For this scenario we first had to install Adobe PhotoShop, MS Word, MS Excel, and Mozilla Thunderbird. As with the OS and XMBC, all software installed just as easily and smoothly as it would on our main ‘real’ systems. The only difference was the speed at which they installed. Here the i3 is a touch underpowered but the installation time was not that terrible. For three weeks we used the BRIX as our ‘main’ system. During this time we edited over 200 photos for 4 different reviews, created dozens upon dozens of Excel spreadsheets, and typed up nearly 50K in words. At no time did we feel this system was so underpowered that it would be unusable in a more workplace scenario.
The only time we really noticed the lack of power was in Photoshop as the i3 did cause major pauses nearly every time we made a change to a photo. Part of this is because we have NVIDIA video cards that PhotoShop can offload a lot of the work on to, but mainly because the i3 is only a dual core processor that runs at a fairly sedate 2.1GHz – and our main rig is a six core / twelve thread socket 2011 beast. As long as you don’t actually use Photoshop so much that is pinned to your taskbar the i3 would be more than enough for (normal) day to day tasks.
