Intel Windows HDMI Compute Stick Review

Introduction There is a portable "USB-powered-HDMI-displayed-AIO-device" war going on since the arrival of low-cost Android boxes which in turn brought us Windows boxes of the same form factor. The next generation of these devices came and shrunk the form factor even more, bringing the full-fat Windows experience to the System on a Chip (SoC) device while maintaining the size of a large memory stick. Amongst the-the many rebranded Chinese Android sticks to make it to Europe has been an official offering by Intel in the form of their "Compute Stick", which serves as proof that they are aiming to claim a slice of this emerging market in both Linux and Windows flavours. Intel were kind enough to send us a Windows Compute Stick to put through its paces, and no sooner had they confirmed we would be getting one had it arrived. Anyway enough of the backstory, let's get the shrink wrap off and get this fired up! Specifications Name: Intel Compute Stick (Windows Variant) CPU: Intel Atom Z3735F (Quad Core 1.3Ghz with 1.8GHz burst) RAM: 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 SSD: eMMC 32GB GPU:Intel Integrated Graphics (64mb) LAN: None WLAN: 802.11a/b/g/n Built-in Bluetooth™ V4.0 I/O: 1x USB 2.0 , 1x HDMI 1.4 OS: Windows 8.1 32bit Dimensions: 103 x 12 x 37 mm (WxHxD) Warranty: 2 Year Price: £119.98 The box is very nicely packed, no bigger than you would get with a phablet sized phone. There is a small black tab which when pulled slides the inner box out from the cover With the box slid out, the first thing you are presented with is the compute stick itself Removing the lining reveals multiple accessories underneath CPU-Z GPU-Z A Closer Look To the front, we have an HDMI connector. There is a rubber dust cap for this though it can easily be lost. To the left, we have USB micro USB (for power) and a power button. Nothing much to see around the back, just a tapered end. There is a Micro SD Card slot on the right hand side and selection of ventilation holes on each side. The top side hosts a blue LED above the Intel logo when powered on. The underside has supplementary information, such as serial number, etc. Testing & Methodology To test each system or notebook, we want to stress every component to check stability and performance, giving us an idea as to why those particular components were picked for this particular system or notebook. We use a wide variety of software applications to gain the broadest spectrum of results for comparing multiple aspects of performance Hardware Acoustic dBA meter AC "Killawatt" power meter Software 3DMark 11 3DMark AIDA64 Engineer Cinebench R11.5 Cinebench R15 CrystalDiskMark CPU-Z GPU-Z HW-Monitor Passmark PerformanceTest 8.0 PCMark 8 Super PI System Performance - PCMark 8 The PCMark 8 Home benchmark includes workloads that reflect common tasks for a typical home user. These workloads have low computational requirements making PCMark 8 Home suitable for testing the performance of low-cost tablets, notebooks and desktops. Home includes workloads for web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The results are combined to give a PCMark 8 Home score for your system. Download here. CPU Performance - Cinebench and SuperPi Cinebench R11.5 and R15 Cinebench is a widely respected benchmark for testing the performance of x86 CPUs. The program allows you to test single and multi-threaded performance as well as GPU performance by rendering with Open GL. Download here. Super Pi Super PI is a single threaded benchmark that calculates pi to a specific number of digits. Super PI is a single threaded benchmark ideal for testing pure, single threaded x87 floating point performance and while most of the computing market has shifted towards multithreaded applications and more modern instruction sets, Super PI still remains quite indicative of CPU capability in specific applications such as computer gaming. Download here. SSD, HDD and USB 3.0 Performance CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a portable storage drive benchmark utility that enables you to measure sequential and random read/write speeds on different block size data. CrystalDiskMark will work with any storage drives including hard drives, SSDs and USB flash drives. Download here. Sequential Read Sequential Write Networking Performance Passmark Performance Test 8.0 The PassMark Advanced Network Test (which is part of PerformanceTest) is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers must act as the server and will sit waiting for a connection. The other computer acts as a client. It connects to the server machine and sends data to it for the duration of the test. You can download a trial version of PerformanceTest fromhere. For this test, we use the ASUS RT-AC68U wireless AC gigabit router and pump data from the test system or notebook through the ASUS router into our Intel Gigabit enabled test system. We connect to the ASUS router with a Cat6 cable when testing ethernet and wirelessly when testing WiFi performance. Wireless (WiFi) Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures Noise Due to the system being completely passively cooled, there was literally no audible indication that the system was running. There was absolutely nothing to detect louder than the ambience of a silent room, which was a great thing to behold. Power Consumption To test power consumption we measure the total system power draw during idle and load scenarios. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Prime95 to loop together - we take the power measurements from the "Killawatt" AC power meter 5 minutes into both of these scenarios at the same point. Temperatures To test thermal performance we measure average CPU and GPU core temperatures during idle and load scenarios. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Prime95 to loop together - we take the temperature measurements from within CPUID HWMonitor 5 minutes into both of these scenarios at the same point. For load we take the average of the maximum temperatures, for idle we take the average of the minimum temperatures. Final Thoughts Pricing Retailing at £119.98 it sits at a similar point to the entry Brix/NUC mini systems though the compute stick has the improved form factor as a complete "plug and play" package, whereas the NUC systems often require extra components and OS to complete the setup, but in turn are vastly quicker. I can't help but think if they could push this under the £100 mark then this would be a real contender, though at its current price it mainly for those who are looking for ease or form factor over speed. Incidentally, Intel does in fact supply a Linux variant of this for only £89.99 but at a sacrifice of only 1GB of RAM instead of the 2GB we have here, and 8GB of eMMC storage instead of the 32GB on the Windows model; both have Micro SD ports. The Intel Compute Stick can be purchased here. Overview To look at it resembles a first generation USB WiFi dongle, though it is still an impressive amount of hardware tucked in here. Despite being made from plastic it feels reassuringly solid in hand. Though there is a rubber dust cap that has been provided for the HDMI connector it would have been nice to see a more matching solution, or the ability to retract the connector would be even better. Noise wise this it is as close to silent as you can get. We found that if we turned our test monitor off and held it directly to our ear we could make out a gentle hum, though when we turned our test monitor on it was completely inaudible. Our DB meter found no difference to it being on to being off, hence there is no DB graph in our results. Performance wise we were never expecting numbers that would blow our socks off and the compute stick was as powerful as we'd expect considering this is an Atom processor. We tried a selection of "work" related tasks on this, including operating and manipulating a large spreadsheet on a 1080p monitor, running through some PowerPoint presentations, manipulating a 20mp image in (32 bit) Photoshop, and general web browsing. For everything office related the compute stick was a joy to use, and PowerPoint presentation animations were nice and smooth. The compute stick was a little sluggish when it came to Photoshop, though really it was down to the size of the images we were trying to process. We applied a few filters to a 2mp selfie and it was quick enough, just don't try any serious editing on large images, this is only a 1.33GHz Atom remember. Web browsing was fast for the best part. We got a small amount of lag on pages which use flash, though thankfully these are in decline in general and it did not hamper the experience. Video playback at 1080p on VLC was smooth with no stuttering on sync issues as for web media such as YouTube and Netflix, so this could be a contender as a media system should you pair it up with one of the many home entertainment software suites available. The Micro SD slot ensures you can boost your compute stick capacity should you need to, or carry a decent amount of media with you. We tried a 64GB card and it worked as expected. The Windows installation seemed vanilla which was pleasantly surprising, there was nothing which stood out as custom though it's worth pointing out for some that it was 8.1 32bit. One more thing to point out is that this is eligible for the Windows 10 upgrade, so 8.1 haters can upgrade if you so wish. If there was one way Intel could have improved on this without a doubt it would have been by adding an extra USB port. The first snag we came across with this was using a USB pen to put our bench software onto the device, but then we needed the USB port for the receiver for our keyboard/mouse combo, meaning we had to make a choice of one or the other. We had 3 solutions which were to use a Bluetooth keyboard / mouse which we had to hand (but appreciate most will not), transfer via WiFi, or put it on to our Micro SD card and move it that way. Although though not a massive inconvenience we could think of many other scenarios where a second USB port would be a boon, though out of the box you either need a USB hub or to be able to manage with just one. This niggle aside though it was a neat little device to use, I had read previously that others had experienced issues with Bluetooth connectivity though I experienced no problems using a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. For the travelling businessperson, home media centre, kiosk, display PC, retro gaming system, portable rig or even just the curious; this is an interesting stick of tricks, it's just finding the right use for this for the user that defines it as a decent purchase. Pros Insanely low power consumption Tiny form factor Plug in and away you go, instant solution Cons Only 1 USB Port Neutral Windows version could be priced more aggressively Thanks to Intel for providing us with this Compute Stick