When I was a small kid, My dad bought me a PC, It was maybe an Intel Celeron powered machine backed by 356-MB of RAM and 40-GB of internal hard disk, The only portable device I knew was a floppy disk. That PC used to be a big hefty machine and required patience and a lot of strength to move it here and there. Fast forwarding 15 years and today we have a super – portable Pendrive sized PC which can be hooked up to a screen and can do all the tedious tasks with no hassle. You can’t get a gaming Rig of that size, but It can easily be great for people who use a PC for some light to medium usage, like web browsing and creating documents. Can the Panache Air PC be your next buy? Let us find out!
Panache Air PC 16GB Review
Box contents
Panache Air PC comes in a small and compact box. Opening the box, the first thing we get is the PC stick itself, other than that we also get a power adapter which has a micro USB port, An OTG cable and an HDMI extender. We also get a warranty card which is applicable for the first year.
I would have liked to see a wireless mouse as well as a keyboard in the box as It would make the setup process more streamlined and complete. I have also used the iBall splendo and I really liked the fact that it comes with the keyboard and a mouse.
Ports
If you go on Google and search for “PC stick” you will get a lot of very similar product like this. Almost all the PC sticks will have the same layout the only difference will be the logo on it. This means, every PC stick with the same number of slots which is kind of disappointing.
You get a Micro USB port for charging and a micro SD card slot on one side while a USB port and a micro USB port on another side. So you get 2 functional USB ports in total as the Micro USB can be converted to USB by the OTG cable provided in the box. Nowadays 2 ports are pretty standard on an ultrabook or a netbook. In fact the netbook on which I am writing this also has only 2 USB ports but a laptop is different from a PC stick, If you need a functional PC setup then you would need a keyboard and a mouse and after connecting both of them, you get no ports available which is personally a bummer for me. In my testing period, I had to copy some images to my Pendrive and for that simple task I had to lookup for a USB hub. Which is no simple task either, I had to turn off the PC stick, disconnect it from the TV, attached the cable of the USB hub and then again turned it on. If Panache could have provided 3 functional USB slots then it surely would save a lot of time and effort.
Like all the other PC sticks, the Panache Air PC has a male HDMI port the can be inserted on your TV/ Monitor. As it is a pocket sized PC I would not ask for a VGA port but would have liked to see a 3.5-mm jack. The Air PC relies only on HDMI for the sound interface which for some people might be a disappointment.
Personally I wold have liked it, if the Air had a couple of more ports like another Micro-USB port and a 3.5-mm jack. Also they could have provided an HDMI to VGA converter so that users who don’t own an HDMI monitor can also use this PC.
Performance
This being a very tiny device, you may think that it won’t perform good at all, but that’s not the case, this device over performs for the price you pay. I have an AMD PC which I bought for around Rs.10,000/-, It has an AMD Sempron and a Biostar motherboard. It is big, bulky and performance wise it sucks. Also, it did not have any Windows copies at the time and I had to buy a copy of Windows which bought up the total cost to about Rs. 16000. Now let’s come to the Air PC, I have played GTA San Andreas and I got an FPS read-out of around 50 which is seriously unbelievable. I also played some graphic-heavy titles like Need for speed most wanted and the games was very much playable at high settings, when tinkered the settings down, I was able to play the games flawlessly. I was also able to play COD4 at around 20FPS which was not at all expected as even my laptop can’t run it. This is maybe because of no bloatware OS and compatibility of DirectX11 on windows 10.
I also did a Geekbench 3 benchmarking test and you can see the result below-
As you can see the Air PC has a great processing power but is somewhat lacking in the memory section with just 1000 Mhz DD3 RAM.
Storage
The Panache Air PC comes with 32-GB of Internal storage out of which we get around 18-GB of free space. Now you can store thousands of songs in the 16GB or tens of Movies in it but If you want some more storage you can always attach a micro SD card. Though any micro SD card will work. Microsoft suggests using a class 10 memory card on a windows machine for optimal performance.
Here is a screenshot of the C drive with only one program and some files in it.
OS
The Panache Air PC is the first such portable PC which comes with windows 10 out of the box. It has a 32-bit genuine pre-activated copy of Windows 10 which just requires a little set up during the first boot similar to a laptop.
Windows 10 is the latest version of Windows from Microsoft. It eliminates the ‘Live Tiles’ start menu and brings back the good-old trusty start bar. Windows 10 assures that both the desktop as well as tablet users get the most out of it, unlike Windows 8/8.1 which was more tablet-centric and Desktop users often find it as a clutter.
Verdict!
The Panache Air PC is idle for people who do mediocre tasks like word processing and web browsing, It can also be used as a Living room PC or a backup PC. The Panache Air PC provides the best value for the users money, It is portable, powerful and comes with Windows 10 out of the box. This can surely be a Diwali gift for the techy in your family!