Asus has ­repacked its portable and affordable mini notebook, the Eee PC, into the compact Eee Box.

By TAN KIT HOONG

Take the innards of an Atom-based Asus Eee PC and fit it into a desktop machine, and essentially that’s what you get with the Eee Box.

However, before you dismiss it as a severely underpowered desktop PC, think of it in this way — the Eee Box has the potential to be a very cheap, small, low-powered ­multimedia device to stream to your HDTV.

The Eee Box’s aspirations to be a part of your home theatre system is clear from its slim black (or white) design that looks a lot like a Nintento Wii, with it’s upright standing design.

If you need further proof, take a look inside the box — the Eee Box actually comes with a mounting plate that screws into the standard Vesa mounting points of most HDTVs (the screw holes that are usually meant to screw in custom wall mounts).
USEFUL: On the back, the Asus Eee Box B202 has an audio output port, gigabit LAN port, two USB 2.0 ports (with two more in front) and a DVI output.

So, you can mount the tiny computer neatly on the back of your HDTV and turn it into a full-blown home multimedia machine.

What you get

While the Eee Box does share many of the features of the Eee PC (1.6GHz Atom, Intel GMA950 ­graphics, Wireless-N) it does have a number of differences.

For one thing, the Eee Box eschews the tiny solid state drives of most Eee PCs in favour of a full-blown ­notebook hard disk drive — 80GB is standard.

But the bottom of the Eee Box has a little slide-out tray for the hard disk drive, secured by a screw, allowing for easy swapping to a larger hard disk drive should you want to upgrade.

The other difference is that the Eee Box comes with a gigabit Ethernet port — particularly welcome if you want to stream video or transfer files to the Eee Box.

One strange omission is the lack of Bluetooth built-in to the Eee Box. Having it would have made it easier to connect my existing Bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard to the machine, and not use up a precious USB port for a 2.4GHz wireless mouse and keyboard dongle.

By the way, the Eee Box has no PS/2 port so if you’re going for a wired mouse or keyboard it’ll have to be USB or nothing.

Oh yes, the Eee Box is part of Asus’ push to include their ExpressGate technology into ­everything.

ExpressGate is actually a tiny Linux-based operating system ­resident on the motherboard itself which boots up in about five seconds so you can access common tasks like web browsing (with a version of Firefox), Skype, photo viewer and instant messenger quickly.

This is particularly useful if you just want to quickly make a Skype call or even check something on the Internet without having to wait for the relatively long boot times of Windows XP.

ExpressGate boots up in seconds just before Windows XP does, but if don’t use it, you can actually disable it in the BIOS settings.

Performance

Overall, the performance of the Eee Box is virtually identical to the Eee PC which means that I could play QuickTime videos up to 720p with no problems but the machine was really struggling with 1080p movies.

The cool thing about the Eee Box is that it is remarkably quiet and very power efficient, which means that you can run it as a torrent machine and not be worried too much about your electricty bills and when it plays video, it’ll never make any noise to spoil your viewing experience.

The missing Bluetooth (I believe it’s an option you can have built-in) on our review unit was a real drag, since I have both a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard which would have been perfect to use with the Eee Box.

In the end I used a wireless 2.4GHz keyboard and mouse combo I had lying about to work with the Eee Box so I could sit well back from my TV and still be able to operate the machine.

I really liked the ExpressGate feature, especially in the Eee Box — since it functions more as a casual Internet machine, it’s actually quite convenient to use together with the HDTV for a bit of web surfing and checking of e-mail without having to wait for Windows XP to boot.

Conclusion

In use, the Asus Eee Box was ­actually a decent performer for casual computing tasks and ­multimedia playback, and actually looked good when placed next to other home theatre equipment.

It’s rather a pity though that Asus did not put in a slightly better graphics processor into the Eee Box — if it could handle 1080p format videos, I’d buy one immediately.

As it is, it’s a competent ­multimedia playback machine and since it runs Windows XP, it’s a full PC and is thus a lot more useful than most of those multimedia playback boxes like the Apple TV and can be used as an extremely low-power torrent machine.

Pros: Small size; low power consumption; quiet; great as a multimedia playback machine.

Cons: Cannot handle 1080p ­videos.

Eee Box B202

(Asustek Computer, Inc)

Mini desktop PC

Processor: Intel Atom N270 (1.6GHz)

Memory: 1GB DDR2 RAM

Graphics: Intel GMA950

Storage: 80GB HDD

Connectivity: WiFi 802.11b/g/n, 10/100/1000 Ethernet

I/O ports: Four USB 2.0 ports, DVI output

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Other features: 4-in-1 Flash card reader

Dimensions: (w x d x h22.3 x 17.8 x 2.6cm

Weight: 2.9kg

Price: RM1,099

Website: my.asus.com