 "ASUS VivoPC VC60 Review")
There are few brand names which come up when we talk about small form factor PCs, specially in the Indian market. ZOTAC with its ZBOXes has been the only player which has been consistently coming out with mini PCs. However, last week we got the ASUS VivoPC VC60 which comes in a compact form factor and bundled with a keyboard and mouse to woo the customer looking at this segment.
Build and Design
The ASUS VivoPC VC60 is a major departure in terms of design philosophy when compared with the ZOTAC ZBOX. The mini desktop comes in a grey matte plastic body with a a brushed metal finish on the top cover. The square-shaped box tends to taper inwards where we have cooling vents around the base. The front face has a single slit which lights up when the system is on. Other than that, the front and sides are clean.
The front face of the ASUS VivoPC VC60 has a slit which lights up when the system is on
The chassis is built mostly of plastic but it doesn’t feel cheap in any way. The VivoPC VC60 can be opened by sliding its top (after removing the screw on the rear side). In the upper half of the VivoPC, you will notice the internal hard drive and at the base is the entire circuitry with the motherboard, Wi-fi adapter, RAM and so on. With the VC60, you can only add on extra RAM or replace the Seagate 500GB Momentus thin drive with another 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD. On the rear side of the VivoPC VC60 you have a variety of ports.
The ports are present on the rear side of the VC60 and include four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, miniDP port, an SD card slot among others
Asus sent us the Vivo mouse and keyboard bluetooth combo as well but this is something that’s sold separately. The design of the Vivo mouse is one of a kind and it will take some getting used to as it is drastically different from other mice. The left and right click buttons and scroller are replaced by a single circular button. The base of the mouse has a smaller diameter than its top, so if you try and grip the base in your palm, you’ll find it difficult to use the mouse comfortably. The click button is responsive around the edges with an audible click, but the responsiveness reduces as you come to the centre. The mouse is equipped with one-finger, two-finger and three-finger gestures which we will get to in a while. The keyboard is well-built, with keys having good amount of travel.
Features
ASUS VivoPC VC60 comes with a regular wireless keyboard and mouse. The combo seen above needs to be bought separately
The ASUS VivoPC VC60 comes in two variants - the Intel Core i5-3210M and Intel Core i3-3110M. The latter version which we recieved is a dual-core, hyper-threaded processor clocked at 2.4GHz. It lacks Turbo Boost but it has the Intel HD 4000 on-board graphics. The Intel Core i3 series is ideal for daily use and for small and medium sized businesses. The VC60 has 4GB of RAM and comes with a Seagate Momentus Thin 500GB internal hard drive. The impressive forward-looking feature of the VC60 is the presence of an 802.11ac adapter which promises higher speeds than the current 802.11n standard and a better range. Of course, you will need an 802.11ac router to actually use this feature on the VC60, but it is a good thing to have. Since it is a backward compatible standard, it’ll work fine with your 802.11n or 802.11g router. It comes bundled with Windows 8 64-bit OS.
The rear-side of the VivoPC is packed with ports - four USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, an HDMI port, mini DisplayPort, D-Sub port, two USB 2.0 ports, an optical S/PDIF port, a LAN port and the audio and microphone jacks. The power button is placed just beside the SD card slot and there is a DC power input port below it. The VC60 is powered by a 65W power supply.
Vivo Gesture application gives you a list of all the gestures that can work with the Vivo Mouse
The Vivo mouse is an interesting peripheral that comes with the VivoPC VC60. It needs to be purchased separately for Rs 2000. Apart from the radical design, the support for standard Windows 8 gestures comes baked into the mouse. You also have a list of one-finger, two-finger and three-finger gestures which can be selected from the Vivo Mouse gesture application which allows you to do a lot of things. For instance, scrolling can be achieved by keeping one-finger steady and doing the scrolling action with another finger. In the three-finger navigation you can slide to the left and right to navigate pages in a document or slide down to show the desktop. Scrolling can also be achieved by sliding your thumb around the circular base of the the Vivo mouse. You can even disable certain gestures if you so desire from the Vivo mouse Gesture application.
Performance
We subjected the ASUS VivoPC VC60 to our regular battery of tests along with a lot of real-life use-case scenarios. PCMark 7 gave an overall score of 2490 and Cinebench R11.5 gave a score of 2.37 - both scores are comparable to the other Core i3-based models we have tested in the past. SiSoft Sandra 2013 pegged the sequential read and write scores at 108 MB/s and 83.5 MB/s respectively.
The top cover can be opened to reveal the 500GB laptop drive
We also ran the PCMark 8 test using the PCMark 8 Professional Edition v1.1.111 thanks to Futuremark . We ran the Home and Work test as those are the areas where the VivoPC VC60 will be mainly used. The test include workloads that simulate tasks which are typical for these kinds of users such as web browsing, photo-editing, video chatting, word processing and so on. We got a Work Score of 3820 and a Home score of 2339.
Video encoding and file compression was comparatively slower when compared Core i3-3240T, with the ASUS VivoPC VC60 taking 85 seconds to convert a 100MB file using 7zip at Ultra settings with 256-bit encryption and 74 secs to encode a 1 min MPEG video to MPEG 4 (2nd pass) using AVIdemux. Both these operations took 76 secs and 57 secs respectively on the Dell AIO 2020 which housed the Core i3-3240T. Resident Evil 5 was playable at 30 fps at 1280x720p resolution with medium settings.
The ASUS VivoPC VC60 can easily handle full HD content as well with the CPU utilisation hovering between 5-10 percent. The VC60 also comes bundled with the ASUS WiFi GO utility which allows you to use your smartphone as a remote to control your system using the WiFi GO! Remote application. You can copy files to and from your system to your smartphone or tablet.
Verdict and Price in India
The ASUS VivoPC VC60 is great for those looking at a small form factor PC which can perform everyday tasks. It bundles a regular keyboard mouse combo kit and you can buy the Vivo Mouse and keyboard combo for an additional Rs 4100. It comes with Windows 8 out of the box, so essentially it is a plug and play PC. The price of Rs 38,750 is still on the higher side when you consider the mini PC market and this surely puts the VC60 is a niche segment. It makes sense in small office where space is at a premium or as a lifestyle PC for those wanting to show-off. You can attach the VC60 behind the monitor as well using the VESA mount. What gives the ASUS VivoPC VC60 an edge over a similarly specced small form factor ZBOX (ZBOX Nano ID 63 Plus) is the presence of an OS, keyboard and mouse combo and some level of future proofing thanks to the 802.11ac support. We just hope the pricing slides down to enable more home users to adapt this mini PC.