Sitting on top a Shuttle G5

Side by Side Comparison.

After tearing it apart, the Nova was meticulously assembled again, and we tested the Nova with an E4500, E6420 and a E6850. The 946GZ chipset handles the 800/1066FSB Core 2 well, but sadly, the E6850 refused to work on the Nova. The elaborate heatpipe cooling handled the higher-end CPU without any problems at all, and the noise level is maintained at a virtually silent level throughout our tests.

We also popped in a stick of Aeneon 2GB RAM stick and it worked like a charm. We recieved the bare unit from Asus in our labs, but it will ship with a full set of accessories including a remote control, the TOSlink adaptors, a stand and a whole load of stuff along with this little monster. We will update this article upon recieval of  the rest of the stuff.

There isn't quite a point running the usual 3DMark mambo jumbo on this machine, as this is built purely for home entertainment purposes from the feature set that we've looked at previously in this article. We tried running some High-Definition Content on the machine, and H.264 encoded 1080P movie trailers ran choppily on the default configuration of the E2160 chip, and it is still slightly laggy on the E4500 chip. Things were ironed out when the E6420 was popped in, and movies begun playing like a charm. The P23 variant of the Nova will be equipped with a E6300/E6320 CPU which should handle High-Definition Content well.

Sadly, it might prove too costly for Asus to equip the Nova PC with a High Definition ODD at the moment, and HD Content on Bluray & HD-DVD is something that enthusiast might love to have on this little machine, and it is virtually impossible for the end-user to obtain a slim blu-ray/hd-dvd drive in the market now. Lack of front I/O ports has proven to be a gripe in terms of accessibility, and additional I/O options like E-SATA will be highly appreciated because the ease of upgrading isn't high, and 2.5" hard drives is still cost a fair bit more than their 3.5" counterparts. All in all, Asus has gotten themselves a winner in the Small-Form Factor market with a superior cooling solution that's virtually silent, classy touch-sensitive buttons and a nice Slot ODD.

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