Review: Packard Bell Imax Mini NVIDIA ION nettop PC. A little bundle of joy?

Final thoughts and rating

The Packard Bell Imax Mini N3600 is a straight rebrand of the Acer Revo N3600 nettop computer. In its highest specification, priced at £299, the Imax Mini houses an Intel Atom 230 chip; 2GB RAM; 160GB hard drive; 802.11n WiFi, and GeForce 9400M graphics in box that's not much bigger than a hardback book - and lighter. The extremely quiet system can be mounted behind a VESA-compatible monitor or placed on a stand. In effect, it's a netbook without a screen. Packard Bell should provide a free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 in due course, too.

Connectivity is good, from HDMI to eSATA, although DVI should have been provided instead of D-sub. The addition of NVIDIA's ION platform brings better-than-Intel GMA950 graphics for both multimedia usage and basic gaming. GeForce 9400M has greater gaming credentials than Intel's GMA950, yet don't expect to play any modern first-person shooter at 1,024x768 - the chip simply can't cut it.

Delve a bit deeper and a few other flaws become apparent. The Atom 230 chip struggles with any real kind of multi-tasking and quivers when decoding non-GPU-accelerated multimedia content. That's telling when playing Flash HD clips and, out of the box, the majority of HD content. Third-party programs get around some of the limitations, sure, but Joe Average would want to play a Camcorder-recorded H.264 clip on his shiny, new 1080P TV, we reckon. No optical drive means that Blu-ray or DVD playback isn't possible without some form of hard-drive streaming, either.

Bringing it all together, the Packard Bell Imax Mini N3600 is, for all intents and purposes, an ION-powered netbook without a screen. Many of the compromises made on netbooks are magnified on a larger screen and, given the £249 price for this model, sans gamepad, we can see that it make sense if you simply want a small, quiet PC for light usage. Just don't expect it to replace the power of even a two-year-old desktop machine.

HEXUS Rating

We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.

The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the Packard Bell Imax Mini is evaluated with respect to our 'mid-range' criteria.

Packard Bell Imax Mini N3600

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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Rebranded Acer product with a 50% price rise… You can get the Acer one starting at £160 :(

I just had a scout around and the Acer Revo available for £160 only gets you 1GB RAM, an 8GB SSD & Linux. A customer review on Play said he received a linux model with a 160GB HD though which he claimed Acer were replacing the 8GB SSD model with when stocks ran out.

@ Tarinder: I'm assuming that although it's not powerful enough to replace a 2yr old desktop, it would be comfortably faster than a 7yr old Athlon XP2000 1.6GHz single core desktop for freeview recording & BBC iPlayer duties?

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I just had a scout around and the Acer Revo available for £160 only gets you 1GB RAM, an 8GB SSD & Linux. A customer review on Play said he received a linux model with a 160GB HD though which he claimed Acer were replacing the 8GB SSD model with when stocks ran out.

@ Tarinder: I'm assuming that although it's not powerful enough to replace a 2yr old desktop, it would be comfortably faster than a 7yr old Athlon XP2000 1.6GHz single core desktop for freeview recording & BBC iPlayer duties?

Will101,

I wouldn't assume that, no. If we say that the HEXUS.PiFast test is reasonably indicative of single-threaded performance, and it seems that way, then going back in the database shows an Athlon XP-M 2500 (remember them?) returning a time of 75.63s:

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=722&page=5

We know that the XP 2000 will be slower, so maybe 90s. An Atom takes around 200s for the same task.

Single-core Atom 230 has pants single-threaded performance, and it's not cut out to be a desktop processor, IMHO. Fine in netbooks, where you can kind of mentally compensate for its lack of performance.

Seems like it doesn't tick all the boxes of what its meant to be designed for.

The Atom chip as great of an achievement it is, has no place in a home PC yet. Its needs more power
and the GPUs need a little more power too that go with them.

I think the uptake of the Atom surprised Intel a great deal. I think it was merely a stepping stone for them toward a lower power x86 processor for smart phone type machines. 7" 800x480 Netbooks (the original Asus EeePC) were really at the top of the range for Atom in terms of processing power whilst running Windows, and these machines are pretty much fine.
Beyond these specs, the Atom's lack of oomph is plainly evident, Flash is choppy due to it's dependence on CPU power and the introduction of Ion has only highlighted this. Indeed, Ion has turned the Atom into something of a co-processor for many tasks that machines running the nvidia graphics chip are now being used for.
For a desktop machine, there is no real reason, that I'm aware of, to run Atom other than the pretty form factor. I'm quite sure that if the manufacturers put a fraction of the effort into putting under-clocked AMD processors into the same space that they're putting Atom, then you could have a large increase in performance for not that great an increase in cost. The only issue I can conceive is that Microsoft may only allow XP to be licenced for use on machines it classes as netbooks and nettops, preferring to have OEMs pay full whack for Vista/Windows 7 on desktops which would, at least in the case of Vista, up the minimum requirements required.

(Why AMD processors ? because I'm aware of single-core AMD processors reportedly being run at the same wattage as Atoms whilst being quicker in terms of performance. Intel may well be able to do the same but I'm unaware of it.)