Featured

Intel Windows HDMI Compute Stick Review

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