Asus EeeBox EB1501 ION Mini-PC


The Eee system from ASUS is a slick little box, but coming in at $500 without a Blu-ray drive is going to make a lot of people take a closer look at the competition. The gang at SPCR liked it well enough, and it is quiet and cool enough for your HTPC needs.



Most of the clips, except for the WMV-HD video played smoothly using CPU power alone, though with high CPU usage — above 60% in most cases. However, with the GPU assisting, CPU utilization dipped below 30%, and H.264 and Flash playback used slightly less power. Ultimately, GPU acceleration really wasn’t needed to play through most of our video test suite as a dual core Atom at 1.6GHz is powerful enough on its own. However, taking advantage of ION’s decoding capabilities frees CPU resources for other tasks and ION gives you that all important HDMI port, which Atom systems with Intel’s antiquated GMA 950 graphics lack.