Asus Chromebox review, specs: The Asus Chromebox is being dubbed as the “world’s smallest Chrome computer,” and it could well be the smallest desktop PC of it’s kind. The Toronto Sun has described the unit as “ultra-compact” and “affordable” and noted that it resembles the look of a Mac Mini.

According to the Canadian newspaper, the Mac Mini-look alike is being sold for a quarter of a price of the Apple machine, with limited performance and storage. One of its variants, the 1.4GHz Celeron processor of the Asus Chromebox does the job but mainly because of the Chrome OS platform.

This leads to the question: Can this compete well with Mac Mini? Though it maybe a bit far fetched when it comes to design and performance, the Asus Chromebox, particularly it’s Haswell-powered variant the M075U shows promising signs.

According to Geeky Gadgets, the new Asus Intel iCore i3 equipped Chromebox follows on from the recently launched Asus Chromebox M005U mini back in March and is equipped with a less powerful Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor. The latter has 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.

Other specs of the new Asus Chromebox M075U include a 16GB solid-state disk (SSD) and a connectivity provided by dual-band 802.11 in WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and graphics from Intel HD 4400 chip. Connectivity options for the machine include four USB 3.0 ports.

The Chromebox is pre-installed with Google’s Chrome OS, but the Asus minicomputers can run Ubuntu or any other Linux-based operating system you might choose. The Asus M075U system also has 4K Ultra HD via its HDMI and DisplayPort and also has a handy SD card slot for memory expansion.

In terms of the M004U’s performance and speed, which a few benchmark tests is able to measure, the particular Asus Chromebox blew away the Chromebook Series 3 but was underwhelming compared to the Toshiba CB35-A3120. In a Sunspider Test done by PC World, the Asus Chromebox returned a score of 423 ms and generated a score of 2,661 in the PeaceKeeper test.

PCWorld noted that it felt snappy while browsing the web and playing a few Flash games. Java and Silverlight remain unsupported for the machine and number of ChromeOS packaged apps is very small.

This shows that when it comes to competing with a MacMini, the highest-end variant of the Asus Chromebox may stand a chance in terms of speed and performance, but the app support is where it lags behind.

As the popularity of the Chrome OS platform and more Chrome apps are developed, then it’s not too far off that we’ll see more users adapting and using Chrome OS-running machines. For now, the Mac Mini sports too many advantages against its Chrome counterpart by Asus.