DVD to a 4GB or larger flash drive. You'll then need to
set the mini PC's BIOS to boot from the USB drive.
VeryPC Nano Sketch
Core i7
Rise And Shine
Mini PCs make great media center PCs. By installing
applications, you can stream music and video across your network to your TV,
and even watch catch-up TV and YouTube. You can also control your media center
with a smartphone or tablet app. You don't want to be reaching around the back
of your TV to wake your media center up, though, which is why it's useful if
you can wake the PC up over your network with Wake on LAN. We've mentioned in
each review whether this is possible, and whether you have to change anything
in the BIOS to enable Wake on LAN. We also tested whether we could turn each PC
on by sending a wake-up request from a smartphone app.
Zotac Zbox IQ01
Plus
Operating Licence
Six of the PCs in the group come with Windows 8 or 8.1
installed, one has Windows 7 and three don't come with Windows at all. Both
Zotac PCs and the Sapphire Edge V58 don't come with Windows, so, in those
particular cases, you'll need to budget around $112 for a copy, and have access
to a PC with an optical drive and a spare 4GB USB flash drive to install it.
