Asus Eee Box B204 review

We really like Asus’s original nettop, the Eee Box B202, as it’s compact, cheap, stylish and power-efficient.

It’s ideally suited to office tasks and web browsing, as it’s not capable of playing HD videos. That’s is where the new B204 version comes in. It looks identical to the B202, but inside there’s a new graphics chipset. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 isn’t up to playing most 3D games, but can smoothly play 1080p HD video such as that found on Blu-ray discs.

The B204 doesn’t have a Blu-ray drive, however, or any sort of optical drive for that matter. The supplied Eee Cinema software, which is similar to Media Center, will let you play MPEG2 and H.264-encoded video straight from the box, so footage from HD camcorders is well catered for. The software has no support for TV tuners, though, so you’ll need to flick back and forth between two applications if you add one via USB.

The B204 comes with a remote control for browsing and playing video, audio and image files. It’s a nice design, but disappointingly it uses IR. There’s no built-in IR receiver, so you have to use the provided USB dongle, which takes up one of the four USB ports and looks messy. A Bluetooth remote would have been far better.

The addition of Bluetooth is one of the few other changes from the B202. The original B202 had an 80GB hard disk, but the updated model (part code EBXB202-WHT-X0056) has a 160GB disk, just like the B204. One bizarre new feature is the built-in UPS battery, which provides six-and-a-half minutes of power. In a power cut your monitor will also switch off, though, making it very hard to save your work before shutting down. Despite the new graphics chipset, power consumption is still impressively low, with results similar to the B202’s.

The B202 had a DVI-I output, so you could connect a digital display or use an adaptor to connect a VGA-only monitor. The B204 has only an HDMI output, so you can’t get a VGA signal from it. On the plus side, this will appeal to those with HD TVs as it can output audio and video signals from a single port. Otherwise, the ports are identical to the B202’s: four USB, a memory card reader and stereo mini-jack audio in and out sockets.

If you’re looking for a small PC to play HD video, this one fits the bill. However, its slow processor and small hard disk mean it’s not suitable for editing or storing such content. It’s not ideal as a media centre, either, as it lacks an optical drive for playing DVDs, and the provided software doesn’t support TV tuners. Nettops are best suited for light computing tasks, such as web browsing. It’s a good little PC, but we don’t feel the B204 adds enough to justify the more than £70 increase over the B202.