This hacked Chromebox is INSANELY impressive.

0:00 If I told you that I spent just $25 on a mini PC that could run a Minecraft server, handle remote gaming, was upgradable, sipped under two watts at idle, and could even be powered over USBC, you'd probably assume I was lying. And technically, you'd be right because after shipping and taxes, it was more like $37. But still, this little mini PC really surprised me, especially because, well, it's not really a normal mini PC. It's actually a Chrome box. Well, it was a Chrome box. In this video, I'm going to show you how I flashed the firmware to turn it into something much, much better. As with many of my videos, this one began with me browsing Facebook Marketplace where I stumbled across a

0:46 listing for a really cheap Asus CN60 chrome box. Now, if you're not familiar with Chrome boxes, essentially they're the same thing as Chromebooks, but rather than being in a notebook form factor with a screen and a keyboard, well, they're just a little box. Like Chromebooks, they run Chrome OS, which is basically just Google Chrome and a file browser. Also, rather than having a UFI, Chrome boxes have different firmware that only lets them boot into Chrome OS, so you can't simply install Windows or some Linux distro on them. When I came across that really cheap Facebook listing, though, I started wondering if there might actually be a way to repurpose that little Chrome box. So, I started doing a bit of research and pretty quickly came across a website called mrchromebox.te that offered instructions and resources for modifying the firmware on Chrome boxes and looked to be really promising. After looking at the supported devices list and also looking into the specs of various Chromebox

1:32 models, I passed on that CN60 and instead bought this. This is an Acer CX i3 that I picked up on eBay for just $25 plus tax and shipping. Now, it probably was that cheap because it was listed as four parts due to having a password, but I felt pretty hopeful that I could reset whatever password was set. So, I pulled the trigger. Now, despite the i3 in the name, there are a few different variants of the Acer CXi i3 that don't include i3s in them. But, mine does feature an eighth gen Intel i38130U. It's a dualcore 4thread CPU with bass and boost frequencies of 2.2 and 3. GHz, respectively. Mine also came with 8 GB of DDR4 and a 64 gig SSD. On the front, there's a power button, micro SD card reader, two USB 3 ports, and an audio jack. On the back, there's a

2:18 gigabit Ethernet port, three more USB 3A ports, an HDMI connector, and a barrel jack for power. But there's also a USBC port that not only supports USB and display port over USBC, but supposedly can also function as a power input. Cracking it open is a little bit tedious, but once you remove the outer cover, you'll find a pretty simple single board computer with two DDR4 sodium sockets, an M.2 socket for the SSD, and an M.2 ekey socket for the Wi-Fi adapter. Now, at face value, there's nothing crazy about the specs. But if we can manage to hack it to run something other than Chrome OS, it might actually make for a solid little desktop PC or maybe something like a home assistant server. I mean, the CPU isn't that old. It has upgradeable components. It looks like it can be powered over USBC and the form factor is nice and compact. In fact, it's so small I think

3:05 I think I might have lost it. Hold on one second. Oh, here it is. I was able to find it with this Finetrack Smart Finder from the sponsor of today's video, UG Green. The Finetrack Smart Finder is easy to connect to your iPhone using the Find My app. You can actually add up to 32 finders and share them across five different devices. The Find Track makes it easy to track your valuables basically anywhere in the world. And if you're nearby, you can have it play a sound to help you find it. You'll even get a notification if your device gets left behind. It's perfect for your keys, backpack, or I guess even a little Chrome box. And since it's integrated with Apple's Find My Network, all location data is end to-end encrypted, so only you can access the tags location. It's powered by a standard CR 2032 battery that can last up to 2 years, and it can easily be replaced by just popping it open with a spudger. The Finetrack Smart Finder is

3:50 already super small, making it perfect for your key ring or something. But if you need something even slimmer, there's also the Finetrack Slim Smart Finder. This one's perfect for your wallet and can easily be recharged via USB using a magnetic connector. If you're interested in keeping track of your valuables, check out the UG Green Finetrack smart finders by using my links down in the description. Now, since the system was supposedly password locked, I wanted to get it booted up to see what I was dealing with. And rather than trying USBC just yet, I opted to use a standard 19vt power supply. Unfortunately, I bought this adapter kit a while back, which has really come in handy. The system booted up and as I expected was managed by a school district. I wasn't really expecting it to work, but I looked up the recovery instructions on Acer's website. Unfortunately, I did miss some of the screen capture here, but basically it had me use a

4:36 paperclipip to press the recovery button on the back while turning on the system. And then I followed a few more steps to erase all local data. To my surprise, this didn't just get rid of the user, it also removed the organizational management, leaving me with a perfectly usable Chrome box. I hopped into Chrome OS as a guest user and not only did it work great for browsing the web and such, but the system was also only drawing about 2 and 1 half to 3 watts while sitting at the desktop. Before taking a crack at wiping the firmware, I also wanted to test out the USBC power. So, I grabbed this UG Green Nexo charger that can not only provide 100 W, but can do so at 20 volts, which I assumed this would need since it otherwise used a 19volt power supply. It took a second, I assume, for the USB power delivery negotiation and whatnot, but it eventually booted up just fine. Now, I was hoping that with this GAN charger, the efficiency might be a little bit

5:21 better, but it was pretty much just the same. I assume there's probably some efficiency benefit from having a fixed 19volt power supply that doesn't have to negotiate different voltages. I switched back to the 19 volt power supply just because I figured it would be a bit more stable and I wanted things to be stable because, well, now it was time to flash the firmware. On the Mr. Chromebox getting started page, you can find the prerequisites and some basic instructions, but you'll also notice a ton of warnings. And yes, you should be warned. While I'm aware that many of you watching this video are very smart and technical and probably have a good understanding of what's going on here, it's still important to note that flashing the firmware on your Chrome box is risky. You could end up with a brick system that might only be recoverable using something like a chip programmer. And while there is a helpful script that does do a lot of the hard work, this still isn't necessarily a simple process. In fact, there's a very

6:07 specific warning to not trust YouTubers. So, if you're going to do this, make sure you read into the process, double check that your device is supported, and search for any issues people might have encountered with your specific model before flashing anything. With all of that out of the way, let's move on to hopefully not breaking this thing. After making sure that I met all the prerequisites, I was faced with the choice of which firmware I wanted. The first option is to install the readr legacy firmware, which essentially overwrites the boot payload on a writable portion of the flash storage. This lets you dual boot your OS of choice as well as Chrome OS while not making any significant changes to the firmware. What I opted for though was the UEFI or full ROM option, which completely wipes the firmware image, essentially turning the Chrome box into, well, a regular PC. Following the instructions, I verified that my model was supported and then followed the

6:53 steps to enter developer mode. Now, to completely wipe the firmware, you have to write over readonly portions of the flash storage. So, to do that, you have to disable the firmware right protection. With many models, including the CXi3, you can do this by removing a specific screw from the motherboard. And unless you want to reenable right protection later, which isn't necessary, you can just leave the screw out. On the Chrome OS login screen, I hit control alt F2 and then logged in with a user Kronos with no password to get to a VT2 shell. From here, I was able to download and then run the firmware utility script, which of course I misspelled the first time. This utility can do a lot of things, including installing the full ROM firmware. After starting the process, it asked if I was sure, and then it asked if I was really sure, and then it asked if I was really, really sure before letting me save a backup of the stock firmware to a flash drive.

7:40 After that, it was the moment of truth. Would I breakick this little Chrome box or would the update Oh, hey, it worked. After rebooting, I was able to hit escape to get into the UFI of my new non-chromebox mini PC. And boy, was I pumped. Now, this UFI doesn't have a ton of options, but there are some settings you can tweak. But the more important thing here is that now you can boot into any UEFI compatible operating system. First I swapped out the 64 gig SSD with a 1 TB NVME SSD. And then I installed Proxmox without any issues. And after running Power Top Autotune and the AutoASPM script, the system idled at just 1 1/2 watt, which is insane. We're getting into sub Raspberry Pi territory here. At least at idle. It went up quite a bit more when we were running workloads, but still that's super impressive. To see if this Proxmark server could actually be put to use,

8:26 though, I installed Crafty Controller and Jellyfin. In Crafty Controller, I set up a simple vanilla server, which it seemed to handle fairly well. The CPU usage spiked a little bit, but I never noticed any hitches or issues with chunk generation. In Jellyfin, I had no issues setting up quicksync for hardware accelerated transcoding. The integrated graphics on these eighth gen mobile chips aren't insane or anything, but it's enough to transcode 10-bit HVC to H.264 with VPP tone mapping. While you might not be able to run a ton of virtual machines or services with this little dual core i3, the little Chrome box seemed to handle Proxmox without any issues. Well, except for one. For some reason, I had really slow downloads in both Proxmox and Debian 12. And this was strange because when I ran Iperf 3, that looked totally normal. I originally thought this was a driver issue with the R8169 driver, but after many, many

9:12 hours, I finally figured out that the issue was caused by having EE or energy efficient Ethernet enabled. After disabling that, downloads worked just as expected, but this did bring idle power draw back up just a little bit to around like two watts or so. And if you ran Power Top Autotune, that would break it again. Interestingly, I didn't have this issue at all in Windows. And yeah, I did install Windows primarily to run a few benchmarks, but it also gave me sort of a worst case scenario for using this as a desktop. Just like in Chrome OS though, the CXi3 handled basic computing and web browsing without issue, and it didn't even break a sweat when playing back 4K YouTube content. I also installed Moonlight for some remote game streaming from my desktop. When streaming 4K, I noticed just a bit of sluggishness at times, but even in faster paced games like Rocket League, it was still very playable. So, you could definitely set this up as a media PC or remote gaming box in your living

9:58 room or something. Although, you might be limited to 1080p or 1440p. And that's because this HDMI port, I believe, only supports HDMI 1.4b. That means you can only get 60 Hz with 1080p or 1440p, but 4K is going to be limited to 30 Hz. But if you don't mind 1080p or mostly plan on using this as a media box running something like Kodi, this could work great in the living room, especially with that super low idle power draw. As I said, I also ran some benchmarks starting off with Geekbench. Here, the CXi3 managed single and multi-core scores of 1267 and 2662, respectively. I don't have a ton of results to compare this to just yet, but I do have the results from a Zeon E31220 V3 from a Dell R220 I covered recently, and the CXi i3 was just a bit faster in single core performance, but it fell behind to the true quad-core CPU and multi-core

10:43 performance. I also ran Cinebench R23, and here the CXi i3 managed single and multi-threaded scores of 778 and 1786, respectively. I also grabbed the results from a mini PC with an Intel N100 and an HP Prodesk with a Skylake i56400. The CXi i3 with its dualcore CPU was slower than both of these systems, especially in the multi-threaded test. When it comes to idle power draw, the CXi i3 outperformed both systems, only drawing 4 watts from the wall. Under a heavy load like Cinebench, though, the CXi3 struggled, drawing 31 W. The little N100 mini PC absolutely dominated here. And even though the ProSk with its i5 drew around 25% more power, it was also about 50% faster while doing so. Now, this motherboard does support some upgrades. Obviously, the M.2 2 SSD can be upgraded

11:29 and that socket supports four lanes of PCIe Gen 3. But I also use this little SATA controller to confirm that the M.2 E key socket supports one lane of PCI Gen 3. So you could use something like that little SATA adapter to make a hacky little NAS build or something. Or you could just use an adapter to plug in another NVME SSD. Do keep in mind though that because these are sort of staggered, certain combinations of little adapters may not work. Like if for example you wanted to boot from an SSD on the E key socket and then put like a little SATA adapter on the M key socket, that wouldn't work because they would bump into each other. Also, I didn't have the sodiums to try upgrading the RAM, but because the i3 8130U supports 32 gigs, you should be able to upgrade this with two 16 gig sticks if you wanted to. So all in all, was this whole process worth it? Well, in my opinion, especially for less than 40 bucks, absolutely. I think the main

12:15 takeaway here is that this little system is very efficient when running lightweight tasks and would probably work extremely well for things like Home Assistant, Pi Hole, Uptime Kuma, and so on. In fact, if all you're doing is running those very lightweight services, this might even be as efficient as something like a Raspberry Pi. You could also use this in other ways, though, such as for media streaming, remote gaming, or more in line with its original purpose, just basic web browsing, but now on an operating system of your choice. Flashing the firmware did take more work than what would be required with a more standard x86 mini PC, but in some ways I find that to be better. I found it pretty fun to take a locked down Chromebox and turn it into a very usable PC. And not only was this cheap and fun, this little system turned out to be surprisingly good in a few ways. It's much more upgradeable than I would have imagined, and the efficiency when at idle or running lightweight

13:00 tasks was shockingly impressive. Plus, being able to power it via USB could really be a plus if, for example, you wanted to build a cluster out of these in a little 10-in rack or something. That being said, there definitely were some drawbacks. First, there was a decent amount of risk, not only in flashing the firmware, but also for me in buying a locked system. Fortunately, I didn't have any issues there, but that's not to say you might not if you try to do the same thing. In fact, I was concerned enough about unlocking the system and flashing the firmware that I actually bought a second CXi3 motherboard just in case I break the first one. There are plenty examples out there of people breaking their Chrome boxes, so definitely take your time, read the documentation, and do some research. I obviously can't vouch for other models of Chrome boxes out there. I have no idea how efficient, upgradable, or usable any of them are, but it's pretty cool that this option exists because the more options we have

13:46 for repurposing tech like this, the better. I really hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, maybe consider giving me a thumbs up, maybe consider subscribing, or even becoming a RAID member for as little as a dollar a month. With that, you get early access to all of my videos without any ads. I think it's a pretty solid deal. That's about it for this one, though. So, as always, thank you guys so much for watching. Stay curious, and I really can't wait to see you in the next one.