Products, offered by UK based company Aleutia, can be good candidates to be HTPC or media client. They are tiny, noiseless and use very little power. However they have enough power for HD video playback thanks to nVidia Ion graphical platform.
Also you may peep inside the Aleutia’s PC using their Flickr photo stream. And even you won’t buy anything from Aleutia it might give you some useful ideas to build tiny and silent HTPC by yourself.
More and more nettops based on nVidia Ion are announced. Few of them were demonstrated on the Computex Taipei 2009. Unfortunately there is no detailed information about their configuration, price and availability.
MSI Wind Box
It’s hard to believe that the compact nettop Fit-PC 2 has enough horsepower to playback Full HD video with resolution 1920 x 1080! It’s based on Intel Atom (Z530 or Z510) processor and equiped with 1GB RAM, your choice of 2.5″ HDD, built-in WiFi adapter, six USB ports, Ethernet and HDMI out. As OS WinXP or Ubuntu can be used. The price of Fit-PC 2 is between $245 and $400 depending on the configuration.
As I see the Fit-PC 2 is good choice for media extender of MythTV, XBMC, Boxee or VDR. Also it can be used as LinuxMCE media director. But be sure that it supports netboot via PXE.
Two new NVIDIA Ion nettops was announced last week – ASRock ION 330 and Pegatron Cape 7. ASRock ION 330 (picture above) doesn’t look like Acer AspireRevo. It’s a bit bigger but it sports a dual-core Atom 330 and an integrated DVD optical drive.
Pegatron Cape 7 looks similar to Acer AspireRevo and there is no any information about its spec except HDMI and USB ports showed on the picture below. The price and date of availability are not known for both.
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The new Acer Aspire Revo based on nVidia Ion is available for pre-order on the Play.com. The price is very reasonable. The cheapest model with 8Gb SSD is just €233.99! It can be the best choice for LinuxMCE media director or XBMC/Boxee/VDR/MythTV media extender. You can pay for Acer Aspire Revo now but you’ll get it after 18/05/2009 only. Note that Play.com makes delivery for all EU countries.
