Asus [TPE:2357] is preparing to ship the Eee Box EB1501P home theatre focussed nettop in the UK by the end of this summer or around the beginning of fall. This news was leaked earlier this week by UK tech news source Electric Pig and was later confirmed by Asus UK. Even though it is supposed to be a nettop, this Eee Box will pack quite a punch with its above average specifications.
The RAM will stay at 2GB just like the Eee Box that came before it, so will the HDD at 250GB and you can’t get away from Windows 7 either. But beyond that lies the graphics — which will be the next-gen ION from NVIDIA which is 16-core desktop graphics. It will be paired with the Atom Dual Core D525, Wireless N WiFi and HDMI out too. So if you are thinking about attaching it to your HDTV directly — you can just go on ahead.
The ION 2 graphics chip and the Atom D525 are going to really help its cause as a home theatre solution. Together they will enhance your HD video experience by quite a few notches over the previous models. Also, it will be giving you good mileage when it comes to gaming. Some of the newer games might also run on it at lower settings. So over all it is going to be good deal.
And while we wait for it to release, the original report compares it with the Mac Mini and poses it as a possible competitor. The two cannot be compared directly thanks to the hardware difference but with it costing around $600, which is below the Mac Mini’s starting price of $699. A lot of people might want to trade up if they want a Mac but I can see a lot of people being okay with this because it does more or less everything an average person would want to do with a desktop.
