The Acer Hornet nettop has the potential to be an extremely impressive HTPC. The “Hornet” from Acer is a new nettop, based on the powerful Nvidia Ion platform, bringing 1080p video playback over HDMI.
The Acer Hornet is which is said to be launching in China on April 8th for less than $299. Nvidia have reported that their Ion platform is powerful enough to easily run Windows 7 and Vista Home Premium (with Media Center).
It looks like the Acer Hornet Nvidia Ion nettop will be available in three versions, “Standard”, “Deluxe” and “Media Center”. The standard Hornet features an Intel Atom N230 CPU with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and an 80GB HDD, and comes with Vista Home Basic. The other higher models features 2GB of RAM, and a larger 160GB HDD, and Vista Home Premium and a “Boxshell” quickboot operating system.
I have personally been looking for a powerful (graphics wise) nettop, to use as a HTPC / media center, and have been very interested in the Asus Eee Box B208, but now I have seen the Acer Hornet with the Ion platform (GeForce 9400M graphics), I think I might wait for it.
The Media Center version of the Acer Hornet comes with a remote control, which looks very similar to a Wii controller. The Hornet is extremely quiet, can easily handle 1080p decoding and playback, features HDMI output, is extremely quiet (less than 26dB), and can be Vese mounted to the back of your HDTV / monitor!
Update: Acer have officially announced this nettop as the Acer AspireRevo !
Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:05 am
Acer