Final Thoughts and Conclusion
This being my first time dealing with a pre-manufactured small form factor (SFF) PC (well smaller than that, a miniPC), I was pleasantly surprised. I have built ATOM, Brazos and Celeron based SFF computers before but honestly none had grunt. What I expected was reasonable power draw and a little more capability at the high end. What I found was lower power draw for common tasks and unexpected power at the top side. The fact that more power is used for most of the heavier tasks, such as encoding and transcoding, is offset by the time savings and total power usage being lower.
We did test this unit playing some free steam games as well and suffered no visible deficiencies in frame rates or picture quality. Gaming up to 1080 with moderate quality settings in game with the Nvidia 640 set to default yielded a great balance of looks and playability. The types of games we ran were not top of the line games (Moon Breakers) but they were not simple Facebook type games either. All in all gaming is not an issue as long as you realize this is not a gaming device and you need not max out settings.
Giada seems to have put together a solid system here that finds a good balance between mean and green.
