Sapphire Edge-HD Mini PC review

The humble nettop can only be improved in so many ways, with the Intel Atom processor and integrated graphics restricting it to basic tasks and media playback, so it’s natural that manufacturers have been looking to innovate elsewhere. Sapphire has decided miniaturisation is the way to go with its new Edge-HD.

It’s the firm’s first nettop, and is rather ambitiously touted as “the smallest PC in the world”. We’d argue that the Anders fit-PC 2 has a volume of 313cm[SUP]3[/SUP] to the Sapphire’s 558cm[SUP]3[/SUP], but the Edge-HD is certainly smaller than most and, at just 20mm wide, will be able to slip into the smallest of crevices. Note the need for an external power supply, though.

Despite the small size, the port selection is excellent. A pair of USB 2 sockets are hidden behind a flap on the front, and the rear serves up two more ports next to D-SUB and HDMI outputs as well as Gigabit Ethernet.

It feels reasonably solid for such a small machine: the centre of the chassis is a bit flexible, but we’ve seen more expensive machines look and feel cheaper. It’s coated with a matte-black finish, and when the neat power buttons, minimal lines and ripple-effect base are factored in, you have one of the sleekest nettops around.

The Sapphire is powered by an Intel Atom D510, which used its pair of 1.66GHz cores to return a score of 0.40 in our application-based benchmarks. That’s what we’d expect from an Atom, although bear in mind that similar systems based on AMD’s Brazos platform should offer more juice when they appear – in our tests, the AMD E-350 was about 20% quicker.

Sapphire hasn’t settled for Intel’s integrated graphics, instead opting for Nvidia’s latest Ion chipset, which has 16 graphics processing cores and 512MB of DDR3 memory. While it won’t play top-level games – our Low quality Crysis benchmark crashed before it could finish – it’s powerful enough to handle 720p video playback smoothly, with only the most demanding sections of our 1080p test clips stuttering.