Conclusive Thoughts

The NetBox-nT330i Barebone is an interesting product from Foxconn, which can be equipped with the DRAM quantity and HDD/SSD capacity of our choice. When looking and holding it, we can say it’s about the size of a Wireless router.

The barebone comes with the wireless adapter installed, which worked perfectly after I have installed the latest driver version from station-drivers.com.

This little computer can be used successfully for Office work, browsing the Internet with a low number of tabs (considering that they are fully loaded with Flash) or watching HD content (720P and 1080P clips played without a hitch in Windows Media Player 11 and the latest VLC version).

Regarding the power consumption, I was impressed, considering that I have recorded in IDLE only 29.38W and during the playback of a 1080 HD clip 38.08W.

The only issue I have found is the temperature of the CPU in some situations, like playing HD content; when we fresh start the computer, we can observe that if we stress the CPU only by a little, the fan will reach it maximum speed and it can be clearly heard.
Having temperatures on one of the Atom 330 cores of about 83-85 degrees Celsius is a little too much after playing a short HD clip. Surprisingly, I have not encountered any system freezes during the benchmarks, even if the temperatures were high.On the outside, though, the case does not get that hot.

Considering the high temperatures, I have searched on the Internet to see if other people experienced the same issues and they did; some of them have cut a hole through the top plastic cap and replaced the fan inside. The temperatures they have obtained were much lower, but I guess not a lot of people would like to do such kind of modifications. (without cutting the plastic with a special tool, we could easily ruin the outside aspect of the barebone).



The price of this mini-computer that can turn your monitor into an "iMac" clone is around $220, add in the cost of RAM and a HDD and you're looking at $300 price tag, making it one of the more affordable mini-PCs out there. Yes you can go for a small laptop or netbook at a slightly higher price, but will that play HD content fluently? For a netbook that's capable of that, you're look at $450-500 price range!

I would like to thank again to Foxconn for making this review possible.