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VeryPC Treeton II XS
As the name would suggest, this is the second version of the Treeton, VeryPC's small form factor, energy-efficient desktop computer. The original Treeton impressed us with its frugal power draw, consuming just 28 watts when idle, and 60 watts under heavy load, but still managed to score 0.80 in our 2D benchmarks.
Admittedly, you can easily add another 30 watts to this figure once you connect up a monitor, doubling its power demands in real-world use, but this is extremely efficient compared to most standard desktop machines that we see.
Rather than just matching this, the Treeton II manages to undercut its predecessor slightly, drawing a mere 27 watts when idle, although it does become rather greedier when pushed hard, consuming around 75 watts while running our 2D benchmarks. It's rare to demand that much from a PC in real-world use, though, and the extra processing power that the new model brings means that it is likely to draw less power than the original overall, as it won't have to use quite as much of its peak power when handling normal tasks.
This speed boost mostly comes courtesy of a faster CPU. VeryPC has stuck with the Athlon X2 from AMD, but a 2.3GHz chip is fitted to this machine, rather than the original's 1.9GHz version. Sitting beside this is the same 2GB of DDR2 RAM, but storage space has received a boost to 160GB. That's double the size of the drive in the original Treeton, but still woefully small compared to most desktops on the market now.
The graphics chip has also seen an upgrade, although not one which will do much to please gamers. Gone is the Radeon 1200 chip, to be replaced with Nvidia's latest integrated graphics chip, the GeForce 8200. It's the first example we've seen in the Labs, and performance was, as expected, sluggish. It managed just 16 frames per second in Crysis, even at low settings. Still, this does suggest that older titles ought to be playable.
As well as an update in power consumption and processing power, the chassis also gets a makeover. It's around the same width and depth as before, but the height has been reduced from 100mm to just 65mm. And instead of a basic DVD writer, this PC has a laptop Blu-ray drive for high definition movie playback.
This has an unexpected side benefit: it's a laptop drive and will happily work in almost any orientation, which means you can position the Treeton horizontally or vertically. The latter makes for a very compact desktop footprint.
The plain black aluminium chassis, however, is a bit of a come down from the smart exposed metal of the previous Treeton, and the Perspex panel - dully lit with a blue LED - doesn't do much to brighten things up. We do like the pair of USB drives mounted on the front, which provide easy access for flash drives and the like, but this hardly a groundbreaking feature.
Moving to the back of the panel, there's another six USB ports, as well as a VGA and DVI output. Unfortunately, the HDMI output on the original Treeton, which made it a great option for a living room media centre PC, is gone.
Unfortunately some other benefits of the first Treeton are lost from the interior of the case, too. The single free PCI slot remains, but is now unusable because of space restrictions, and the gap for an additional hard disk is no more.
Thankfully, the best feature of the first PC remains: no, not its power efficiency, but its warranty. Five year's worth of cover is provided, with a free service during the third year, on the proviso that the customers renew their anti-virus package with VeryPC each year at a cost of £30. During this period, all repairs are free, which provides great peace of mind for small businesses and home users who want hassle-free computing.
Another nice touch is that VeryPC can pre-install the OpenOffice suite free of charge, making it ready to go straight out of the box.
Cost, though, is also the Treeton's Achilles heel. Although the PC is a small, efficient and reasonably fast all-round machine, it excels at no one particular task, and yet costs over £600 before even a monitor or peripherals are taken into account.
Despite its Blu-ray drive, without a large hard disk and HDMI port it's hard to recommend this as a media centre, and without a cheap price tag it's hard to recommend it as an office machine. It unfortunately misses the target audience purely looking for the most energy efficient PC, too, as a standard laptop can match its performance for around 21 watts idle - and that includes a screen. It is, then, hard to see what niche this second Treeton will occupy.
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