Asus joins the Ionic party.
For a ready-to-go, low power home theatre PC, it's tough to not like any Nvidia Ion-based nettop. Unfortunately, it's taken some time for the Nvidia Ion to start making its way through OEM's product pipelines, but finally we're starting to see more of them.
Asus is the latest to show off a small packaged Nvidia Ion nettop that packs the Intel Atom 330 dual core processor. Asus characterizes its EeeBox PC EB1012 as "High Definition Entertainment in a 1L-Sized PC," which appears to be accurate as it is fairly compact in size and has HDMI and S/PDIF outputs.
It holds a 250 GB HDD, but you can expand storage easily to hold more media thanks to six USB ports and even a flash memory card reader (handy for displaying your photos). The rest of the specifications read like that of any other high-end nettop, complete with wireless N and gigabit LAN.
The EeeBox PC EB1012 will ship with Windows Vista Home Premium, meaning that it doesn't have to be restricted or held back for the release of Windows 7, but should still come with the free upgrade. Find out more on Asus' product page.
Most ION platforms, including those with an single core Atoms have been proven to handle Blu-Ray and H.264 decoding just fine.
@warezme it is actually a lot different than mac mini
Add an SSD, and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that thing and you are in business.
Win7 will cost something, I wished they also had an SSD version, or at least 32-80GB SSD upgrades for it.
Yes, the Nvidia Pure Video 3 GPUs (CUDA) handle all the H.264 or MPEG2 VC-1 video decoding. In XBMC/Mplayer on Unix, it can play back a 36MBps average Blu Ray with less than 6% CPU usage.
One would expect this from next gen Directx computer and OpenCL capable GPUs.
The only downside of the ION is that it still uses a slow Atom CPU that will struggle to play Hulu at least on 480p. Maybe Flash/Silverlight will add GPU decoding, but that will likely be after OpenCL becomes mainstream because most laptops don't have a OpenCL compatible GPU.