Performance, Synthetic Benchmarks

In terms of performance, the Eee Box is like most Atom machines we've come across so far, although it's worth pointing out that Asus went for a mobile Atom N270. Acer and MSI use desktop, Atom 230 CPUs in comparable products. This is no big deal, as both are clocked at 1.6GHz and run at the same FSB. More importantly, Acer packs 2GB of memory on their Revo, although the Ion IGP on the Revo takes a bite out of the system memory, which is not the case with the Eee Box B204.



A quick look at GPU-Z reveals that the Mobility HD3450 runs at up to 500MHz, and it has 256MB of DDR2 at 500MHz.



Surprisingly, in 3Dmark 06 the Ion has the upper hand. The B204 scores 1032 marks, and the CPU score is 387, while the Ion gets 1306 marks and a CPU score of 487. It must be noted that Ion was tested under Vista, while the Eee Box ships, and was tested on, XP.



In HD Tune, the Seagate hard drive gets average scores, with access times slightly higher than what we've come to expect from netbook drives.



Sandra CPU scores were also Atom-average, but memory bandwidth was rather low, even for an Atom-based system.



Overall, the Eee Box B204 seems to be a bit slower than the Ion-based Acer Revo, but as we already said, the Revo runs Vista, so you should take some of these scores with a grain of salt. In real life, the differences would be negligible.