ASUS Chromebox Google Chrome OS SFF PC Review

Name: ASUS Chromebox Small Form Factor Chrome PC
Brand: ASUS

by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 11:16 AM EDT

Performance and Benchmarks

Page 5: Performance and Benchmarks

Benchmarking the Chromebox is unfortunately limited to tools that can be run within the Chrome browser. However, there are a few net-driven metrics these days that can be used to measure Javascript and HTML processing throughput, as well as graphics and HTML5 media processing capabilities and performance.

Web Rendering, Graphics and Javascript Processing

Browser Graphics and Processing Throughput

The ASUS Chromebox falls in at the top tier of our group of test machines, consisting of both thin and light laptops as well as chromebooks. As you'll note, it's quite a bit faster in most areas versus the Acer C720 Chromebook (powered by a lower-cost Intel Celeron 2955U) but about on par with the Chromebook Pixel (powered by a previous gen Core i5-3427U).

WebVizBench and Mozilla Kraken are slightly more strenuous benchmarks, with the former relying on HTML5 media and graphics performance and the latter comprising audio processing, image filtering, and cryptographic routines driven in Javascript. As you can see, the two Intel Haswell-powered machines do well in the HTML5-powered WebVizBench, while they're not quite as strong as the higher-end clock speeds found in the Chromebook Pixel, Dell Latitude, and Lenovo X1 Carbon notebooks.

Google Octane 2.0

Rendering, Compute and Web Performance

Google describes their Octane 2.0 benchmark as "a modern benchmark that measures a JavaScript engine’s performance by running a suite of tests representative of today’s complex and demanding web applications. Octane‘s goal is to measure the performance of JavaScript code found in large, real-world web applications, running on modern mobile and desktop browsers."

Once again, the ASUS Chromebox makes a strong showing, even edging out the high-end Google Chromebook Pixel. Suffice it to say that the Chromebox is pretty much up for anything you'd ask for in a class of device like this.