Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to harbor unboxed I'm your host Matt and today we're looking at as rocks new fanless mini-pc the B box a few months ago Intel launched their latest Braswell system-on-chip range they will forgive you for not noticing it was a pretty quiet launch and there were no production units on the shelves until months after all the details were released replacing the current Bay Trail D lineup a 3-cell rod and one Pentium SOC s all featuring new 14 nanometer air Montt caused about a month ago as what released a range of mini ITX motherboards using these new Braswell system on chips and they look pretty good however the products we have on hand today is even better as what called the B box and as a group to point out it's a PC so not a box to keep you busy though don't despair it's actually a pretty cool little PC so far there are two versions of the B box one using the star on n 3150 quad core and then the one we have which is based on the star on M 3000 a 2.0 a gigahertz dual-core processor there's three configurations to choose from the cheapest of which is a $140 bear bearing that lets you install your own mSATA SSD and laptop ddr3 memory and this is the option we went for for 220 dollars as Rolf is offering a complete version of the B box and 3,000 that includes a 128 gigabyte SSD and 4 gigabytes of ddr3 memory which seems like a pretty fair deal although keep in mind you still need to bring your own operating system like an Intel nook it's extremely small with the capacity of just point 6 liters and yet as Rockets cram some pretty nice hardware inside the B box comes in white black or gold and as you can see we've picked up the gold version for this video because what sort of YouTube salton wouldn't want a tiny gold PC right but seriously we probably suggest speaking of the white or black version for your living room moving on the front of the B box there are two USB 3 ports and one of them is a type C port this makes the B box the first mini PC to feature type-c USB which apparently doubles the charge speed of devices such as smartphones along with the USB 3 port there's an audio out it also accepts Markin which is a very handy feature indeed finally there's a small infrared receiver used to communicate with the supplied remote on top of the B box is a small power button that's gently backless by a blue LED around the back we have a 12 volt 3 and DC input 2 HDMI outputs DisplayPort output 2 USB 3 ports a single Gigabit LAN port and a Kensington lock this provides the B box with considerably better connectivity than other mini pcs we've seen underneath the B box there's four rubberized feet and quite a lot of insulation to get inside to making the upgrades or install any hardware you'll just have to undo these four screws taking the B box apart reveals a truly small PC on the back side of the PCB we find a small yet rather large heat sink for a mini PC the transfers heat from the processor to the chassis back on the top sided PCB we find an M sight alone mini PCIe slot and 2s o dem slots it's also worth mentioning at this point the users can install a two and a half inch drive into the B box as well which is very surprising this means you could install a 2 terabyte drive which is very handy for users who want to use it as a home theater PC and store a lot of movies TV shows or anything like that obviously an SOC boasting a mere 4 watt TDP rating isn't gonna set any performance record so we didn't think it was worth throwing a whole bunch of benchmarks at it so we didn't really think it would reflect the unit's true usability so instead we're gonna show you how it performs in the real world with some general usage applications as Rob says the B box works so well when compared to other mini PC is due to its ability to use dual channel memory where all other manufacturers are currently limited to single channel operation it's worth noting that although we tested with 16 gigabytes of RAM 4 gigabytes will probably be fine too since the B box is really a single tasking device before we begin keep in mind that we're using screen capture software running on the B box to record this video to show you general usage and that comes at the cost of around 10 to 20 percent CPU utilization so the performance Rebeck to show you is slightly slower than normal as you can see we're 2013 opens quite quickly thanks to the SSD so you'll notice the CPU utilization jumps up to 100% despite the heavy CPU utilization is ready to go the second the application pops up and we can scroll through the document smoothly after playing around with word we've tried a few PDF documents they all open quickly and allow instant browsing of the document scrolling through the PDF is smooth for the most part and can be done quite quickly that we found that running into a bunch of embedded images was sometimes caused a bit of lag again note for the most part the CPU utilization was locked at 100% next we tried a 1080p video a furious review playback was perfectly smooth when we weren't recording but as you can see even though we are recording the screen playback was still smooth with 29 frames per second that's work supplied the 4 KB box advertising trailer to try out and we have to say playback didn't go well the video would only playback at a few frames per second so we don't see how 4k video playback is really possible finally we tested some web browsing when compared to a more powerful core i3 desktop for example the B box is notably laggy still non power users which is another way of saying patient users shouldn't have any problems again keep in mind we're recording this footage using the B box which makes it appear a bit slower than it really is to recap the B box is a point six liter mini PC that didn't consume more than 9 watts during our testing this incredibly low power usage allow a dropper to create a completely fanless tiny little PC honestly I don't think as were actually be advertising this model in particular as a 4k player users that bought it for that purpose are gonna be on quite the end of a bee sting because it just can't do it first of all we can only get 4k to display at 30 Hertz which is extremely laggy even just moving the mouse around on the desktop and secondly the B box is only just capable of playing back 1080p contents we're really not sure how they got 4k to work the bare-bones spec is great value at 140 dollars and we really appreciate it being able to install an msi door SSD as well as a two and a half inch hard drive there's a lot to like about the B box from the excellent connectivity to the unbeatable price so we expect this mini PC to do pretty well for asrock it'll also be interesting to see how much faster the star on an 3150 quad-core enabled B boxes we assume as rock we're referring to this model when talking about 4k playback despite the fact that this typically mentioned it on the n 3000 webpage and the Box overall if you're looking for a low-powered quiet PC that you can do emails we're processing web browsing as well as playback 1080p content then the B box and 3000 will fit the bill thanks for watching this mini review I hope to see you on the next one this has been Matt for harbor and box please let me know what you think of the B box in the comments