14 DAY TRIAL // The Edge HD mini personal computer from Sapphire established itself as the world's smallest fully featured PC in the world, or at least these were Sapphire's words back in 2011 when it launched it.
The newest mini PC to leave Sapphire's labs is called Edge HD4 and is just as small as its predecessor, or predecessors since there were more than one before it.
It is based on the latest mobile central processing units from Intel, like the Celeron 847, with two cores, 1.1 GHz clock speed, and 2 MB cache memory.
The CPU is accompanied by 4 GB of DDR3 RAM (random access memory) and a hard disk drive of 320 GB.
No discrete or add-in GPU is used, as the Celeron has its own HD iGP (integrated graphics chip). It isn't very strong, but it should have no trouble running Windows, office tools and web browsers. Playing HD video should also work just fine.
Furthermore, the new system has a LAN port, USB 3.0, three USB 2.0 ports, a Full HD HDMI interface (1920 x 1080 pixels) and a VGA monitor output. An HDMI cable is shipped with everything else, as is an HDMI-DVI adapter.
Moving on, the Sapphire Edge HD4 Mini PC boasts built-in audio, a microphone input jack, and a line-out socket.
As for software, buyers will have to decide between Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
As for the price, it ultimately depends on the hardware choices, and this brings us to the final point: Intel CPUs aren't the only ones up for grabs.
The Edge HD4 Mini PC, or at least members in the Edge HD series, can have an AMD APU (accelerated processing unit) instead of an Intel CPU. Either way, the systems have a power consumption of under 30W, even at maximum load.
That's about 10 times less than typical desktop PCs, whose CPUs alone often use more than three times that much.