Results

While the HDD comes preinstalled with a basic DOS installation, the system supports Windows 7, Vista and XP so I went straight with the Ultimate edition of 7.

Once setup, you throw the bundled pen drive into the device and since it comes with all the needed drivers, off you go. I was a little surprised not see more up to date versions on Sapphire’s site however. Perhaps they are in deeper than I looked, but you’d expect to see them on the product page for the Edge.

Once I was up and rolling, I threw a few videos onto the Mini PC to see how it handled standard video.

Louis didn’t have any objections, so I then moved on to HD content. Again, even with 1080p being pushed through it, the little Edge hummed away and output it with no problems at all. No stuttering, no buffering or pixelation, just good quality video.

After this I decided to see how gaming was. While I appreciate that the onboard GPU isn’t going to be a powerhouse, there are some games that I felt it would be able to take a bash at, and it did very well. First up I logged into my GOG account and downloaded Raptor: Call of Shadows, an old school overhead shooter. Zero problems. Smooth frame rates, full screen no issue; though to be fair, as would be expected from a 15 year old game.

While I was never going to attempt a Crysis 2 run on this thing, I thought the Edge could handle something a bit more strenuous, perhaps something with quite a large draw distance to push the onboard Atom. So I went with Minecraft. Again, the Edge did very well, handling the blocky title on “fancy” graphics at full 1900×1080 resolution.

The only thing that I did have to lower was the draw distance, but only from maximum to “normal” which isn’t particularly noticable. This got rid of any lingering hardware lag that caused the odd stutter.

I also played some music over the network and did some streaming via my AC Ryan media centre; again, zero issues. This is shaping up to be quite a little product.