New Braswell Celeron Quad Core Mini Box PC, Fanless PC, HTPC, With Rich IO: Dual HDMI Dual LAN USB2.0 USB3.0 Wifi, 4K, Sliver Aluminum Shell

The case is aluminium and solid. Inside is a nano ATX board (12cm square) with an Intel Celeron J3160 CPU (depends on which model you buy). The CPU is actually mounted on the reverse side of the motherboard, and is directly thermally bonded to the case (you turn the case over to open it, therefore the CPU is bonded to the top of the case). Therefore if you remove the motherboard, you will need some thermal paste to ensure a good thermal bond when you reassemble.The J3160 is obviously not competitive with desktop Core i3/5/7 CPUs, but it has very low power consumption, while being more powerful than e.g. a Raspberry Pi (although maybe an pi version 4 would be nearing the same level of performance?).Inside there is a single SO-DIMM memory slot. My PC would not boot with an 8GB module, but it was OK with 4GB (I also own an earlier model of this PC with a Celeron N3150, and that does work with the 8GB module). I contacted the seller through amazon, and they were very helpful in assisting why my PC would initially not boot.There are also two mini PCI connectors, and the unit comes with one slow populated with a wireless adapter; he other slot is free. I don't need the wireless adapter so I have removed it to help lower power consumption a little. I have also added an eMMC module as internal solid state storage.There is also a single mSATA connector, I have used this to connect a standard 2.5" HDD for extra storage space. The HDD screws to the inside of the access plate (on the underside of the PC). It is a tight fit when the plate is reassembled, but it does fit.Power consumption at idle (including the 2.5"HDD at 5400rpm) is 5-6 Watts. Under load the consumption increases to about 9 Watts, possibly with shorts peaks slightly above this. These are all wattages measured at the wall, so this includes losses in the DC power adapter (supplied).Due to the low power consumption the unit does not get hot, in fact it barely gets warm to the touch, despite the CPU being thermally bonded to the top of the case. There is no fan, so this is a truly silent PC (mine makes some noise from the spinning HDD of course).I previously owned one of these and ran it continuously for about 3 years, at which time it developed a fault, although it does still work. Given the low price, low power consumption and reasonably high performance I decided to buy a replacement as there isn't much out there to touch it in terms of that combination, and being a nice compact simple design.I run ubuntu server on this fine, but I believe it will run Windows 10 as this is an x86-64 CPU.Overall if it wasn't for the previous failed unit and the problem with an 8GB RAM module this would be a definite 5 stars, but given those issues I give this a four. To be honest though, at this price I am kind of OK with replacing the unit after a few years - I got a slightly faster CPU in the new unit after all, with no increase in power consumption.

Hardware is not bad. Very clear that it has been rushed, with the BIOS having pretty much every option available where normally a vendor would trim down to just those that are relevant to the hardware. Viewing the PCI details also shows some very generic-looking strings that normally would have been cleaned up. I get the impression that someone has just bolted together the components such that they work and then shipped it out of the door.With all that said, I ran this as a firewall for a few months and it was fantastic. Handled dozens of clients with a 200Mbps/12Mbps cable connection and I didn't see any performance or stability issues at all. I did see some weirdness booting Linux in UEFI mode from a USB flash drive -- had to either use the old BIOS mode or boot specifically from the "partition 1" UEFI entry. Used both of the built-in Ethernet ports, plus a USB 3 Ethernet adapter to allow me to have WAN plus two LAN. Initially ran with Ubuntu 16.04, but had a quick play with ClearOS and OPNSense as well. Ultimately replaced it with a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite because it was neater than having the USB adapter, and I liked the Ubiquiti Web UI.With the box freed up from firewall duties, I thought I'd give it a go as a desktop PC. Went to install a new OS on it, and the first issue I saw was that my Kingston DataTraveler caused the boot and BIOS process to slow to a crawl. Unplugged the flash drive and everything went back to normal. Switched to a DataTraveler Micro Duo (which I had used for the firewall software installs) and everything was fine. Installed Ubuntu 17.10 with no major drama, but once booted into the desktop environment, the mouse and keyboard would hang repeatedly. Switched back to Xorg (instead of the default Wayland) and this seems to have improved matters -- had to open a bunch of apps before things started to grind to a halt, and that's probably due to the limitations of the 4GB RAM I've got on this box. Whatever the reason, in my opinion the performance of this box isn't really up to running as anything more than a *very* basic desktop machine.