Back in August we got our hands on the small ASRock ION330-BD nettop with a Blu-ray drive inside for a full review. We liked the little machine pretty well thanks to its low price and decent performance. ASRock has now announced a new updated version the nettop we played with offering more features called the ASRock ION330HT-BD.
It feels like we’ve been waiting for Lenovo’s IdeaPad S12 with NVIDIA Ion graphics for months, probably because it has been months. Announced back in May, demonstrated to us in June, then officially delayed in August until Windows 7’s launch, the arrival of the new Microsoft OS means Lenovo can finally push the IdeaPad S12 Ion out of the door.
The poor global economy resulted in some of the worst quarters in the history of many electronics and notebook makers thanks to consumers not buying in droves. It looks like the market is starting to turn around for many computer makers and the latest figures for GPU shipments from Jon Peddie Research are in for Q3 2009, and they look good.
ASUS have outed their first supercomputer, and while you might associate the term with rooms packed full of ominous black totems, the ASUS ECS 1000 is actually a simple desktop. Despite the compact size, the ECS 1000 manages to hit speeds of up to 1.1 terraflops courtesy of NVIDIA graphics cards; the 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 is paired with three NVIDIA Tesla C1060 computing processors and a single Quadro FX5800.
MSI are threatening to join the ebook reader market themselves, with company chairman Joseph Hsu revealing that they’re currently working on an NVIDIA Tegra based device. The news comes after ASUS reiterated their ongoing ebook reader development, with the most recent news suggesting that the company has not one but two such devices in the works, offering two different screen sizes.
ASUS’ latest NVIDIA Ion based nettops have been well and truly pawed over by NetbookNews.de, and considering that the Eee Box EB1012 at least seems destined for the US market it’s only right that we should take an interest. The EB1012 – and the ASUS Eee Box EB1501 – uses Intel’s dual-core Atom 330 1.6GHz processor, paired with the Ion 1080p-capable graphics chipset, with the key difference being that the EB1501 finds room to squeeze in an optical drive.
Video demos after the cut
Acer’s Aspire Revo nettop has just received a welcome shot in the arm, courtesy of a dual-core Atom 330 processor and an extra gig of RAM. The Aspire Revo R3610-U9012 kicks out its predecessor’s Atom 230 chip in favor of the quicker alternative, and pairs it with 2GB of RAM, Windows 7 and NVIDIA Ion graphics. That should hopefully make the system a little better at coping with non-1080p video tasks, something the first model had issues with.
ASUS’ Eee Box range arguably came of age when the company announced the 1501, their first NVIDIA Ion based model. Packing a DVD drive and various video output options, we’ve been waiting to see when it might show up in the wild; that question has been answered by the guys at Newgadgets.de, who grabbed some live shots of the Eee Box 1501 at a press conference in Munich.
Remember Mobinnova’s élan Smartbook from Computex earlier this year? The 8.9-inch ultraportable promised HD video playback and hours of battery life, thanks to its NVIDIA Tegra chipset; now Mobinnova are back, with the élan rebanded as the Beam, and promising a launch for the compact machine at CES in January 2010. According to LaptopMag’s interview, the Beam will be offered with a carrier subsidy, though the company are keeping quiet on exactly which US network they’re in bed with.
From a skinny whippet of an ultraportable to an altogether chunkier model, BFG’s Deimos X-10 SLI Gaming Notebook doesn’t particularly lend itself to narrow tote bags but if you want to do some serious gaming while on the move then this is your beast. The Deimos X-10 packs an 18.4-inch 16:9 1920 x 1080 display and can be built with dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M 1GB graphics card in an SLI setup.
SlashGear Japan
