Gadgetory

the chromebox may look like a Mac Mini but it's anything but a standard desktop I'm going to take you inside the case and show you why I'm Bill Detweiler and this is cracking open the Samsung built series three chrome box is Google's first attempt at bringing its Chrome OS to the desktop and given the operating systems web-centric nature where all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud the machine doesn't need a lot of high-end hardware and luckily getting to its hardware is a snap just pop off the bottom cover once you're inside you can remove individual components either by hand or with a small Phillips screwdriver the power supply is located along the side of the case and below it is a small circuit board with the developer mode switch more about that later there's a single cooling fan small IO board with two USB ports and the recovery button and of course the motherboard as for individual components the chrome box has a 1.9 gigahertz Intel Celeron processor integrated Intel HD graphics one thousand four gigs of ddr3 sdram a sixteen gig SSD and both Ethernet and Wi-Fi support given the machines three hundred and twenty nine dollar price tag the chromeboxes processor and RAM are on par with other budget pcs the 16 gigs of storage is another matter and it's the first way in which the chrome box isn't your average desktop and to be fair Google doesn't expect users to store much data on the chrome box thus the small SSD and if you're wondering if you can swap out the factory SSD for a larger one the answer is maybe I've read of people trying it but with different levels of success depending on the make and model of the replacement drive whether they replace the RAM or not and if they were trying to run Chrome on the new drive or replace it with Linux speaking of RAM that's the second way the machine is different from your average PC the chips are removable and you could conceivably replace them with larger 8gig ones but I haven't tried it and I've read conflicting reports of Chrome OS actually being able to support that much memory another interesting feature on the motherboard is the empty mini PCIe slot next to the M SATA slot used by the SSD I've read of people trying without much success to put a second SSD drive in this slot thus the theory it's a mini PCIe slot and not a second M SATA one it's possible that this slot was intended for use with a cellular modem card but that's just wild speculation the last interesting hardware characteristic is the developer mode switch now flipping it allows you to modify the existing Chrome OS or even replace it with a different one and if you make a mistake during all your tinkering you can use the recovery mode button and a recovery USB Drive to return the machine to a factory fresh state now at this point the Chrome OS and chromebox are really just still experiments and that fact comes through when you look inside the machine now for more information on the series three chrome box including real-world use and performance tests check out rich Browns full C net review and to see more teardown photos and read my full Hardware analysis go to TechRepublic comm forward slash cracking open I'm Bill Detweiler thanks for watching