Asus Eee Box PC EB1501 review

Asus was among the first to market with its miniaturised, Atom-powered nettop PCs, but Acer’s Aspire Revo R3600 was the one that stole our hearts. Where the first nettops simply disguised a netbook in desktop PC clothing, the Revo added a dash of gaming and video decoding potency courtesy of Nvidia’s Ion chipset. Now Asus has gone one better, redesigning the Eee Box from the ground-up, adding a dual-core Atom, Windows 7 Home Premium and even a DVD writer for good measure.

Visually, it’s a real cut above its predecessors. Gone are the boring, angular lines of the original model; the EB1501 emerging as a curvaceous, attractive little devil. A silver base holds the Eee Box up at a jaunty angle, giving easy access to the two USB ports, memory card reader, the microphone and headphone sockets and, most novel of all, the slot-loading DVD writer. For those tempted to adopt the Eee Box as a basic do-it-all PC, or even give it pride of place in their lounge as a Media Center, the optical drive is a crucial addition.

And there’s no doubt that, on paper at least, the EB1501 seems like a great candidate for these applications. The dual-core Atom 330 processor is backed up by 2GB of memory, and the 250GB hard disk is generous enough. But, even with the dual-core processor at the helm, the Eee Box struggles. It’s not that Windows 7 Home Premium is unusably sluggish, but it certainly can’t compare to the way Windows feels running on more capable dual-core processors. Our subjective qualms were borne out by mediocre benchmark results: the Asus is unarguably faster than the Acer Aspire Revo R3600, which managed a lowly 0.29, but still limps to an overall result of 0.39.

Forgive the Eee Box’s sluggish performance, though, and it has plenty to offer as a compact media centre PC. The array of connections at the front of the unit are supplemented at the rear by another four USB ports, eSata, Gigabit Ethernet and both VGA and HDMI ports. Wireless networking in the form of 802.11n comes as standard too. One major issue, however, is that the Atheros chipset proved incompatible with the WPA2 encryption on our Labs network; an annoyance that forced us to drop back to WPA encryption.