VERDICT Small, speedy and surprisingly well connected, this is the best-realised Chromebox yet.
THE RARITYWITH which new Chromeboxes launch is at least partially balanced by each design coming in about half a dozen different specs. The Acer Chromebox CXI3 is a perfect example. You can have it with an Intel Celeron 3865U and 4GB of RAM for about £250, but the version we tested packs a quad-core, eight-thread Core i5-8250U, not to mention 8GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD.
That all makes it something of a powerhouse in Chromebox terms. Like their laptop counterparts, Chromebooks, Chromeboxes typically settle for less horsepower, and a focus on cloud-based applications and storage in order to stay more affordable than equivalent Windows systems. This particular £502 model might be stretching the concept, but it does allow for slicker, smoother everyday use than most Chromeboxes.
There’s not a hint of slowdown when racking up browser tabs and running multiple applications, and booting up is almost instant. The CXI3’s power is shown quite starkly in its Geekbench 4 benchmark results: 4,286 in the single-core test and 11,106 in the multicore test. Compared to the Celeron 3865U-powered Asus Chromebox 3 (Shopper 368) we tested last year, the CXI3 is almost twice as fast on single-core performance and scored more than five times higher in the multicore test. Even though the Chromebox 3 is half the price, the numbers still favour Acer’s device.
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