The latest iteration of Google Chrome OS devices are coming in the form of “Chrome boxes”. The initial Chrome boxes were released two years ago as Google was still trying to navigate the Chrome ship. Now Chrome as an OS is starting to catch on, most significantly in edTech.

Both ASUS and HP have released Chrome Boxes with just about the exact same specs. Both manufacturers boxes have a 1.4ghz Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16gb of local storage. Both are ideal for doing web based tasks where you don’t need the processing power, of a full fledged computer.

The ASUS M004U Chrome Box is retailing for $169.99 while the HP costs $10 more.

With both boxes having the same specs, the key thing that was separating the HP box from the ASUS box was that it was “small quiet and efficient”. The quiet part comes from a claim that the HP Chrome Box is fanless.

Low and behold, Geek.com’s Matthew Humphries reports that the HP Chromebox is in fact, not fanless. As Humphries points out, using the terminology “fanless” can only possibly mean one thing, and that is that the device has no fan. HP even goes as far as to say that the Chromebox has no dust build up, naturally because it’s being advertised as fanless.

Lon Seidman of Lon Reviews Tech, shows that the fanless HP Chromebox does indeed have a fan inside and even holds the Chromebox up to his microphone and you can clearly hear it blowing air out of the ventilation holes in the back of the box.

So with both devices having the exact same specs and neither actually being fanless ASUS is the better choice, saving $10.

Watch Lon’s video below: