Chillblast WAP 2500U Ultimate Micro PC
Its name might be long but ultimately this PC is short of charm; if only the CPU had been more modern
Chillblast takes a refreshingly different approach to this low-cost entry. With a target buyer who is simply interested in a computer that works, it’s put together a special “PC Pro Edition” version of its barebones WAP 2500U Micro PC. And it really is tiny compared to everything else on test, with a 130 x 128mm footprint that isn’t much bigger than a coaster.
You can access the Chillblast’s innards by removing four crosshead screws from its base. This reveals two SODIMM RAM sockets (both occupied), a heatsink-covered M.2 SSD and a Wi-Fi card. All these are easy for you to replace, and there’s a SATA socket free if you want to add an extra SSD; the base includes holders for you to screw it into place.
This base is made of a shiny plastic that mirrors the shiny plastic top, and whilst this photographs well we’re not convinced of its practicality. It’s a fingerprint-loving finish, and the overall effect isn’t as classy as we suspect the designers hoped. What you do get is function, with three
USB 3 ports at the front that sit aside 3.5mm jacks for a mic and headset.
The rear is similarly functional, with a pair of HDMI cables – you can connect two 4K displays – along with a pair of USB 2 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It’s a shame that USB-C is absent, as this means the only way to power the WAP Ultimate is to use the supplied 60W external power brick. It all adds to the cable clutter on a desk and that’s meant to be one of the benefits of a tiny PC such as this.
As the 60W indicates, this isn’t a powerful system. It relies on a rapidly ageing AMD Ryzen 5 2500U mobile processor, which is based on the original Zen architecture. This is made to look slow compared to the Zen 3 architecture found in the latest AMD Ryzen chips, and a score of 122 in our benchmarks is ample evidence that this isn’t the speediest machine. Aside from the hard-disk-based Acer Aspire, we also found it the slowest for mundane tasks such as copying files (despite using the faster USB-A 3 ports on the front of the chassis).
In fairness to the Chillblast, it’s a mini PC whilst all the others are full size. A fairer comparison comes from our previous desktop PCs group test ( see issue 317, p76), where we tested the PCSpecialist Aurora Mini. This was based on an AMD Ryzen 4500U, which proved a big help in Cinebench R23 where it scored 1,153 and 4,904 in the single-core and multicore benchmarks, compared to 855 and 3,462 for the Chillblast.
Thanks to having eight graphics cores rather than six, however, the Chillblast was much faster in our gaming benchmarks than its mini rival. Both systems rely on integrated graphics, but the AMD Radeon Vega 8 in the 2500U powered the WAP Ultimate to 30fps in Metro: Last Light,
33fps in F1 2020 (both at 1080p, High settings) and 848 in 3DMark Time
Spy. Compare that to 18fps, 23fps and 602 for the Aurora Mini.
If power consumption is crucial to you, note the PCSpecialist machine has the advantage, sipping 9W at idle to the 15W of the Chillblast, and 48W at peak against 55W. That won’t make much difference to your annual electricity bill, but if you like a silentrunning machine we’d again direct you away from the Chillblast as it can be distractingly noisy: it’s fine when idling, but has a tendency to go through the gears when it’s pushed. The PCSpecialist Aurora Mini was silent for the vast majority of the time.
We wanted to like the WAP 2500U Ultimate. We’re fans of mini PCs as a rule, because they fulfil the needs of swathes of people who don’t need huge amounts of power and don’t have any desire to tinker with their PC. Why consume extra space on or under the desk with a tower PC?
And there are things to like here. The easy access to the memory and SSD are major plus points, as is the fact you can add another SATA SSD to expand the 500GB of supplied storage.
Still, we can’t recommend this PC. The Aurora Mini offers greater everyday speed thanks to its more up-to-date processor, and doesn’t suffer from the variable fan noise problem. It also offers Wi-Fi 6. Unless the WAP 2500U’s superior gaming performance is enough to win you over, we know which we’d pick as our daily runaround.