Asus Chromebox: For just $180 you can have a fanless, fairly useless Chrome OS desktop PC

Asus Chromebox: For just $180 you can have a fanless, fairly useless Chrome OS desktop PC
Will 2014 be the year of the Chromebook/box?

Will 2014 be the year of the Chromebook/box? Very possibly, if Samsung, LG, Acer, and now Asus, have anything to do with it. The Asus Chromebox is a very small fanless, headless box that will go on sale in March for just $180 — half the price of the (ever so slightly smaller) Intel NUC. It runs Chrome OS, Google’s Linux-based OS that runs the Chrome browser and very little else.

Hardware-wise, the Asus Chromebox is very similar to what you might find in existing Intel-based Chromebooks. There’s a 1.4GHz Celeron 2955U (Haswell) CPU, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. On the connectivity side of things, there’s Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, 4x USB 3.0, DisplayPort, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and an SD card slot. Graphics-wise, the HDMI and DisplayPort are powered by the Celeron 2955U’s integrated GPU — which won’t be playing any high-res games, but it should be more than enough for full-screen HD video playback. AnandTech reports that there will be Core i3 and Core i7 Chromeboxes as well, which will presumably push the pricing up into the Intel NUC range ($300+).

The Asus Chromebox is incredibly small, measuring 4.9×4.9×1.65 inches. The Intel NUC is marginally smaller, but they’re both incredibly small computers. Other than its incredibly low price, the main advantage of the Asus Chromebox is that it’s fanless — so, plug in an external hard drive, or connect it up to your NAS, and you have a fairly plucky home theater PC. It’s also a pretty solid choice if you’re looking for a small, inoffensive piece of technology to get a friend or family member onto the internet. The lack of internal storage is always going to be a bit of an issue with Chromebooks and boxes, but Google’s free-100GB-of-cloud-storage-for-two-years does ameliorate some of the pain. (Read: LG’s all-in-one Chromebase will bring Chrome OS, unfortunately, to the desktop.)

Intel NUC: Slightly smaller, but more powerful than the Asus Chromebox

As always with low-power, headless PCs like this, though, there’s always going to be a question about just how useful they actually are. Before you can use the Asus Chromebox, you have to plug it into something — a TV, a desktop monitor, both of which will cost you money. If you’re using it as a home theater, why not just get a Chromecast, or an Xbox or PlayStation? You could put Linux on it [ read our Linux-on-a-Chromebox guide], but it’s still a pretty wimpy piece of hardware. You could attach some external hard drives to it and turn it into a FreeNAS box, perhaps, but for most people it’s probably cheaper and easier to just plug a hard drive into your router or an existing PC.

Personally, if I was going to go down the ultra-small-form-factor PC route, I’d probably spend the extra money and get an Intel NUC, which has an all-important mini-PCIe expansion slot. (Can you say smallest LAN partyrig ever?)