14 DAY TRIAL // Intel’s launch of the Atom Cedar Trail platform has inspired many hardware makers to introduce computers built around these chips, including Asus who has recently presented one such design dubbed the Eee Box EB1031.
Compared to its predecessors, Asus’ new nettop has now gained a matte case that does a far better job at keeping fingerprints away than the glossy finish used previously, while also sporting a thinner profile.
Despite the small size, the Asus nettop comes with a wide variety of ports and connectors including a pair of jacks for plugging in a mic and headphones, four frontal USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, as well as VGA and HDMI video outputs.
At the heart of the system stands Intel's recently released Atom D2800 processor that is based on the Cedarview architecture.
This chip was designed by Intel to be used inside low-power computers and it features two processing cores with Hyper-Threading support, for a total of four computing threads, packs 1MB of Level 2 cache memory and comes clocked at 2.13GHz.
In addition, the chip also sports an integrated 1066MHz memory controller as well as a 640MHz on-die GMA 3650 GPU that is based on a PowerVR core.
As it can be seen from the video enclosed, which was provided by Notebook Italia, the Asus Eee Box EB1031 is quite capable of handling 1080p video decoding, and Intel even boasts that it supports Blu-ray 2.0 playback.
The rest of the system includes 4GB of DDR3 memory, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, a multi-format card reader, as well as a 500GB hard drive (but can take any other 2.5-inch drive, HDD, SSD, or hybrid).
The Asus Eee Box EB1031 esktop will become available in March of this year, at a yet undisclosed price point.
