Fantastically small home theatre PC in a box
If the MSI Wind Box was really just a tub of hot air, then the Cubi is a hurricane. A very good-looking hurricane. Sleek and small, with a clean design, our review sample is a treasure trove of golden hardware. It’s everything the Wind Box should’ve been.
Around 1mm taller than Intel’s NUC, the Cubi’s slightly sloped, edgey physique gives it a much more arresting and elegant look than its rival. It’s almost a shame that it’s VESA-mountable and that most of these things will be slapped to the back of a TV, as the pristine, glossy-white chassis really does look quite at home on our desk.
Clearly, because of the size of this thing, it’s not a powerhouse when it comes to performance. With a Cinebench score of 199 (almost double what its gusty cousin can produce), it loses out to the Intel NUC5i3RYK we tested in PCF305, but only by 20 points. However, it makes up for this by running as silently as the grave. Idling at around 50 degrees Celsius and peaking at 70. Under load it’s almost impossible to hear any noise from the Cubi without physically slamming your ear next to the small little box of joy.
The storage situation is also far better than its little brother. Our review sample came with 120GB of internal flash storage by default (107GB left over after a quick install of Windows 10). But with access to an additional 2.5-inch drive via an mSATA adaptor, the Cubi can accommodate up to 1TB of additional SSD space, if you require it. This does increase the height of the Cubi by a further 12mm or so, but all in all it’s completely worth it for that expandability.
Speaking of expandability, it also includes two SoDIMM slots, allowing up to a total of 16GB of RAM. Couple that with a Broadwell Core i5 and you have yourself one seriously impressive work or home theatre PC, one that you can fit into the palm of your hand, no less, and one that runs on an impressive 65W power supply.
IO is handled by a positive menagerie of connectivity, with the back featuring two USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and power. The front also boasts a four-pole input for headphone and microphone combos and an additional two USB 3.0 ports. It even comes with Wireless AC and Bluetooth 4.0, which is a must in today’s modern age of high-speed gaming and streaming.
And did we mention this thing streams 4K? Because yep, although we guess that’s not as impressive as we’d all like to think nowadays, there are still a lot of people out there using laptops that stutter playing 720p videos on YouTube. It’s a PC rolling in at £189 for the barebones Core i3 model, or £250 for Core i5 version.
The MSI Cubi comes in at a very attractive price point and performs admirably in competition against the Intel NUC and its own little brother the Wind Box. For price to performance, you’re not going to get any better any time soon.
All up, MSI seems well on the way to cracking the algorithm that will hopefully deliver the perfect, all-round Steam, office and home-streaming box. It’s not 100 per cent there yet, but it certainly looks promising for the future of micro-PCs. ZAK STOREY
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i3-5005U 2GHz
Memory Up to 16GB DDR3L 1,600MHz
Storage 1x 2.5-inch, 1x mSATA
Network 802.11 ac WiFi card, Gigabit Lan
Video 1x HDMI, 1x Mini DisplayPort
I/O 4x USB 3.0, 1x 3.5mm headphone/mic
Dimensions (D x W x H) 115 x 111 x 35mm