All looks good save the price.

Should've waited for the cheap 5000 series ATi's for bitstreaming support

I am not too impressed and i don't like the fact that this is in essence dell's version of a mac mini it's bad enough that they copied apple a company i am no fan of,but then they throw questionable specs as wlell blah,i'd rather build my own

If the HDMI supports audio this thing has 7.1 channels of HD audio.

Faster CPU and gfx than an Atom, HDMI port (non on mac mini) and the same price to boot. This is the perfect HTPC.

well, good for u then... i guess everything's made to catch up to apple... btw, if this is apple, it would have cost at least double that price...

i thought the point of an HTPC was to be able playback multimedia. can this thing -- the cheapest base config -- actually do that? seems a little weak under the hood.

I'm guessing the addin video card would be on a riser?

haha.. it took them 4 years to copy the crappy Mac mini? Sad.

Honestly, I think it is just ugly. Plus I would rather spend a bit more and get the next gen Atom with Ion.

$649 ??? I think I will pass...

Yea this would make a nice little HTPC. Zino > AV Receiver > TV, all of this thought pending HDMI.

Prob easiest thing to do it buy the base config, and then pick up a low profile HD4650 with HDMI for ~$50, this all granted there isnt some special card size in there.

Thats a good price! I recall a Atom 330 based nettop for over 300 dollars, with half the RAM and hard drive space.

The 780G chipset is actually pretty capable at media without needing a beefier discrete card.
The problem with the base configuration is the single-core Athlon. I wouldn't put less than a dual-core into a machine these days, especially not something for entertainment. If they had managed to get a 4850e in here, it would have been much more powerful. Best they offer in this line is a dual-core Athlon Neo at 1.8GHz. The TDP of the Neo is rated at 15W, though, so it obviously runs a lot cooler than the desktop processor.

Wow, Intel settles law suits with AMD including anti-trust, and the next day Dell has an AMD PC?

Why is Dell selling Vista by default with options to "upgrade" to Win 7. Is Microsoft actually supporting this, or is Dell just trying to milk more money out of mindless consumers by offering an "upgrade" to a more recent OS that should cost them the same? I guess Dell just has a few million unused Vista licenses still lying around they need to dump off on unwitting customers.

Still for $229, this is the most fully-featured "nettop" I've seen yet, only its a real computer.

WTH is 2.1 HD Audio? I only see a single (ie: 2.0) stereo minijack output. Does this thing have a small built-in sub and 2 small mid-high-range speakers? I thought not.

You really can't beat the value of the low-end systems, though! It would be a good HTPC client if it's quiet and as long as you don't need to bitstream the 8ch codecs. They should offer Intel/Indilinx-based SSDs as options.

Not the worst idea I've seen, but lets be honest, its a mac mini. For that matter it isn't even an impressive mac mini until the $600+ price point.

to quote deadlocked,

I think most who would opt for a HTPC will probably build something equivalent for less or something more powerful. The consumers looking for a small underpowered rig will go for probably get a discount net top or burn their dollars on a mac mini.

I just can't see dell selling many of these.

single-core Athlon 1.6GHz? Wait, I have an old 1.3ghz that's almost 10 years old. Is AMD still making those or is it a totally different CPU?

Needs an option for a TV tuner for me to want it

Wow. Talk about a blatant rip off of the Mac Mini. It literally looks as if the Dell design team walked into an Apple store, bought a Mac Mini, gave it a paint job, took out the good hardware, and re-sold it a lower price point. Are you kidding me?

Jeez. At least the Mac Mini comes with a Core 2, 9400m, and a slot loading drive. I suppose I can't complain at $659 with a 20" LCD but at least give the options to upgrade it beyond that crap of a CPU. If you price this thing from the ground up without the thrown in LCD the Mac Mini is actually a better deal given the hardware. Of course when you throw in a 20" LCD it changes the deal but the hardware cap sucks.

You can "save" $63 by picking the first step-up config and getting shunted into Win 7 Home Premium and 15 months of Mcafee, so you end up a bit ahead if you like subscription based security.

The features are pretty darn nice, this is definitely a step up from the pretty dated Mac Mini platform which has a woefully limited CPU and GPU configuration. It will be very hard to resist picking one of these up if Dell drops some coupon codes during the holidays. This is just what the casual HTPC user needs, a widely capable system with a really small form factor.

The "new, beefier" mac mini is still locked into the 9400m (which is a lot slower than the HD4330) and it shares video ram, AND the mini has a max of 4gb installed ram. If you are looking for a unit for gaming, the Dell is the way to go. If you are into CPU intensive apps, the Mini wins with the faster C2D just don't burn your house down running folding @home.

Gotta love these little "net tops." This one does appear to have some guts to it though, so it may be adequate to use in a living room for an HTPC.

mmmmmmm candy

Not bad, but I question the ability of a single core processor to handle HTPC content, the video card supports video decoding, but there are some codecs which still require CPU (software) decoding I could see the single chip failing here.

I really don't think that anyone is looking at either of these two product as gaming rigs of any sort. I just don't understand why Dell is locking this into Athlon Neo processors.

Haha Dell obviously wants to promote more AMD after this heat from Intel and Dell's name being dropped in on the mix as a participant. And yet there are Intel fanboys who probably don't and won't know how to cope with the fact that there is an absolute series of AMD products now...what will be the effect of such a change?...anybody see 2012? :-P

There is an advantage to the 9400M: CUDA. If you are building a HTPC; cuda and this cpu would enable 1080p HD *.mkv playback. I would be highly interested if they had used the nvidia 8x00 chipset and AMD cpus... but alas they didn't. In all others ways I would call the ATI graphics chipset superior.

If Dell builds in ATI stream processing via OpenCL to beef up HD video decoding and 6 channel audio decoding then, the ATI choice is a good one, and an all AMD/ATI solution is a good standpoint from platform development.

Ummmm... there were small all in 1 units WAY before Apple came out with the Mini, or even the Cube...

While I respect Apple's refinement of those products, I'm not stupid enough to think they were the first ones to do it...