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Sapphire Edge HD2 MiniPC Review

Product: Sapphire Edge HD2
Company: Sapphire
Author: James Prior
Editor: Charles Oliver
Date: September 8th, 2011

Platform Comparison

The Sapphire Edge HD2 addresses the two major issues with the Intel Atom by adding NVIDIA ION 2 graphics. This CPU and GPU combination should make it perform comparably to AMD's Brazos platform, also targeted for media consumption and basic office/home computing tasks like webmail, internet surfing, video streaming and social media. We will compare the AMD E-350 APU, as seen here in Sapphire's' Pure Fusion Mini E350 mini-ITX board.

There are some fairly significant differences between our comparison platforms, the first being size. The Sapphire Edge HD2 is a quarter of the size of the Pure Fusion based mini PC. The E350 board is powered by a m-ITX power supply rated to 200W, instead of a more efficient external power brick like the Edge HD2. The Pure Fusion system also contains two SO-DIMMs and a slimline BD-ROM drive, and has built-in BlueTooth rather than Wi-Fi. These design choices make a difference in the power consumption as the efficiency and extra components take a toll.

Below you can see idle, DIVX HD playback, CPU load, and GPU load system power draw conditions. The readings were taken using a Kill-a-watt meter, and represent Windows 7 idle (network connections and aero active), WMP 12 playback, Prime95 and MSI Kombustor 1920x1080 stress test conditions.

We can see a fairly consistent 8-10W advantage for the Atom + ION 2 system, in all tests. Moving to a 65W adapter might reduce the power consumption of the Pure Fusion mini PC, but so would matching specifications - single RAM stick, fewer USB slots, Wifi in place of BT, no optical drive. It's the classic function vs. form, needs vs. power trade off argument.