Sapphire Edge-HD Mini PC/HTPC

First off I would like to point out that setting up a system that has no CD drive is a little bit different. If all you have are CD’s then you will need to use a tool such as imgburn to make that CD/DvD into an ISO image and from there the easiest way is to use UNetbootin (a tool normally used for Linux installations but will work with a Windows ISO ) to drop the ISO onto a thumb drive and make it bootable, this is beyond the scope of this review so I will not be going into detail on it.

Test platform

• Sapphire Edge-HD mini PC

• Windows 7 and XBMC which runs on Ubuntu 10.10

• Toshiba 42inch TV with both VGA and HDMI input

• Standard USB keyboard and mouse.

Sapphires Edge-HD Mini PC comes with

CPU	Intel Atom D510 dual core 1.66Ghz which is Hyper threaded to show 4 cores
Graphics	Nvidia ION2 with 512MB dedicated video memory.
Memory	2gb of  DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
Network	Realtek 10/100/1000 Ethernet and Realtek Wireless b/g/n
Hard drives	250gb Seagate drive 2.5inch 5400rpm.

Benchmarks

Video

• Cyberlink DVD 10 both standard definition and HD content playback.
• XBMC – a very popular all inclusive media center operating system that it built off Ubuntu and is not limited in some of the ways Microsoft windows is.

Business use

• Microsoft office – general usage with some heavy usage thrown in to simulate a more business use.

General benchmarks

• Aida64

• 3Dmark vantage

Video

Primary testing was done using several media players all of which are suppose to offer GPU acceleration. All tests were run at 1080p unless otherwise noted.

• Local Media

All media players tested performed flawlessly with the local video clips of standard definition (480p -720p)  video CPU usage was down 20% which is very reasonable for windows 7 video playback.

Where things started to get a little dicey was when HD content was brought into play when playing BluRay rips using the driver supplied by the manufacturer playback was akin to watching a fast slide show once the graphics  drivers were updated to their current revision 266.58 playback became significantly smoother and CPU usage dropped dramatically, from 45-70% CPU utilization down into the 30% range.  There were some minor spikes between Cyberlink DVD 10 and windows media center but nothing that would cause playback issues. CPU usage tended to be a little lower using XBMC probably due to the decrease in load to run the XBMC UI without all the windows background processes. Overall the Edge-HD is shaping up to be a strong candidate for holding down the role of media center.

• Internet media:

One thing I did notice is that under window 7 sites like Hulu and Youtube HD which utilize the new Adobe flash player played flawlessly. Sites that use Silverlight such as Netflix caused high CPU usage and stuttering playback when HD was turned on. The the video lag caused by the use of Silverlight and  is by no means an issue with the Edge-HD its more an issue with poor implementation if any GPU support for Silverlight coupled with a processor that’s designed to be lower power.