The world of mini desktop PCs keeps getting bigger. ASRock's Beebox is coming by the end of June, reports AnandTech, and it has an interesting mix of features. For one, it includes a new Intel Braswell chip. Because of that, it's totally fanless, and it's the first mini-desktop we've seen to include a USB Type-C port, a standard that's going to become increasingly common throughout 2015.
If you haven't memorized Intel's complex pile of codenames, Braswell is the desktop version of Cherry Trail, which is the new 14nm version of Atom that we looked at in Microsoft's Surface 3. Braswell chips are given a higher 4W TDP than the 2W Cherry Trail chips, and because they're intended primarily for budget desktops and laptops, they include things like SATA support and extra USB ports. They're sold as Pentium and Celeron chips instead of Atoms, but otherwise their CPU and GPU architectures are identical, which means we're looking at Intel's Airmont CPU cores and a cut-down version of the same GPU included with the higher-end Broadwell chips.
The Beebox's specific chip is the Celeron N3000, a 1.04GHz (2.08GHz Turbo) dual-core processor with a GPU that can run up to 600MHz. Performance will probably fall a bit short of dual-core Celerons based on the Broadwell and Haswell architectures, but it should also be much more usable than the Bay Trail-D chips that it replaces.
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