Intel Compute Stick vs. HP Stream Mini vs. Dell Inspiron Micro

Intel Compute Stick vs. HP Stream Mini vs. Dell Inspiron Micro

Important: I have found the most limiting factor on all of these devices to be the 32GB of onboard storage. Just installing Windows 8.1 updates can consume a sizeable portion of this! Windows 10 gives you more space and is strongly recommended!

Intel Compute Stick

You can see specs here:

Intel Compute Stick
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html

Intel Compute Stick Thoughts:
The Intel stick was tested with Kodie (http://kodi.tv/) and it worked well. Also, it played other videos and youtube just fine. As other reviews mentioned, multitasking is not recommended as this device only has 2 GB of memory and it lags when running more than one or two applications.

Note on Intel Compute Stick WiFi: Expect the WiFi on the Intel compute stick to only work well in area that have great to excellent WiFi coverage. Good to poor WiFi coverage will give you very poor performance even when compare to other devices being used in the same poor coverage area!
[update] this note might be incorrect. it may not be a reception issue as signal strength actually appears good. see note2.

**Intel Compute Stick - Note2 on Wifi/Bluetooth: I believe the bluetooth and the WiFi share the same chipset. So either the shared chipset or some type of RF interference is causing very very poor WiFi performance. Expect 80 kbps to 4 mbps if you use bluetooth and WiFi at the same time. If you disable bluetooth and use just WiFi expect up to 12 mbps. More testing in this area is needed.

HP Stream Mini
HP Stream mini has more ports and more compute horse power, but consumes a lot more electrical power. ~10 watts (Intel) vs. ~45 watts (HP).

You can see the HP stream ports and specs here:

HP Stream Mini Desktop - 200-010 | HP Official Store
http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/desktops/hp-stream-mini-desktop---200-010-p-k5g59aa-aba--1

I did a iperf Wifi test on the HP stream mini and I got about 40 mbps.


Here is a comparison of the processors HP mini vs. Intel compute stick. The Celeron is the HP steam mini processor, the Atom is in the Intel Compute Stick:

Intel Celeron 2957U vs Atom Z3735F
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Celeron-2957U-vs-Intel-Atom-Z3735F


Dell Inspiron Micro

I did not have this unit for testing. The hardware info indicates that it should perform faster than the Intel Stick but slower the the HP mini, but at the price point of the Intel stick.

For detailed review of the Dell Inspirion 3050 checkout this blog:

http://www.atxgeek.me/2015/05/dell-inspiron-3050-micro-teardown.html

New! Inspiron Micro Desktop | Dell
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/inspiron-3050-micro-desktop/pd

* This table was updated after installing Windows 10 on my HP stream mini.

Did my website help you out?  If so make a Donation