If you were curious as to which manufacturer would begin utilizing those fancy Core i7 chips first, we highly doubt Niveus Media came to mind. Granted, it isn't first to the punch per se, but Intel's latest will help power some of the 2009 line of media servers. The passively cooled Rainier, Denali Limited Edition (rear pictured after the break) and the rack-mountable Pro Series have all been upgraded with niceties like HDMI 1.3 and Seagate's Pipeline HD hard drives. You'll also find the G45 Express chipset, SSDs and support for eight CableCARDs scattered about, though pricing won't be disclosed until we get closer to the Q4 release date. More specifications are listed after the jump.

It's been a busy week for CableCARD HTPCs. First we caught the Dell XPS 410 preview prior to spotting an unofficial announcement in the AVS Forum that Velocity Micro would be shipping their CableCARD HTPC this week. Now we struck gold (we think) with the first official CableCard-ready Vista HTPCs now shipping from Niveus. As of today, both the Niveus Summit Series ($3,199 Rainier and $7,999 Denali) and Pro Series ($7,999 n7 and $15,999 n9) ship with HD DVD options and hot-blooded HD CableCARD-support. Keyword: "support," meaning you still have to spring an additional $1,499 to get the separate Digital Cable Receiver box with 2x CableCARD receivers like we saw at CES. You'll also have to track down a local dealer to bring home the Pro or Denali models but at least the Rainier is available online and shipping in 2-3 weeks. As always with CableCARD, there's still a piece that's unclear: the CableCARD receiver still shows a "mid-March" ship date. Pffff.

[Via Chris Lanier's Blog]

Read -- Niveus Rainier
Read -- Niveus Digital Cable Receiver

Niveus has just announced its latest media centers, dubbed the Rainier and Denali Editions, the two products that comprise the 2007 Summit Series line at this year's CEDIA, being held in Denver. The just-over 4-inch tall Rainier ($3,500), runs Windows Media Center 2005, and is loaded up with HDMI, WiFi, an SD/MMC reader, IEEE 1394, dual USB ports, VGA, composite and S-Video in, eight-channel analog audio out, S/PDIF, and of course, Ethernet. Further, it boasts up to three television tuners (two NTSC and one ATSC), 750GB of storage, 2GB of RAM, and an ATI X1600 Pro graphics card. If that wasn't enough to whet your appetite, the 8-inch tall Denali ($7,000) is even more loaded, with an Intel Core 2 Duo (no word on what speed yet), four television tuners (a pair of NTSCs and ATSCs), NVIDIA's GeForce Series 7 graphics card, a full terabyte of storage, a whopping 4GB of RAM, and even has, as we previously reported, built-in support for CableCARDs. Expect both editions to ship on September 30, but while you wait we've got more pics of the Rainier and the Denali Editions on the other side.