Windows on a stick...

[Blazkowicz]

I just skimmed over the specs and the pages about storage and network performance.

It is indeed good, the eMMC 5.0 does a fine job at least at this size. I would take a laptop with such eMMC and a 2TB hard drive, and be content with it. Low end flash is a bad pitfall, it's easily worse than an old hard drive esp. if your workload is to apply 2GB of Windows updates.

The wifi is the other obvious weak link, except on this model. Dual band (is it it?) 5GHz does wonders albeit perhaps even that will have trouble in e.g. a NYC condo or some place like that down the road.
It depends a bit much of consumer awareness of their network.
It could be okay to have low end wifi and using USB to ethernet - in a great many cases the internet box is right next to the TV or near.

The separate power plug ought to be used on low end too (takes some heat off) as well as a minimum of eMMC 5.0

 

[BRiT]

Interesting product, but a bit too close to the price of a NUC. I do like the direction the market is heading with smaller and more powerful products.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Earlier in this thread there was some doubts as to how much Steam streaming takes and whether it could come close to maxing out a simple 100Mbit connection. Obviously it depends on the settings but on my home gigabit ethernet network, with all streaming set to unlimited/best quality and hardware encoding/decoding, playing GTA V hovers around 50-90Mbps at 1080p60.

I've been playing a lot of GTA on my TV streaming and with balanced settings I've found sometimes it produces decoding artifacts causing some occasional blocking, a lot more apparent in daylight in the sky with the more solid colors.

That's using H264? I wonder about a good incremental improvement with H265. Frame by frame encoding I suppose. Would be funny if we could get MJPEG and play on a really old PC or hacked console etc.