14 DAY TRIAL // Six months after the introduction of the Edge HD nettop, Sapphire has presented a new version of the mini-PC that swaps the current Intel Atom CPU for a more powerful AMD accelerated processing unit.
The new Edge HD model was showcased during the recent CES fair and it sports pretty much the same chassis as its Intel cousin, but this time it will get its power from an E-450 APU, according to Tech Report.
This is the fastest Brazos chip available so far and it sports dual Bobcat x86 processing cores clocked at 1.65GHz and Radeon HD 6320 integrated graphics, featuring some impressive multimedia capabilities.
What this means is the little 18W chip that is installed in the Edge HD3 is fully capable of decoding Blu-ray video as well as other Full HD movie formats, no matter the bitrate used for their encoding.
These can be stored on the included 320GB hard disk drive, which is housed inside the case together with 4GB of DDR3 system memory.
As far as the available connectors are regarded, the system features two USB 2.0 ports, an audio-in and one line-out jack, an Ethernet port, as well as VGA and HDMI video outputs. The Fusion-powered EDGE HD3 was also designed to provide users with USB 3.0 connectivity.
Built-in WiFi rounds up the features list, while the power consumption of the Sapphire nettop is estimated at a low 30 Watts.
If these specs sound good to you, then you should know that the E-450 powered Edge HD model should become available in February of this year with a base price of $300 (234 EUR).
The current EDGE HD2 nettop is powered by a dual-core Intel Atom D525 processor which runs at 1.8GHz, has 2GB of system memory, a 250GB hard drive and Nvidia second-generation ION graphics.