While I’m not a fan of the $25 mail in rebate, Amazon.com has the Patriot Box Office Media player for a low $58 with free shipping and no tax for most. That’s a pretty smoking deal for a media player we reviewed last year and really liked.
The benefit to these types of Media Players–the Box Office in particular since you can add your own hard drive to store content–is that they can run as a self sustained device. Unlike a Media Center Extender (remember those?) which requires the Server PC to be on and thus drawing more power, the Box Office can run in and of itself without any other computers being turned on. Let’s take a closer look at the data to show just how impressive this unit is in regards to power savings. For comparison, I will include the ASRock ION-330 we previously reviewed , which is one of the lowest powered fully functional systems I have seen.
| System |
Power Draw
|
| ASRock Ion-330 |
26 idle/38 max |
| Box Office (no drive) |
6 Watts |
| Box Office (with 160gb 2.5″ Drive) |
9 Watts |
| Box Office in Standby Mode |
0 Watts |
While the 6 and 9 watts are very impressive for the Box Office, the 0 Watts used in Standby mode is what really surprised me. Even the most power efficient systems will usually draw at least a couple watts when in it, which will normally allow for faster boot time. The beauty of the unit is that even with its low power draw, bootup time was an amazing nine seconds! If you add a hard drive and enable Samba/Bitorrent (more in the Extras section) then boot time increases to a still reasonable 20 seconds.
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