Installing Windows on an Xbox One APU: The Chuwi Aerobox Review
by Dr. Ian Cutress on December 24, 2020 9:45 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks, Power, Temperature, Noise
For office productivity, there’s no getting around the fact that these are Jaguar cores. Coupled with the memory bandwidth means that flicking between the basic documents can be somewhat laggy, and this isn’t really a system for anything other than email and web browsing. We still put it through our test suite, and the full range of tests were conducted. A few of them are highlighted here.
For reference, the Athlon 5370 mentioned here is a quad-core Jaguar.
Power, Temperatures, Noise
I will say a few words on power and temperatures.
Our normal tools for extracting power do not work on this embedded processor, likely a function of its age (similar Jaguar desktop processors that were public have the same issue), however we were able to take some wall measurements.
At idle, we saw power consumption in the 65-70W range. This is fairly high for a HTPC, so we would suggest not leaving it turned on when not in use. During our Borderlands 3 gaming, the system power hit 150 W, which should actually be clipping the power supply that is only capable of 150 W. This may be a limiting factor in gaming performance as a result. During high CPU loading, the total system power only went up to 85 W or so, showcasing that the GPU is the key component here.
For temperatures, before we replaced the paste, the system would peak at 75ºC regardless of load, and still offer full CPU frequency. After applying our own paste, that dropped to the 62-68ºC range. All throughout, the fan on the cooler never ramped up enough to be noticeable at a distance of a couple of meters. The one time the system had an odd boot, the fan did spin to 100% and was very loud, but after rebooting it came back as normal.
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osx86h3avy - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
I didn't read all comments so someone may have mentioned this but if they used a smaller box and added quad port gigabit nic if possible it could make a neat platform for pfsense router...I dunno though I mean not if it runs at 150w but perhaps with the right nic they could get that down...or perhaps add more Sata ports for a cheap nas???....other than that it seems like more of a curiosity than a real,option....and really, there are already so many far cheaper better solutions for those that it doesn't make much sense unless they can cost out somewhere like with say just 4gb onbaord mem, Emmc storage, no audio, etc., but now its just a whole other beast and all for the sake of just not throwing away decade old silicon which it seems is the best thing to do with these....phoenix_rizzen - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
The table on the first page doesn't match up with any of the text describing the APU in the Aerobox.CPU and GPU specs are incorrect.
regsEx - Sunday, December 27, 2020 - link
And they wondering why CB2077 is 20 fps on that ancient slow hardware. It's actually doing very good on that hardware, as they said.kaidenshi - Sunday, December 27, 2020 - link
"The concept of the modern console built on the same x86 architecture as desktop and gaming PCs came into effect with the 8th Generation of consoles – we’re talking the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One, both of which used the semi-custom services of AMD to build specific processors for these machines."Ahem, the original Xbox would like a word...
Mitch89 - Tuesday, December 29, 2020 - link
Was thinking the same thing. Original Xbox used a Pentium III running a modded version of Windows.artk2219 - Sunday, December 27, 2020 - link
It may have taken a little less time if you had used a toothpick to mechanically remove most of the paste before going to town with alcohol. Either way, i haven't seen a paste job that bad in a while, although Dell does a similarly bad job more often than not.Kuhar - Monday, December 28, 2020 - link
Can you please add comparison to Apple M1. FPS should be about on par when using rosetta, windows and heavy-duty games, right?cheapcomputers - Monday, December 28, 2020 - link
That was interesting. As soon as I started reading, I wondered how an Athlon 2c/4t would compare. Thanks for including some of that.I wonder if they can actually sell this garbage? Several months ago it would have been no problem for me to get an Athlon, mb, and DDR4 for less than $200.
I wonder how my old a4-6300 would compare. I still use it occasionally to install OSes and for file storage.
dromoxen - Friday, January 1, 2021 - link
This is the sort of system I might/could be interested in ... except its horribly outdated, and slow. Something with decent perfromance and a supremely low power usage (ergo v low heat output) would be more appropriate eg a laptop WITHOUT a screen, keyboard,charger,battery .Where most of these SFF items fail is their lack of gfx muscle .
Thanks NV for killing off MXM(micro-sized gfx card), which was earths last, best hope.
Deskmini seems far better ??
Athlex - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
"despite there being no mention of MSI anywhere else on the product or through the stack"Looks like there's a Microstar part number just below the M.2 SATA slot - MS-7C28