Sapphire Mini PC Edge-HD

Sapphire says its Mini PC Edge-HD is a ‘fully featured PC for home or business use'. The Mini PC is well-named, the machine barely occupies any desk space. It is easily the slimmest Atom machine we've tested and weighing 530g, it is one of the lightest too.

Within its compact confines lie a power-packed set of components including a dual-core Intel Atom D510 processor that runs both its cores at 1.6GHz. This CPU packs HyperThreading technology and so can execute up to four threads simultaneously. There's also a reasonable 2GB of DDR3 RAM and a nVidia ION 2 GPU with 512MB of dedicated video memory.

That last component gave the Sapphire serious muscle when it came to video firepower as using the right media player, we were able to watch 720p HD video without any dropped frames. At the same time the GPU was competent enough to tackle Street Fighter IV in high detail at 1280 x 720 pixels; it managed a framerate of 32.94fps making the game playable. Even when we ran the more intensive Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, we were able to attain playable framerates by reducing the quality of detail to medium.

As an apps machine the Edge-HD impressed again, it managed figures of 2,033, 2,604, 2,491 and 5,375 in our PCMark 05 CPU, MEM, Graphics and HDD benchmark tests.