Sapphire EDGE VS8 Barebones Model Review (8GB/SSD)

1. Introduction2. Sapphire EDGE VS8 Barebones (Packaging and Bundle)3. Sapphire EDGE VS8 Barebones4. Step by Step Install Guide for EDGE VS8 Barebones5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra7. Synthetic: PCMark 78. Synethetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit9. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Synthetic: 3DMark 1111. Synthetic: 3DMark12. Synthetic: HDD Performance13. Real World: BluRay PlayBack with PowerDVD 1114. Real World: MKV 1080p Performance15. Real World: Flash HD Performance16. Real World: Media Encoding17. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.018. Gaming: Left4Dead219. Gaming: Total War Shogun 220. Gaming: F1 201221. Gaming: Hitman Absolution22. Gaming: Sleeping Dogs23. Technical: Acoustics Performance24. Technical: Power Consumption25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

Kitguru has reviewed many of the diminutive, versatile Sapphire EDGE systems in the last couple of years. We reviewed the EDGE HD3 in February 2012, powered by the AMD E450 and the EDGE VS8 in December 2012, powered by the AMD A8 4555M APU. In early February we also reviewed the latest Celeron powered EDGE HD4. Today however we have something really special for you – the enthusiast focused barebones version of the EDGE VS8.

The EDGE VS8 has been my personal favourite of all the EDGE systems I have reviewed to date. The quad core AMD A8 4555M APU (1.6ghz) proved quite powerful and capable of handling a variety of tasks, a significant step above the Intel ATOM processors of yesteryear. It also demands very little power at the socket, which is a huge selling point if the system is to be left on 24/7.

My biggest problem with all of Sapphire's EDGE systems has been the company insistence on including a painfully slow 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm mechanical hard drive. This has had a hugely negative impact on the overall performance of the system.

The barebones version of the EDGE VS8 negates this concern, as the system doesn't ship with memory or a hard drive. You therefore have the option to populate this unit with whatever memory and hard drive, or solid state drive that you want. As the starting price has also been reduced accordingly this is surely a good thing.

The EDGE VS8 is built inside a tiny little chassis which is vertically mounted on a supplied stand. If the barebones VS8 is too expensive, then Sapphire also sell a VS4 version. This system features the 1.9ghz, dual core AMD A4-4335m.

Sapphire colour the boxes differently. This barebones EDGE VS8 kit is a bluey/green, rather than the red of the EDGE VS8 ‘all in one' box.

The rear of the box details the key benefits of the EDGE VS system, and the specifications of the hardware inside.

The Sapphire EDGE VS8 is protected inside a cardboard protective box and wrapped in a clear plastic bag to protect against scuffing during transport. Underneath this box is another box containing the accessories.

Sapphire supply an extensive bundle with the Edge VS8 which includes:

1 x HDMI cable
1 x HDMI to DVI adapter
1 x User Manual
1 x Installing the HDD/SDD and memory guide.
1 x Chassis Stand
1 x Power cord
1 x Power Adapter
1 x Driver CD
1 x Optical SPDIF cable
1 x VESA Mount

The EDGE VS8 system is finished in a matt black surface which looks and feels fantastic. Unfortunately as I have mentioned before it does attract fingerprints rather easily. I had to constantly clean the surface after handling the unit for even a short time.

The Sapphire logo is emblazoned into the chassis and stands out quite dramatically due to the contrasting colours. Each side of the chassis has cooling vents in place to ensure the internal temperatures can be maintained within a reasonable level. The power button is styled to look like a continuation of the side panels (image above right).

The rear of the machine is home to the majority of the connectivity. On the front of the EDGE VS8 hidden behind a protective port are two USB 3.0 ports, alongside a card reader.

The complete I/O list is as follows:

1 x Mini Display Port
1 x HDMI Port
1 x RJ-45 Gigabit Lan
4 x USB 2.0 Port
1 x Audio-in
1 x Line-out
2 x USB 3.0 Port
1 x Optical SPDIF
1 x SD Card Reader

The supplied stand is easy to fit, simple line up the screw with the hole on the underside of the chassis and screw firmly into place.

The Sapphire EDGE VS8 is a slim unit which can be easily hidden behind a television set without taking up additional space. This is one of the primary selling points for the product.

Previous versions of the EDGE systems we have reviewed have all featured very slow 5,400 rpm 2.5 inch hard drives which have ruined the performance. The whole point of the Barebones product we are reviewing today is to give the user their own choice of hard drive and memory. You no longer have to pay for an ill performing bundled hard drive or memory.

We feel that someone buying memory and a hard drive for this system will be working to a budget of less than £150, on top of the price of the EDGE VS8 barebones.

We had to get a Solid State Drive for the EDGE VS8 because the Windows operating system is so much faster with one installed. While we could have saved a little extra cash and opted for a 64GB Solid State Drive, we feel that 120GB is an ideal size as there is plenty of space to install a plethora of programs for media, photo editing and even a handful of games.

In the end we opted for the Samsung 840 Series 120GB drive, which is priced at £77.99 on Amazon, with free delivery for Prime Users. This drive has excellent read and IOPS performance characteristics.

With the hard drive sorted we needed to look at getting some new memory for the EDGE VS8. This system doesn't take standard DIMM memory, instead utilizing smaller SO-DIMM's found in laptop computers. We know that the motherboard in the EDGE VS8 is limited to 1,333mhz speeds, so there is no need to buy expensive 1,866mhz+ rated SO-DIMM memory.

This time we decided to buy some Kingston HyperX Plug and Play DDR3 memory, rated at 1,600mhz with fairly tight CL9 timings. When you buy an EDGE system from Sapphire they always ship with 4GB of DDR3 installed, so we wanted to effectively double this to see how performance may increase during our testing.

A dual channel 2x4GB kit was only £33 inc vat when we bought it last week, although we noticed the cost has increased slightly to £40 inc vat this week. Still, this is great memory and ships complete with little heatspreaders to help improve cooling performance, important inside such a small system as the EDGE VS8.

The total cost for the fast SATA 3Gbps rated 120GB SSD and 8GB of high grade DDR3 memory is less than £120 inc vat.

Sapphire include a little sheet of step by step instructions showing the user how to install the memory and hard drive. We will go over it all today however as the guide doesn't mention a few things.

Firstly it is worth pointing out that the barebones unit already has the screws removed and these are supplied inside a little clear plastic bag. You will need these when you complete the installation, to seal the chassis. There are also some screws to install the hard drive.

Removing the chassis can be fiddly, you have to pull back on the case while holding the other side firmly. By the time you finish, the chassis will be very messy with fingerprints, as shown in the images. You can clean these off later, but for now, lets get the hardware installed.

When the outer shell is removed we get access to the internals of the EDGE VS8 system. If you are unsure of which side of the chassis you should be pulling, you can see from the images above that it is the side with the power switch which disengages from the main body.

Everything is easily accessible, and we can see that the AMD A8 APU is cooled by a small heatsink with heatpipe and fan.

Installing the hard drive, or Solid State drive looks straightforward although we noticed a little problem immediately.

Ideally we would want to slide the Samsung SSD into the connector, and line up the screw holes perfectly and bolt into place.

It is impossible to screw the 2.5 inch drive in place from the side shown in the image above as part of the VS8 shell is in the way. Unless you are happy holding the drive in place with two screws (on the other side), this bay will need detached from the motherboard. The instructions are not very clear on this and they read as if the hard drive bay is actually an accessory in the bundle, already detached.

There are four screws holding the drive bay in place, two on either side as shown in the image above. Make sure you don't misplace any of the screws as there are no spares in the box.

Use four of the silver screws supplied in the little bag to attach the drive to the bay. When this is finished, it is time to refit the bay onto the motherboard.

Carefully line up the drive in the bay with the SATA power and data connector on the motherboard (above left). The drive should click into place and the screw holes should be perfectly lined up (above right). When you are satisfied, screw the bay into place with the four screws you removed previously.

Unpack the memory and get it ready for installation.

If you have never upgraded a laptop before, then SO-DIMMs use a slightly different install method. There are two slots, so focus on the lower slot first.

Check the slot and align against the memory module, they will only insert in one direction so check they match. When ready, angle the memory ensuring the connector is fully inside the slot as shown above. Push down vertically on the memory module until it clicks into place.

If you bought a dual channel kit, which we recommend, then repeat the process for the upper slot, shown in the image above.

When everything is in place, it should look like the image above.

Locate the cover you removed earlier and angle it above the disengage point. When it is in place, it will slide back into place and lock. Take your time with this.

The image above right shows how dirty the EDGE chassis will look after handling it during the install phase. A cleaning cloth is a must afterwards!

For the review today we will test our EDGE VS8 PC build against the other EDGE systems we have reviewed in previous years, and against the EDGE VS8 system we reviewed in December last year which featured 4GB of memory and a 5,400 rpm 2.5 inch hard drive.

For more detailed results some of the review will feature further comparisons against other desktop and mobile processors.

As always, the Barebones version of the VS8 does not ship with any operating system in the box. You need to budget in the cost of an operating system and a USB drive with Windows installer prepared, or an external USB powered DVD/Bluray drive to install from the OS DVD disc.

All of the software on the optical disc is available to download from the Sapphire website. Drivers are available for 32 bit and 64 bit Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7 and 8. We are using Windows 7 64 bit for our review today.

Above, an overview of the hardware as shown in CPUz and GPUz. At the heart of the Edge VS8 is the AMD A8 4555M APU which runs at 1.6ghz with a turbo boost up to 2.4ghz. It is a quad core Piledriver Trinity chip built on the 32nm process. There is no level 3 cache. The TDP is rated at 18W.

The 8GB of Kingston Hyper X dual channel DDR3 memory is down-clocked at 1333mhz @ 8-8-9-23 timings. A full list of HD7660G specifications are listed here.

Comparison processors:
AMD A8 3870K
AMD A8 3850
AMD Zacate E-350
Atom D525 @ 1.8ghz
Turion X64 X2 L510 @ 1.6ghz
Core i7 3610QM
Core i7 2960XM Extreme Edition (Mobile)
Core i7 2630QM
Core i7 2640M processor
Core i7 2360QM
Core i7 2600K
Core i5 2500K
Core i5 2410M
Core i3 2105 desktop processor.
Intel Celeron 847 Dual Core.
AMD Zacate APU – E350 (HD6310 graphics)
Atom D525
Turion X64 X2 L510

Software:
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
HQV Benchmark 2.0
Left4Dead2
F1 2012
Total War: Shogun 2
Sleeping Dogs
Hitman Absolution

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Asus BluRay Drive
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Calibrated Power Meter
Nikon D3X with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes), Nikon 24-70MM lens.

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The AMD A8 4555M processor is very capable and scores well in these tests. The memory bandwidth test is particularly interesting. We can see an approximate +2GB/s gain by using our own Kingston HyperX memory in this system with tight timings. The default scores of the ‘all in one' EDGE VS8 system in previous tests were around 6.6GB/s.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The EDGE VS8 in our last review scored 1,641 points. With a Solid State Drive and 8GB of memory installed, the score increased to 2,749 points. This is a huge increase and it just shows how severely the 2.5 inch HDD negatively impacted the overall performance of the VS8 system.

CINEBENCH R11.5 is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

A score of 1.33 means that the A8 4555m isn't an ideal choice for heavy rendering duties, something we already knew. It is a significant improvement over the last generation of low power processors however.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1280×720 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

Interesting to see a very minor increase in performance thanks to enhanced memory bandwidth from the 8GB of Kingston memory and faster paging of data from the Solid State Drive. It wouldn't translate to a vastly improved ‘real world' experience, but the results are nevertheless noteworthy.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The system scores moderately in this Direct X 11 test.

3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.

Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.

Overall performance with the latest 3DMark was very good, although the intensive Fire Strike test was too much for the little machine which is understandable considering it is designed for high performance gaming machines. The frame rate produced was in low single digits for most of the time.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64. We will compare the Samsung 840 Series 120GB drive we installed against the onboard 500 GB 2.5 inch drive which Sapphire normally include in the EDGE VS8 unit.

Above, the miserable kind of performance you could expect from the 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm 500GB Western Digital drive with 8MB of cache.

Above, there is clearly nothing wrong with the SATA 3Gbps controller on the EDGE VS8 – peaking at around 440MB/s throughput on sequential read. This particular Samsung drive is a budget model so write performance is a little worse than we would expect from a Sandforce 2281 unit for example, but as the results show it is equally impressive with both incompressible and compressible data.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Above, the difference between the two drives is massive and verifies the findings with CrystalDiskMark previously. In the real world, the EDGE VS8 feels like a completely different machine with the SSD inside.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the new extended Bluray Disc of Lord Of The Rings.

The onboard GPU acceleration helps reduce the load on the HD4555M. No problems playing back Bluray content.

The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We use the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP).

We ripped our BluRay disc of Sniper Reloaded to 1080P MKV and use Windows Media Player to playback the file.

MKV playback is demanding, although the system handles the task fine, with plenty of cycles left over for multitasking.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled.

Good results from the system, demanding an average of only 14 percent APU time.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

Hardware acceleration is enabled.

By simply adding 8GB of higher grade memory and a Solid State Drive, we have managed to reduce the encoding time by almost 2 and a half minutes!

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	Sapphire Edge VS8 Mini PC
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

We were pleasantly surprised to see a score of 196 points, which is a match for the leading discrete AMD solutions on the market today. This figure translates to class leading HD image quality.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter video game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States and November 20 in Europe; in 2010, Left 4 Dead 2 was made available to the Steam client for Mac OS X. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.

We selected 720p and configured the engine to run with a mixture of low, medium and high settings.

The Sapphire Edge VS8 Mini PC is able to power the Source engine at 720p, maintaining smooth frame rates throughout. The game loads in a fraction of the time when compared against the previous EDGE VS8 we tested in December. All thanks to the Solid State Drive in this system.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

We test with the built in STEAM ‘Benchmark DX11 Graphics Balanced 720p’ setting.

This engine is very demanding and the A8 4555m can't really deliver a smooth experience, even at balanced 720p settings.

F1 2012 is a video game developed by Codemasters. It is based on the 2012 Formula One season, and is the sequel to F1 2010 and F1 2011. It is the fourth Formula One game developed by the Codemasters studios after the company renewed its licence to develop the official games of the series.

The game features all twelve teams and twenty-four drivers competing in the 2012 season, as well as the twenty circuits — including the brand new Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas — included in the championship.

We configure the engine to run at 720p with the ‘low quality’ preset. We run the built in benchmark for this test.

We recorded exactly the same results in this game as before. It couldn't quite deliver smooth frame rates at 720p with low settings, averaging 21 frames per second.

Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. It is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series, and runs on IO Interactive’s proprietary Glacier 2 game engine.

We selected a 720p resolution and the ‘lowest’ quality settings preset.

We recorded minor improvements with this particular engine when compared to the same test we ran in December, however the game is still not smooth at these settings. Real world this really wouldn't be playable.

Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix, released on August 14, 2012, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Sleeping Dogs takes place in Hong Kong and focuses on an undercover operation to infiltrate the Triads.

We selected the lowest possible image quality settings at 720p.

We tested with both the built in benchmark and in the real world. While the benchmark shows unplayable performance, we found that much of the game ran quite close to the 25 frame per second sweet spot. If you are willing and able to accept a little drop in frame rate from time to time, it was actually quite enjoyable.

The game loaded much faster and seemed to suffer from less' juddering' also, thanks to the adoption of a fast Solid State Drive.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground with our Extech digital sound level meter to mirror a real world situation.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet take off/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The Sapphire Edge VS8 Mini PC is extremely quiet, basically silent most of the time, until pushed hard with synthetic tests. When the fans are at full speed the system is audible, but still quiet. These are excellent results, especially if you want to use the system in a bedroom environment and leave it powered on 24/7.

To test power consumption today we are using a calibrated energy meter. We loaded the system with 3DMark11 and measured results at idle and load.

The system is very efficient, demanding under 40 watts when fully loaded. This load figure drops to around 30 watts when tasked with only Cinebench R11.5. The Edge HD4 consumes even less power, although the Celeron 847 performance is much weaker than the A8 4555m APU.

When I initially reviewed the Sapphire EDGE VS8 back in December 2012 I left feeling very positive about the diminutive PC. There was no doubt in my mind that it was the most capable EDGE system, thanks to the fantastic all round performance generated by the power sipping AMD A8-4555M APU.

It wasn't all peaches and cream however, because while I praised the EDGE VS8 it exhibited a rather major and inexcusable performance concern. Sapphire crippled the overall performance of the system by installing a nasty 5,400 rpm 2.5 inch hard disk drive. This had the negative effect of slowing down absolutely everything, from booting the system, to even opening a basic application.

If I blindfolded an enthusiast user and sat them in front of two screens, one running the EDGE VS8 as we reviewed it last year, and the barebones system I tested today with the Solid State drive and ram enhancement, I am confident they would feel one of them was probably an entry level Core i5 system for day to day tasks. The differences really are that colossal that it rams home the point I always make in reviews … a solid state drive is one of the most worthy upgrades available on the market today. The boot time was reduced by almost 500% and applications loaded in a fraction of the time.

As I detailed before, the AMD A8 4555M is not a powerhouse chip design, but it is a step up from the last generation and leaves the ATOM and Celeron processors for dead. It is more than capable of handling general office duties, surfing, daily internet browsing and even light Photoshop work. It is also an excellent choice for high definition media playback as the image quality is at the same level as AMD’s more expensive discrete solutions. Hardware acceleration also ensures ultra smooth playback of Bluray and H264 contained video.

There are limitations with such a system, and while they seem obvious to me, it is worth pointing them out again. The EDGE VS8 is not designed for gamers who want to play the latest Direct X 11 games at high resolution. It will struggle with intensive duties such as 3D rendering and video editing. That said, we did notice that our video encoding task was reduced by almost two and a half minutes because of the wider memory bandwidth and Solid State performance, when paging the data.

While the main selling point will be the tiny physical dimensions of the EDGE VS8, it also produces very little heat and noise. Under most situations you would be hard pressed to hear the fan spinning and demands under 30 watts most of the time. You could leave the VS8 on all day and it would barely impact an electricity bill over the course of a year.

The Barebones VS8 is without question the EDGE you want to buy. At time of publication we don't have confirmed pricing in the United Kingdom, although we have been told that it will cost around $120 less than the ‘complete' VS8. Right now, the EDGE VS8 costs £399.95 from Overclockers UK, if they can get the price down to around £330 for the Barebones unit, then it will make sense.

Obviously you need to factor in the price of the Solid State Drive and the memory, but we proved today that it doesn't have to cost a fortune. For £115, we were able to get a 120GB SATA 3Gbps Solid State drive and 8GB of high grade dual channel SO-DIMM memory from Kingston. With the cost of a Windows operating system factored in, the total cost would be around the £500 mark. If you already have an operating system license at hand and opt for a cheaper, smaller 64GB Solid State Drive such as this, then the price would drop closer to the £400 mark.

The VS8 barebones is clearly designed for the enthusiast user with modest knowledge of system building. We fear installing an SSD/HDD, memory and then an operating system with drivers may prove to much for the ‘average punter', alienating a large portion of the potential audience.

We still believe Sapphire should release a VS8 ‘Ultimate' edition complete with Solid State drive, 8GB of memory and Windows 7 with all the drivers pre-installed. We think it would sell like hotcakes to an inexperienced audience who yearn for something different.

This page will update with availability and pricing, when the Sapphire EDGE VS8 ‘Barebones' becomes available.

Pros:

• extremely tiny.
• almost silent.
• very low power drain.
• runs quite cool.
• capable of handling a lot of everyday tasks.
• BareBones unit is the one to get – just budget extra for a Solid State Drive!

Cons:

• need to budget for an operating system.
• no optical disc support without extra cost (USB pen drive or DVD drive).
• a complex install for the ‘average punter’.

Kitguru says: An extremely capable, attractively designed system that really shines when partnered up with a good Solid State Drive.

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