ASRock ION 330HT-BD nettop goes on sale for $589
By Darren Murph 
posted December 9th 2009 10:23AM
posted December 9th 2009 10:23AM
If you're scouting a nettop that'll hit your doorstep prior to those Christmas bells ringing, you'll want to look elsewhere. That said, those with plenty of time to spare may want to consider ASRock's ION 330HT-BD, particularly if you just can't seem to stop renting Blu-ray Discs from Netflix. The box has just landed on Amazon with a $588.99 price tag and an admittedly frightening "usually ships within 1 to 4 months" warning, and if you're no fan of BD (liar!), the standard 330HT is in the same boat for $458.99.
You can get the BD version in the UK for about $560 and it's ready to ship now.
Yikes! $458.99 for the DVD model? The non-HT model ran $349 at Newegg. Adding an IR remote and wireless N shouldn't add $110 to the price. You can get a wireless adapter for less than $30, and a remote for $30.
I was planning to get this for the holidays, but I guess I'll just have to buy the cheaper model and add the remote myself. Now, if only I could find one in stock somewhere........
@Spiny Norman I'm right there with you. I've been holding out for the 330HT mostly because of the remote, but this is stupid. *sigh*
Here's hoping that the standard 330 resurfaces at the old price. Newegg has been sold out for some time now.
@Packgrog
I couldn't take it any longer, and I just went out and purchased an Acer Aspire Revo 1600 for $199. It only has the Ion LE chipset, but I'm not planning to play any games on the thing, so I think it should do the trick.
For a while I thought I would build my own, but I couldn't find a single place that has an Atom 330. That may be why these things are sold out all over the place: there are no chips to be had. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this 330-HT.
I rather get a Dell Zino. It's cheaper and better looking.
@max1001
Seriously. What a piece of crap this is for $600.
@max1001
and for nearly the same price you can get a slightly better gpu and much better cpu with the zino
@max1001 The Zino won't run XBMC Live as well, due to issues with support of ATI under Linux.
@Packgrog
That'll effect a whopping .004% of people purchasing it... what ever will Dell do?
@Parias True. It still surprises me how many people are using Windows for these things, though. Something like XBMC Live (or a Boxee equivalent if they ever get off their asses and do it) is pretty much the perfect basis for a machine like this. While deal with all the Windows garbage when you could control all of the necessary settings through the same interface you use to play media files?
Besides, I swore off Dell long ago. Perhaps they've gotten back to their former glory, but I've come across too much junk Dell hardware in the past to be tempted by the Zino.
@Packgrog
Spoken like a true nix fanboy. It's like religious zealots that can't understand why people think differently than they do. Has it occur to you that people might to use their computer to do normal computer thing instead of just watch videos on it.
@Packgrog
Your ramblings don't make it any less true that such a small amount of people give a damn about XBMC that it isn't even worth Dell's time to consider.
@Parias
I think you're really underestimating the number of people that buy these nettops for HT use. Most people who don't need HT support will most likely be springing for a laptop due to their portability.
With all of its DRM nonsense, I think a lot of us are actually not fans of Blu Ray.
@manekineko2
http://www.dvdfab.com/blu-ray-to-blu-ray.htm
Problem solved.
you can get ion nettop for $199 or less and if you have to, you can purchase the external blu-ray drive for less than $100.
@htd but a cheap nettop won't be powerful enough to handle BluRay...
@NewL
It will if it's an ion nettop.
Hell, the aspire revo dual core version comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse for 330$ the only thing this asrock has is a larger hd (not much, still a paltry 320) and bluray...
@corduroy point is, there is no $199 Ion nettop.
@htd You are thinking of the single cores, the dual cores are always about $300
Couldn't you be rock'n some Pinetrail powered nettop in 1 to 4 months?
@KAL326
Pinetrail = joke
way overpriced
what a rip-off.
So when does the HD-DVD version come out?
@jabba359 I'm thinking it will come out just about a year ago.
I think Asrock totally just missed their price point. This isn't a bargain any longer, it's a ripoff. Sorry, no sale here (and I was waiting to pounce on this thing).
Wouldnt it be worth it to just wait for ion2 to come out? Isn't it supposed to be in the new year? I was ready to get this thing if the price was good, but not so sure anymore.
This is pretty steep when it doesn't include ANY software. Over the old 330 barebones ($350) the 330HT-BD adds $239 to swap out DVD for Bluray, add 802.11n, IR/remote.
You need to spend another $200 for Win7 Home Premium, and another $100 for software to play back Bluray (PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc.). Total $889.
Looks nice. However, it's not yet possible to play Blu-Ray movies under Linux / FreeBSD, so no sale.
In other ASRock News:
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16703/69/
ASRock releases "new" MiniATX Socket 939/PCI Express 2.0 motherboard for Germany/Austria.
Funny thing is I want one as i'm typing this on a K8 Neo2 Fir w/FX60 which works great for Vista/win7 just would be nice to have PCI-Express and would be perfect as an HTPC lol.
really?? more of this useless junk? Blu-ray Disc is highly overrated... much wider selection of movies on regular DvD why anyone bought blu-ray is beyond me but all i know ... If you got Xbox Live you get Netflix right at your console and you get Netflix on your Computer... oh if you got satellite tv you get movie channels with movies that netflix, blockbuster, hollywoodmovie or any other type of movie store has yet now if you was a smart person with your money you'd go that rout ... yes yes i know that not everyone can afford that so go pay the $5 ticket fee at the movie theater and watch the movie ... and really will you watch that movie so much it will pay for it self? or will it sit there half the time collecting dust cause you got work kid has a concert there's a baseball game on or the super bowl is on... point is waste of money and time of the creators
@CountryBoy37 judging by that post, you really shouldn't worry about movies. What you need is a book, or better a a lot of books and the time to read them.
Maybe then you'd be able to form a few coherent sentences or use at least a few proper punctuation marks other than "...".
@CountryBoy37 "If you got Xbox Live you get Netflix right at your console and you get Netflix on your Computer."
Uh, unless you have broader broadband than 98% of the USA does, you don't have HD. It takes a seriously fat pipe to equal the bitrate of BD.
@CountryBoy37 You haven't used an xbmc, haven't you?
@(Unverified) well... i have a BD player ps3 xbox and regular HD dvd player and to be honest if you know your stuff instead of going to google and typing in a bunch of stuff for your precent witch is wrong btw BD is an epic fail in the movie industry mine sits there collecting dust so does the Ps3 they both are useless and waste of money and ok for those who don't know how to adjust the settings on an HD BD is better but for those of us that are electronically literate we can make the HD picture look twice as good as BD @New L ha ha get off dictionary.com looking up big words and grow up this is a chat room no need in showing off "typing skills" when majority of people use slang if you really was as smart as you are pretending you'd know that
Actually, part of the extra cost seems to come from included RAID capability. feppaspot.com seems to have each of these configurable with dual drives, which seems to account for part of the $100 increase over the old version (along with the remote and wireless).
Geez, you might as well configure an HP Slimline with an Intel Core 2 Quad and you'd probably get it for cheaper than $600 they're offering here.
That remote appears to be identical to the one that came with the LinkSys DMA2200 Media Center Extender. It's not well made at all: the buttons are very small (except the Media Center button) and does not include any sort of backlight/glowing. It's impossible to use in the dark.
Dell Zino HD /w Blu-ray, people. Cheaper. Faster. Sexier.