Yoyotech Virtue Vesa Box 1 review

The Yoyotech Virtue Vesa Box 1 is a compact PC that would suit a home office where space is tight. The Virtue Vesa Box 1 is small enough to mount at the back of a VESA-compatible monitor, and Yoyotech provides the necessary custom mounting plate.

The Virtue Vesa Box 1 is housed in a plain black MSI Mini-ITX case. If you’re planning on mounting the system behind your monitor then the system’s design won’t really matter, but even if you don’t it is small enough to easily be hidden away. If you do place the Virtue Vesa Box 1 behind your PC then you find it awkward to attach USB flash drives and so on.

The model we reviewed was powered by a dual-core Intel Pentium K G3258 20th Anniversary Edition processor, but you can specify more powerful processors such as the Intel Core i5-4670 for additional cost. The processor is paired with 8GB of memory.

As for performance, the Virtue Vesa Box 1 scored 45 overall in our PC benchmarks, which means so it’ll be more than capable of editing documents and spreadsheets. It shouldn’t struggle too much with tougher tasks such as image editing, either, but it will obviously be slower than a Core i5, which would be a better choice if image- or video-editing is one of your hobbies.

The system isn’t designed for gaming, and this shows in our Dirt Showdown laptop benchmark, in which the Virtue Vesa Box 1 produced an average frame rate of 17.8fps. You’ll have no problem running common applications, web browsing and even some casual games, though.

We were also pleased to hear the system running quietly, even under load, but you’ll want to keep the exhaust vent on top of the PC free from obstruction.

Our review system came with a 500GB hard disk for storage, but you can upgrade to a 1TB hard disk for around £10 more and this is worth doing for the extra storage space.

Surprisingly, for such a small PC, there are plenty of connection ports, with four USB ports and headphone and microphone jacks on the front, and an eSATA connection, two USB3 ports, two more USB2 ports, a line-level output, a microphone input and a gigabit Ethernet port on the back. The only graphics output is a HDMI port, which is a shame, as we’d have preferred to have an alternative for greater compatibility with monitors.

You must specify the operating system you want when you order the PC, and our system came is priced with Windows 8.1. You’ll save around £80 if you opt for no operating system, which might be a good option if you want a low-cost Linux.

Due to the limited size of the system and motherboard, your upgrade options are restricted. There’s a half-size mini-PCIe connector that’s useful for installing items such as a Wi-Fi card. There are also a total of two SATA3 ports and the case can accommodate two 2.5in drives of either 9mm or 7.5mm thickness. The existing hard disk already occupies a SATA3 port and a drive bay. There’s also an mSATA slot should you want to add a fast mSATA SSD.

If you’re looking for a compact, inexpensive work PC then the Yoyotech Virtue Vesa Box 1 is a great choice. It’s inexpensive and offers enough performance for most computing tasks. The Virtue Vesa Box 1’s performance was slightly behind that of the similarly priced Zotac ZBox Sphere O1520 Plus, but the Vesa Box 1 provides far greater upgrade potential for storage and you’ll also need to add the cost of an operating system when looking at the ZBox Sphere.