Asus VivoMini is a small desktop computer with a small starting price. Asus introduced the VivoMini last fall, promising it’d launch soon for $149 and up.

Now Asus tells me the little desktop PC should be hit stores in the next few weeks.

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The cheapest models will feature Intel Celeron 2957U processors, but Asus also plans to offer models with Core i3 and Core i5 Haswell chips. It’d be nice if the company has some Broadwell options, but this computer’s been under development for a little while and it’s possible that the 5th-gen Intel Core chips weren’t available when work on the VivoMini began.

Asus says the computer supports up to 16GB of RAM, but will likely ship with 4GB and it will be available with 32GB to 256GB of mSATA solid state storage.

It features 3 USB 3.0 ports, an SDXC card reader, HDMI and DisplayPort (with support for 4K output and dual displays), and there will be models with 802.11ac or 802.11n WiFi.

The whole computer measures about 5.2″ x 5.2″ 1.7″ and weighs about 1.3 pounds.

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17 replies on “Asus VivoMini tiny desktop launching soon for $149 and up”

  1. Believe I’m seeing these for sale, but they’re bare bones, without operating system or keyboard or mouse. Guess I’ll keep waiting for the HP Stream Mini.

  2. I have the older VivoPC (silver) and I’m pretty damn happy with it. I removed Windows 8 and installed Windows 7 instead. This one is $100 cheaper and has better specs. Love the white, too. I may just buy slightly buy one.

  3. I have vivo with i3 but I replaced HDD with ssd evo 840 works fine after painful upgrade to win 8.1. Asus support sucked Microsoft helped alot

  4. The HP Stream Mini has an actual price and expected release date. Asus needs to provide the same, or I’m not waiting. (Or, they could lower the price on the current Vivos.)

    1. To be fair, the HP Stream mini also doesn’t have all its details revealed yet. There are questions as to whether or not the storage is eMMC or msata or whether the memory is upgradable in any way. If eMMC and soldered on memory, I’d rather wait for the Asus.

      If you really can’t wait, there’s the Zotac ZBox BI320 with similar specs (Celeron 2957u, 2GB DDR3, 64 GB SSD) you can purchase right now for about $220.

    1. This is a terrible question to try to answer. You could rate alot of different performance stats of each SOC, and it would still be a terrible way to decide which is better.

      There are benchmarks that can be performed on x86 and ARM cpus, but the results won’t compare very well.

      One benchmark that might offer insight into specific details about raw CPU, GPU, and memory performance is Geekbench. It still won’t tell you which is better in real life usage.

      Here is a list of ARM SOCs, and their Geekbench scores: https://browser.primatelabs.com/android-benchmarks

      The 2957U has a Single Core score of 1200, and a Multicore score of 2100.

      If you want a device to media playback, x86 is the way to go. ARM SOCs usually rely on integrated silicon features to do things like decode H.264 video, etc. If you use an x86 CPU, you will always be ahead of the curve, when it comes to things like media support, and software to decode media.

      Last year’s ARM SOCs will mostly be incapable of playing X.265 media. I have an x86 CPU from 5 years ago that can decode X.265

    2. Can’t run x86 operating systems or software on ARM SoCs. 🙂

  5. I am surprised these aren’t cheaper considering a cheap tablet goes for about that much…

    1. Cheap tablets usually have 1-2gb RAM and atom processors. This has 4gb RAM and a Celeron processor. Quite the upgrade.

      1. Not to mention the upgradability of memory sockets and msata slots. Whatever the savings you get from not having a screen gets eaten up by the more expensive haswell celeron and upgrade slots.

  6. Considering a Raspberry Pi is almost $100 once you add a case, power supply, heatsinks and sd card this is a really tempting alternative for XBMC/Kodi!

      1. Not really. I ran XBMC on a Celeron NUC for a while. It’s probably the best way to do it. Lots of storage options, and lots of solutions for networking, and sharing media over the network.

  7. If it stays in the $150 range for those specs it’ll be a better option than the Chromebox for a standalone XBMC box.

    1. i’m waiting for some of the acer chromeboxes to hit the 100usd price point, especially refurbs if they have any..

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