Sapphire Edge HD2 Mini PC Review

Sapphire have always been regarded as one of the key partners for AMD based products, especially in the UK, as some regard them as the biggest AMD partner when it comes to graphics card products. Over the years they have decided to move into other segments in the computer market and today sees us delving into that area as we aren’t looking at a graphics card from Sapphire, or even their new ventured market of motherboards which happen to be made for the Intel and AMD platforms but instead we look at another Intel based product from the market leader.

Sapphire delved into the nettop market at the start of 2011 with the release of the Edge HD mini PC which offered up a simple ATOM/ION based solution in a small form factor with a wealth of connectivity options. There was sadly a few things that let the mini PC down and it mainly came down to the hardware used inside. Whilst it offered up a high-end ATOM/ION combination at the time, it was still a bit behind in terms of playing HD content to the fullest and Sapphire knew this too.

Moving forward to the present day and we see the Edge HD2 being released with slightly improved features, current hardware and also comes with the choice of having a bundled version of  Windows 7 as standard. The original Edge mini PC gave us an ample Intel Atom D510 CPU running at 1.66GHz, 2GB DDR2 and a 2.5″ 250GB hard drive and whilst these are impressive considering the size that the Edge came in at at 19.3×14.8×2.2cm at 530 grams, Sapphire felt they could offer something slightly more impressive.

The Edge HD2 works off of the success of its predecessor but gives users a slightly improved set of specifications with a D525 1.8GHz Atom CPU, 2GB DDR2 800MHz, 2.5″ 320GB HDD and still utilising the nVidia ION2 graphics to give a perfect fully featured system in a small form factor that is smaller than most router and access point solutions and did we mention that it also comes with VESA mount capabilities?