A-Open’s first mini PC case was a shameless copy of the Mac Mini and supported low-powered single-core CPUs. Now that Apple has decided to copy dual-core PCs, AOpen’s new MP945VX case has started to develop its own identity with a pale-blue lid and dark-blue front LED. Like the Mac mini, it sports a DVI port, two USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, three 3.5mm audio jacks (one of which doubles as an optical S/PDIF connector), a small mono speaker and a FireWire port. Unlike the Mac mini it has S-Video and an internal mini-PCI slot.

Altech adds a dual-layer slot-loading DVD-RAM writer, 512MB of PC2-4300 RAM and a 1.66GHz T2300 Core Duo CPU – all laptop components. In keeping with this theme is an 80GB laptop hard disk, though its 5400rpm limit slightly hamstrung performance. That said, a score of 0.85 in our benchmarks is only 15 percent slower than our speedy reference PC and we never felt the PC was labouring when using Office applications or browsing the Internet, which is, after all, what it’s designed for. It won’t take all night encoding music and video either, as its encoding score of 0.83 illustrates. However, you can forget gaming, as the Intel GMA950 graphics won’t cope.

At $1369, Altech’s machine is just over $100 more than the equivalent Apple Mac mini, however if you add $95 to boost the one year RTB warranty to three years onsite, the proposition becomes more tempting: for $229 Apple boosts its one year warranty to three years RTB.

If you want a small PC for menial computing tasks it’s good value, but note that our A-Listed value notebook costs less (albeit with a lower spec) and doesn’t require an extra monitor, keyboard or mouse. If you want to use old peripherals, note the lack of PS/2 ports but Altech does supply a VGA to DVI adapter for older monitors. Its internal fan isn’t particularly noisy, even when under load, so if you just want a discreet PC that doesn’t dominate a room, it’s a good buy.