Tranquil PC Abel H2 review

The Tranquil PC Abel H2-5 is a NUC, which is a small PC built to a specification dictated by Intel. The entire PC is no bigger than a house brick, with a ridged metal block of a chassis that’s built to keep the system’s insides cool. It’s by far the best looking NUC chassis we’ve seen, with a metal exterior that’s been polished to a gleaming finish. It’s available in red, black, blue and the limited edition “Diamond” gun-metal grey version shown here, which puts an extra £15 on the price.

The Abel H2-5 is the Core i5 version, equipped with a dual core Haswell Core i5-4250U processor running at 1.3GHz. The processor is somewhat underpowered, with the emphasis being on low-power consumption rather than brute performance. Even so, this fanless PC’s chassis becomes almost too hot to touch when its processor is under heavy load.

The CPU’s performance proved to be surprisingly good, however, and the Abel H2-5 scored 47 overall in our application benchmarks. That’s on par with what we’d expect from a mid-range laptop, and although it’s not as powerful as a similarly priced full-size desktop PC, this compact computer is perfectly capable of carrying out common desktop tasks. Have no problem browsing the web, creating documents, watching videos and even occasional light image editing.

You’re largely out of luck if you want to play 3D games, though, due to the processor’s on-chip Intel HD Graphics 5000 graphics processor. In our standard Dirt Showdown laptop test, at a resolution of 1,280×720, and with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics quality set to High, the Abel H2-5 provided an average frame rate of 19.9fps. Reducing the graphics quality to Ultra Low brought that up to a smoothly playable 43fps. While older 3D titles such as Portal will work without much trouble, more recent 3D titles will be restricted to their lowest settings and reduced resolutions. We expected a slightly better performance from Intel HD Graphics 5000 graphics chip, but repeated tests failed to improve on our initial results.

The Abel H2-5 is best suited to life as a compact desktop workstation or, due to its attractive looks, as a media centre PC connected to your TV. The configuration we reviewed has a fair bit of fast internal storage in the form of a 120GB SATA SSD and a 128GB mSATA SSD. There’s no more room for further storage expansion, but you can specify higher-capacity drives at the time of purchase. That fully loads the internal storage connections and mounting points for this little PC, but alternative disks can be specified if you need extra capacity.

If you open up the Abel H2-5, you’ll find the SSD screwed to the bottom cover. Between that and the main bay is a heat diffusion plate and beneath the latter are the guts of the PC. The CPU is soldered in place, so the main removable components are an 8GB DIMM of Kingston ValueRAM and an mSATA disk. There are actually two RAM slots and only one is occupied with an 8GB module running at 1,600MHz. This means you can boost the PC’s memory capacity to 16GB at a later date.

If you want to connect external storage you can use the two USB3 ports at the front or the two at the back. Also at the front is an IR receiver that picks up commands from the supplied media centre remote control and, next to that, a 3.5mm headset port. The back of the Abel H2-5 is home to a glowing blue power button along with mini HDMI and mini DisplayPort graphics outputs. A mini HDMI to HDMI converter is supplied with the PC. Helpfully, the PC supports both wired and wireless network connection with a Gigabit Ethernet port and an integrated 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor.

The version we were sent for review comes with a chunky metal bracket that can be used as a VESA mount to put the Abel on the back of a monitor, or as a wall mount. The PC is remarkably attractive, so there’s no particular incentive to hide it away.

This configuration of the Abel H2-5 is a little pricy for a NUC, though, and its 3D gaming performance is a little weaker than we’d like. However, its dual SSDs mean that you get a fair bit of storage that works at a blistering speed. It’s also hands-down the best looking NUC we’ve seen and, although it runs warm, it’s silent and powerful enough to handle demanding tasks. It’s an ideal media centre PC for those who value style as well as substance.

If you’d like a more rounded PC with greater storage capacity and faster gaming performance, however, we recommend the Best Buy winning Scan 3XS NUC N16.