ViewSonic PC Mini VOT132 Review

It's thin, but it's no thin client: ViewSonic's VOT132 ($449 at ViewSonic's online store) is one of the smallest PCs you can buy -- it weighs a pound and measures 5.3 by 7.5 by 1 inches, about the size of a trade paperback or a bit slimmer than a stack of two DVD cases. But it's a true PC, not just a terminal, with its own Intel Atom processor and hard drive for local storage.

And while it qualifies as a nettop -- a desktop with the innards of a netbook, lately replaced in Intel's official vocabulary by "entry-level desktop" -- the PC Mini packs more power than first-generation nettops like the Asus Eee Top ET1602 and eMachines EZ1601. In fact, it has the specs of a netbook or early nettop, doubled -- 2GB of memory instead of 1GB, a 320GB instead of 160GB hard disk, and a dual-core Atom 330 instead of single-core Atom CPU.

And if you begrudge the Mini its few square inches of desktop space, you can reduce its footprint to zero by mounting it on the back of a ViewSonic or other LCD monitor: The PC comes with a plastic cradle that screws into the VESA wall-mount bracket on the back of most flat panels.

(Of course you'll need to budget some desk room, and a few bucks, for the keyboard and mouse not included in the VOT132 package. We plugged the receivers for a Logitech wireless keyboard and Microsoft wireless mouse into two of the PC's USB 2.0 ports and the system booted and recognized the devices without a hitch.)

Speaking of USB ports, there are six. Two are up front, along with an SD/MMC/MS flash-card slot, microphone and headphone jacks, and power and sleep buttons. The third through sixth USB ports are at the rear, as is a Gigabit Ethernet connector; DVI and HDMI monitor ports; an SPDIF audio-out jack; and an antenna jack for the unit's built-in 802.11b/g/n WiFi. A 3.5-inch antenna is included, as is a VGA-to-DVI adapter for connecting an analog monitor. The unit's 65-watt power supply is a notebook-style external adapter.

You can grumble about details (we'd like to see DisplayPort), but the PC Mini does a fine job of providing the PC essentials. The only glaring omission is an optical drive -- there's just no room for one inside the VOT132's sealed, skinny case.

ViewSonic has ingeniously addressed that with an optional DVD±RW drive dubbed the VDD100. Its $99 price is somewhat higher than your generic USB DVD burner, but it's sized and styled to match the Mini, right down to its fingerprint-collecting glossy black finish. In fact, it magnetically clings to the VOT132's side for a smooth, one-piece appearance, with a supplied cable plugging into two of the latter's USB ports for data transfer and power.

The desktop stand provided with the VOT132 cleverly offers two brackets, one sized to hold the Mini alone and the other to hold the Mini-plus-optical-drive combo. The slot-loading VDD100 worked smoothly in our tests, once we learned to push discs all the way in with a thumbnail lest they be ejected prematurely.

Better-Than-Netbook Performance

The system comes preloaded with the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium, a choice probably made to make its under-$500 price target. We would have preferred Win 7 Professional, but we must give ViewSonic credit for one thing -- apart from the trial version of Trend Micro Internet Security, the Mini is happily free of consumer bloatware, with no office suite trial or other icons cluttering the Windows desktop.

The Atom 330 under the hood is a 1.6GHz dual-core chip with two times 512K of Level 2 cache. It's a first-generation Atom, not the slightly faster integrated CPU and GPU that Intel added to its Atom lineup last week (the dual-core desktop incarnation of the new platform is the Atom D510), but in the PC Mini it's accompanied by a better graphics subsystem than the slower-than-molasses i945GSE integrated chipset seen in most netbooks: Nvidia's Ion chipset, which gave smooth video playback with the 720p and 1080p clips we sampled. The Mini can drive an analog monitor at up to 2,048 by 1,536 or a digital display at up to 2,560 by 1,600 resolution.

Even with Ion, the VOT132 isn't fast enough to play current games (its 3DMark06 benchmark score is 1,147), but it's definitely perky enough for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation work, as well as Web access and browser-based applications (its PCMark Vantage score is 1,827). It renders Cinebench R10's sample scene in 9 minutes and 40 seconds, which is slow by quad-core desktop standards but compares favorably to the 17-odd minutes required by the average single-core netbook or nettop.

One of our few complaints with the PC Mini is that it isn't silent: A cooling fan blows a near-continuous stream of warm air from the unit's top, accelerating from the faintest background noise to a distinctly audible whir when the system is working hard. It's never loud enough to annoy, but it is noticeable.

Even so, the VOT132 is our favorite nettop to date. It makes other small-form-factor and back-of-monitor-mount PCs look bulky, not to mention $200 or $300 more expensive (and, to be sure, more serviceable and expandable; a memory or hard disk upgrade for the ViewSonic is almost out of the question). It occupies a nearly unique niche between conventional PCs and thin clients, but it's all the PC that many office workers need.

And besides, just look at it. Isn't it the cutest thing?