Despite a few useful features, the ASUS Eee Box is a novelty at best. It can't come close to the performance and robustness of even the most basic standard budget PC, while a low-end notebook can do everything it can do and more.

We completely understand the appeal of low-cost mini-notebooks, but we're puzzled by the level of the interest in similarly conceived desktops. The recent Dell Studio Hybrid caused some bewilderment, and we find the new Asus Eee Box similarly confounding.

For AU$429, ASUS's little PC gives you significantly less performance and capability than standard budget desktops in the same price range. And because it still needs peripherals, we reject most claims to significant space-savings. Aesthetes, the environmentally super-conscious and those in cramped living situations may find something to like. We'll even admit that ASUS includes a few interesting features, but its negatives far outweigh its positives. A true budget desktop or a low-end notebook would be a much better solution for most of the problems that systems like this purport to solve.

The idea of the Eee Box is similar to Asus's successful Eee PC mini-notebook. For a low price, the Eee Box will provide you with a tiny, basic Windows XP-based computer for web browsing, word processing and other general computing activities. Its size, affordability and pared-down configuration lend the Eee Box an air of approachability and ease of use, making it a potentially suitable desktop for novices or those in need of a second PC.

The Asus Eee Box on its side with the stand removed.

On its included support stand, the Asus Eee Box measures 21.6cm high by 10.2cm wide by 24.1cm deep. Unscrew the base and lay the unit down flat and its dimensions change to 4.4cm high by 17.8cm wide by 22.2cm deep. In either configuration, the Eee Box is roughly the size of the Apple Mac Mini in overall volume. Laying flat, the Mac Mini is taller, but it has a smaller footprint.

Unlike the Mac Mini, according to ASUS, the Eee Box comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard. The input devices were not ready in time for this review, so we can't comment on them. Even if they're only half-baked, we applaud ASUS for including them in the box. Wireless peripherals help preserve the sparse design these small PCs strive for. Of course, you also have to connect the unit to the wall for power, as well as to some kind of display. This configuration takes up much less space than a typical mid-tower PC, but if your goal is saving space, we find notebooks — even cheap ones such as the Eee PC — far more flexible because of their portability and their freedom from peripheral hardware.

If you're not looking for space flexibility, you might instead be interested in the Eee Box as a small media PC. It would certainly disappear next to the rest of your living-room hardware because of its small size. While the Eee Box lacks an optical drive of any kind, we found that it handled 480p, DVD-quality video easily. ASUS suggested that it would also play 720p video, but in our testing, we found it unwatchably choppy. You could use the Eee Box to play audio, photo slide shows or lower resolution video, but a cheap notebook can do all of those things and more. If you're serious about buying a small computer as a home-theatre PC, you'll need a higher-end system such as the Dell Studio Hybrid, which starts at AU$429.

We'll also risk belabouring the obvious here and point out that the Eee Box is embarrassingly under-featured compared with any number of budget mid-tower desktops in the same price range. Throw in the fact that you can upgrade the latter with a graphics card and other peripherals, and the gap is plain. Perhaps this disparity doesn't need spelling out. After all, it's long been understood that small form factor desktops and all-in-ones typically require trade-offs to achieve their unique designs. However, with such a wide chasm in performance and capability between the Eee Box and its competition, it seems worth noting again.

To hammer the point even further, take a look at how the 1GB Intel Atom N270-powered Eee Box performed on our benchmarks over the page.

If it's not clear, we do not recommend the Eee Box. Still, it does a few things that some of you may appreciate. The first is that ASUS includes a Draft-N Wi-Fi adapter, which gives you a lot of range and provides ample bandwidth for transferring or streaming files. With only an 80GB hard drive, chances are you won't be storing a lot of data on this system. You can also pop the hard drive out from the bottom of the unit for upgrading or servicing — another useful feature that's not common in these tiny PCs.

The removable hard drive slides out from the bottom.

We also like the Eee Box's start-up software layer, called ExpressGate. Approximately seven seconds after you power the system, ExpressGate presents you with a pre-Windows operating system with applications for browsing the web, instant messaging, looking at photos and making VoIP calls with Skype. The ExpressGate screen gives you a button to load Windows XP if you need to go into the more robust operating system, and if you do nothing once ExpressGate loads, it will move on directly to XP as well. This software is so handy we'd like to see it on every PC.

The small power brick is easy to hide.

We mentioned the removable hard drive bay, which is probably the most interesting hardware feature of the Eee Box. The removable stand comes off easily enough with a single screw. You get plenty of external inputs as well, with four USB jacks between the front and the back, a 4-in-1 media card reader and headphone and microphone jacks on the front, and DVI, digital audio, Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi antenna inputs on the back. The small external power brick that comes with this system is a testament to its low power consumption, common to most small PCs. The Eee Box is almost completely silent. On start-up, the fans spin audibly for a second or two, but that's the only noise we heard from it.

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering multiple CPUs

Rendering a single CPU

ZT Affinity 7221Xa

5,110 

1,812 

Gateway GT5692

4,934 

1,772 

Dell Studio Hybrid

4,329 

2,270 

eMachines T5274

3,563 

1,916 

Asus Eee Box

441 

432 

System configurations:

Asus Eee Box
Windows XP Home SP3; 1.6Ghz Intel Atom N270; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB (shared) Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics chip; 80GB, 5,400rpm Seagate hard drive.

Dell Studio Hybrid
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1; 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100; 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 128MB (shared) Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip; 250GB 5,400rpm Samsung hard drive.

eMachines T5274
Windows Vista Home Premium; 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E2180; 2GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 64MB shared Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics chip; 320GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive.

Gateway GT5692
Windows Vista Home Premium; 2.1GHz AMD Phenom X3 8450; 4GB DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB (shared) ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics chip; 500GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive.

ZT Affinity 7221Xa
Windows Vista Home Premium; 2.1GHz AMD Phenom X4 8450; 4GB DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB (shared) ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics chip; 500GB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive.