Setup & Testing Procedures
Unlike other Mini PC’s that we have reviewed the i35G does not come with an operating system installed.  There is also no CD-ROM drive so how do you install your OS?  Using a flash drive of course!  We have guides for installing both Windows 7 and Windows 8 from a USB flash drive.  Once you have Windows installed you need to install the drivers for the system to get everything working properly.  Well I rarely use driver cd’s that come with products as newer drivers are normally available online.  So I went to Giada’s website and downloaded the latest drivers.

Once I had the system up and running the first thing that I did was download CPU-Z to see what was running under the hood.

For comparison we will be comparing the Giada i35G to the Lenovo C325, Zotac ZBOX Nano, Zotac ZBOX HD-AD02, and the Sapphire Edge HD2, which all are Mini PC’s.  We will be running the i35G through a battery of different benchmarks and tests.  I have organized them into different categories.

General System Testing
Windows Experience Index
Windows Media Center
HD Movie Playback

Intensive Testing
PCMark 7 (download)
PC Mark Vantage (download)
Geekbench (download)
AIDA 64 (download)
- Cache & Memory Benchmark
SiSoftware Sandra (download)
- Processor Arithmetic
- Processor Multimedia

Video Testing
3DMark Vantage (download)
Counter-Strike: Source