As I mentioned before, the Eee Box handles YouTube with aplomb (provided you're using Firefox), and will be more than happy to copy and e-mail photos off your SD card. Yet as Scott mentioned in his Atom vs. Nano review, the Atom isn't ideal for doing any kind of real Photoshop work; it's better suited for simple image manipulation like a quick red-eye removal filter.
Video playback is a major point of weakness for the 945 chipset's GMA 950. The GMA 950's hardware video decoding capabilities are fairly sparse, and this proves to be a real issue when paired with a low-power processor like the Atom. To test the video capabilities of the Eee Box, I encoded one of my short films into 480p, 720p, and 1080p WMV files. The playback results were not encouraging.
The 480p video ran without a hitch in Windows Media Player 9, but the 720p version began to show small stutters here and there. The stutters weren't major, but a picky viewer would find them a bit agitating.
Unfortunately, 1080p playback is simply beyond the Eee Box's capabilities. Some bits of our highest resolution video played back smoothly, but any major changes in the image resulted in fits of lag lasting at least a couple of seconds, rendering the video as a whole largely unwatchable. Because of this difficulty and the infrequent but noticeable stutters during 720p playback, I can't recommend using the Eee Box for watching high-definition content. YouTube and other video rendered at or below standard definition runs perfectly fine, but the Atom and GM950 can't handle much more.
This reality leads to a disappointment. Something like the Eee Box could potentially be an ideal multimedia machine, but Intel's decision to tie the Atom to the 945 chipset is a real hindrance. Even an inexpensive GPU like a Radeon HD 2400 could mitigate the weaknesses of the GMA 950. Unfortunately, Intel is reportedly preventing partners from including PCI Express interfaces on their Atom-based Mini-ITX boards, and it stands to reason that this limitation extends to OEM designs like the Eee Box. Atom system builders may be forced to rely on Intel for the platform's graphics component, which makes it hard to blame Asus alone for the Eee Box's high-definition playback shortcomings.
BIOS settings
If you've ever wandered into a laptop BIOS, you may find the Eee Box spartan layout and limited functionality fairly familiar.
The BIOS options available in the Eee Box are decidedly—though appropriately—sparse, but there are little treats here and there. Users have limited access to CPU clock speeds along with the core speed of the GMA 950, but the options given are very abstract with the former and underwhelming with the latter. The GMA 950 can only be clocked up to 266MHz, and CPU overclocking is limited to confusing and ultimately useless settings like "High." As a result, the frequency settings page is probably best left alone. There doesn't seem to be much additional performance to be wrung from this little machine.
The memory tab is similarly bare, though one can at least choose between DDR2-400 and DDR2-533 speeds. This kind of tweaking probably won't do a whole lot for the Eee Box, though.
The rest of the BIOS is standard fare, although the inclusion of Asus' EZ Flash 2 is certainly welcome. The EZ Flash utility is built into the BIOS and allows for easy updates from a flash drive, the hard disk, or just about any storage medium connected to the machine. While this seems like a simple and necessary inclusion for a system without a floppy drive, many desktop boards from top-tier manufacturers still don't have a similar utility.
