ASUS EeeBox EB1012 teases home theaters with dual-core Atom and Ion graphics
By Thomas Ricker 
posted September 1st 2009 5:41AM
posted September 1st 2009 5:41AM
[Via eHomeUpgrade]
posted September 1st 2009 5:41AM
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Can't wait to find out the price/availability on this baby.
$300-$550 approx. Won't buy if its more expensive than that.
I have doubts about flash though. Depends on resolution, no? How about youtube HD fullscreen?
Price should be decent considering the pricing of other Asus products such as the EeePC's and even its EeeKeyboard (a monopoly)... What is more important is with this 'dual core' Atom and Ion how nicely this thing can play 1080P and how good its connectivity is so i can play Street Fighter on the go. amirite?
I'm going to guess it will be priced in the "Might as well buy a MacMini" price range.
nothing is priced in the 'might as well buy a mac mini' price range because it's shit.
oh my god, awesome.
might consider this if the price is good.
Hmm... nice. Will have to see if it can replace Popcorn Hour.
ION
High reated :P
Ion is good but I really wanted the HD 4530 like on the eb1006 (it is double the power) I was waiting for the n330 with the cpu/gpu performance but the stuck the ion in there :(
i just hope it is extremely cheaper than ASRock ION 330 Nettop.
Nice.
Cheap discrete boxes that can run servers (windows or Linux). My current server is eating up the leccy.
i want....
Haha glad i got rid of my revo r3600 last month :D
doesn't this have the same basic specs as the revo r3600? 330 atom, ion, 2 gigs of ram?
OK, I think there must be 2 different revo r3600s. Because the one my brother bought last week is the dual core 330 atom, not the 230 atom that the engadget review was based on.
eSATA? That ingenious port that doesn't provide POWER? Woo friggin' hoo! Let's endorse abject stupidity by supporting this "standard".
I can see were you're coming from, you would rather transfer 300gb+ of data through USB or pull out a screwdriver and open this thing up, take out the HD and connect it into another computer and transfer through Sata 2.0.
Sounds way better than plugging a power cable in (which is likely right there seeing as you are using an electronic device)
tl;dr your gay.
I'm going to have to agree, I've never used an eSATA port. And honestly, I watch 1080P movies off my external Seagate USB drive, while copying files to/from it, and the absolute worst delay I have ever had was about half a second when I paused the video for about 4 hours and the hard drive had gone idle so that half second was to spin up again. USB 2.0 is more than equipped for net-top duty.
And thats a Seagate Barricuda 7200.11 1TB disk spinning in there, not some fancy solid state based solution.
Pr0n downloads way slower, USB sux i have 2 external drives and opted to pay extra the second time for eSATA.
USB supports power but it wont power ur hard drive LOL
Having an eSATA RAID enclosure would be an excellent complement to a device such as this. That way you can have an 8TB media archive attached directly to this. Say what you want, but comparing the read/write speed of USB and SATA is ridiculous.
Nobody suggested that USB was a replacement for eSATA.
eSATA should have included power from the beginning. At least FireWire provides enough power for many drives (although not full-sized onces).
"tl;dr your gay."
And YOU'RE illiterate.
All that hardware and no remote? Ok so a USB blaster is easily added, but it seems like a weird omission.
IR port would be nice to have as well.
Where do I get mine. I've seriously been waiting 10 months for an Ion 'nettop' (I hate that word) to be readily available in the US.
As soon as I can get my hands on this, I'll probably buy 4 (one for each HDTV).
Why would we buy this when the Asrock Ion Nettop 330 is already on the market with about the same spec's?, and it is probably cheaper too.
...because
- the Asrock in not nearly as stylish
- it is probably 3+ times the size of this eeebox
- you probably cant discretely hang the Asrock to the back of your monitor/hdtv
well waiting for in my opinion.
The Asus doesn't have an optical drive, the Asrock does have one, so if you count the size of an optical drive, there won't be a lot of difference between the sizes.
The Asrock also has a 70GB bigger harddrive and it costs the same as the EEE box 202 with netbook atom here (about € 250 incl. vat) and about € 80 less than the EEE box b204 (with Radeon graphics). For that price difference, I could live with a nettop that doesn't "hang discretely at the back of my monitor."
We don't know about the price for the EEE Box yet, so pricing is just speculation. Obviously availability is an issue if the ASRock box is out now and the EEE Box obviously isn't.
But since when is it a bad thing to have similar products from other vendors?
Oh, and the ASRock Ion box sells for $379 on newegg.com as a barebones box. That means no OS pre installed. If you want Linux, then it's probably better that way, but if you want Windows then you're going to have to pony up for it. The EEE Box will most likely come with a Home version of Win 7.
Also, the ASRock box does not have wireless built-in. Not a big deal for some people (my home is wired throughout, so I'd be fine), but it is important for many people. So no, the ASRock box does not have the same specs for the same price.
Its, eee, so it will work with eee-furniture and eee-tv's.
No really, ASRock ION 330 seems like a better option.
This was reviewed on 'The gadget show' yesterday in the UK and was the best pc out of the ones tested
Actually, the model reviewed on the Gadget Show was the EeeBox B206 which is a lower spec'd model. It couldn't handle 1080p video and was slowest at multitasking. As such it lost out in the perfomance stakes to the Acer Aspire Revo 3600.
Another review of the model shown on the Gadget Show further backs this up:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/05/07/review_desktop_pc_asus_eee_box_b206/
Let's hope this model does better with this upgraded Atom chip + ION.
Finally, a stylish nettop with the Atom 330.
Well its based on ION so whatever the cost it will be too much to consider one over just building a lowend desktop.
I hope they offer XP on this! That would make it sublime.
Judging by the timing I would think that this runs Windows 7, but it could still use XP.
The specs alone disqualify it from the starter version of 7, but XP is still only like $15 for a copy from a big manufacturer.
Disregard all that.... sigh!
It comes with Vista:
"The best thing is going to be the ability to push out 1080p video to your display. This would put the EeeBox PC EB1012 in line as a decent low cost HTPC. Unfortunately Asus has chosen to put Windows Vista Home Premium on the new EeeBox, It would be much better with Windows 7 but maybe they will change things once it is officially released."
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/13092/eeebox_pc_eb1012_will_get_ion_and_1080p/
Then again, if you buy this before October 22nd, it should qualify for the free Windows 7 upgrade!
So the real answer is Vista and then Windows 7 as soon as possible!
I hope I can pick one up soon, need to replace wither my mac mini (Core Duo, 2GB Ram, 55GB HDD) with a better beast for all my movies ripped on my external HDD in high def
Unfortunately, the statement about full screen flash isn't true. I have a dual core ion, and I can barely get decent full screen flash through Boxee. Sorry folks, you'll have to wait until mid 2010 for hardware accelerated flash to make this dream complete.
Do people think the new Dell Zino HD will have similar specs to this?
This would sound exciting if I wasn't turned on to Plex for Mac a month ago. The interface is amazing and the Netflix, Pandora, and other Internet related apps support is far better then I could have imagined. If it would only double as a DVR, there'd be no reason to ever switch the app off!
Reasonably priced, this should sell like hotcakes if it can do 1080p properly. A black case would help.
Unfortunately, Hulu still won't do fullscreen.
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=602
No, Ion isn't the silver bullet to end all Hulu-woes, but my understanding is that Ion isn't really supposed to solve the problems in the first place. Hulu is flash-based, which is entirely dependent upon your CPU. That's why all these single-core atom devices are useless when it comes to Hulu. The reason there's hope for this latest EeeBox is that it has a much better processor than previous models. The Anandtech review focuses on single core atom builds, where this is dual.
Good enough, I'm moving soon and I've always played around with the idea of a home theater PC. This one is small, cheap and just powerful enough to be a good living-room set. Personally I'd love to see how much they price it for, and since its an atom/ion system its bound to be cheap.
I wont believe this EEEpc can do Hulu and YouTube HD in full screen until I see it in a review.
Eee Wii!
Sounds great. Throw in a Blu-ray player and I'm in. Maybe I could get an external Blu-ray player?
Two things I need to accomplish with my next media system:
1) minimum: 8-channel LPCM; preferred: bitstreamed DTS-HD MA and DDTrueHD audio.
2) one-stop-shop for ALL 1080p content -- to include high bitrate Bluray ISOs, Hulu, Youtube, HD, and every other online source.
Something tells me that the Atom machines won't get to that point anytime soon, so I'll be stuck going the custom HTPC route with a Xonar Slim audio card instead.
If only they listened to their consumers, these companies could make even more money than they already are...
It's listed at my local PC shop for 378€
2-4 weeks estimated delivery time.
Cheapest AsRock ION 330 is 300€ in the same shop.
They use some safety margin in their prices in pre-order if the price has not been confirmed yet but this might be the final price given how close the estimated delivery time is.
Now go ahead and point out how very expensive everything is over here.