I moved the Stick over to my desktop monitor for the work day, and found it able to begrudgingly handle most of my work tasks. The key was patience—all of my work programs, chat clients and web tools worked fine as long as I gave them time to load. Slack had no problem keeping pace with Gizmodo’s main chatroom, but it lagged a few seconds whenever I clicked over to a private conversation. Most websites looked great, but they took their sweet time to load. The Compute Stick’s not going to do much for you in Photoshop or any other processor-intensive program, but for $150 it’s not totally awful. It’s just not as good as practically anything else.
At the end of a slow but mildly productive day with the Stick, we decided to kick back with some games. I think I told you how other Sean wanted to turn this dongle into a couch gaming PC? Well, we installed Steam and loaded up a few 2D classics like Towerfall, Nidhogg, Worms Reloaded and Hotline Miami. yet even some of these super-simple games weren’t playable. Towerfall ran just fine, as did Jamestown and Metal Slug 3, but the normally lightning-fast fencing bouts in Nidhogg felt more like playing Rock Paper Scissors in slow motion. Hotline Miami chugged at the TV’s native 1080p resolution, and even turned way down to 720p it felt laggy and subpar.
Even flipping the stick into performance mode—which requires a trip to the BIOS—didn’t make things right. Nidhogg got a little more palatable, but that’s about it.
So we said screw it, let’s try streaming some games from a desktop PC—a use case that doesn’t require any real processing power, and one that Intel actually advertises for this thing. We turned on Steam In-Home Streaming, booted up a gaming PC across the house, shut down all our internet apps, and fired up Dark Souls II real quick. The result was pure agony.
Not only was the game completely and totally unplayable over WiFi, it actually completely and totally froze the system on a couple occasions. Sure, Intel technically recommends using a USB ethernet dongle or a 5GHz USB WiFi adapter for Steam streaming—and with them, it works great—but that costs money AND takes up another precious USB port. Now we’re talking about investing in a USB hub, a network adapter, and whatever gamepad you’re using, along with the keyboard and mouse you needed to fire this system up. And pray the Stick can provide enough power to that USB port to connect them all simultaneously. Oh, and don’t forget to install drivers first: when I plugged in my tiny $20 Edimax 802.11ac dongle into the Stick, it immediately gave me the Blue Screen of Death and wouldn’t boot until I yanked it out.
But even if you do invest in the extra gear for streaming, you might run into some nasty glitches in Steam’s couch-friendly Big Picture Mode. The longer we tried to play games, the more issues cropped up. The interface became more and more unresponsive, taking longer and longer to respond to presses on the gamepad. On a couple occasions, we even saw sparkly graphical corruption—usually a sure sign of an overheating GPU. Sure, Big Picture Mode uses a little bit of horsepower, but it’s hard to avoid it if you’re playing Steam games from the couch—whether you stream them or not.
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I love that the Compute Stick can be powered solely by the USB port on my TV. I expe