A quick jot of some notes about the XYC X-26Y from nicegear:

The good:

  • OpenELEC on it just works. And by works I mean everything works. Wifi card, HD video playback, even HD Audio over HDMI works. All I had to do was point audio at HDMI instead of analog out in XBMC.
  • XBMC UI doesn't drag much at all. I've loaded it up with Aeon Nox (which is quite pretty, and therefore quite hungry) and it is just fine.
  • Price. Considering it includes a wifi card, 2GB of RAM, and a 32GB SSD, the price is really excellent.
  • Fanless. Yep, it's completely silent with the SSD in it. It wouldn't be if  you installed a spinner, but out of the box it's indeed silent.
  • Build quality looks good. Feels solid. I haven't opened it up but I'm not expecting it to be anything bad.
  • It's quite wide/deep but moderately thin. So it's pretty good for size overall.
  • GigE. Excellent!


The bad:

  • Fanless means this thing is not cool. It's not just warm to the touch, it's noticeably hot. Not so hot you can't touch it at all, but it's not comfortable after a pretty short amount of time. But that's the trade-off, right?


The indifferent

  • USB ports are upside down. At least I'm not plugging stuff in often.
  • Box it came it bears no resemblance at all to contents, so don't be alarmed by the ATOM and ION2 logos on the outside, this is an Ivy Bridge Celeron and QS77 chipset.
  • An IR window would be cool, but it's not a big deal.
  • Wireless antenna placement is on one of the sides, which isn't a big deal I guess. Would have been hard to cram it into the back as thin as it is.
  • No eSATA, which would be nice for expanding storage beyond the mSATA and 2.5" internal drive bay.


All in all, I'm pretty happy with the box and how it has performed.