If buying a ready-made nettop doesn’t appeal to you and you have the skills to build your own then your options when it comes to choosing a motherboard have been pretty limited up until now. The Intel Atom was really the one workable choice, with a variety of different types of package available around it, but now a new option is about to appear on the nettop building scene.
This is an important advance, because more and more people are turning to the putting together of their own nettop machines as a simple and cheap way to get a good quality computer with a low energy consumption and silent running.
The new motherboards which we can expect to see on the market soon are going to be built around the recently showcased AMD Fusion APU, and the first model to use this is going to be the Sapphire Pure White Fusion E350M1W, which is going to run off a 1.6 GHz dual core chip and will offer a genuine challenger to the existing boards.
It comes with 16MB Flash ROM, AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports and VGA, HDMI, SPDOF and Bluetooth among its connectivity options. As Sapphire is best known as a graphics firm one of the big benefits to this board is bound to be a high quality graphics output; an area in which it could score heavily against the Atom based models.
The price and release date are to be announced shortly, and ultimately it may be the price which determines the success or otherwise of this product. Most people who build a nettop look to do so on a fairly limited budget, as they are often looking for an additional PC rather than their main one. This means that every expense has to be carefully weighed up.
A nettop which appeared on the market last year and which has been attracting good reviews and customer feedback is the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 model. This increases the company’s nettop range, which also includes the popular Q100 and Q110 machines.
The new computer from Lenovo runs off the ION 2 platform and incorporates a dual core Atom D510 1.66 GHz processor. There is 5.1 channel audio, a 500 GB hard drive, 2GB of memory and Wi-Fi / HDMI / VGA connectivity built in. It probably has all of the connectivity options you could ask for, and the performance and hard drive size are among the best in its class and price range.
The Q150 comes with Windows 7 Home Premium pre loaded and the whole package weighs just 1.67 pounds, which is 0.76 kilos. It is also one of the smallest nettops around, and measures in at 6.75” x 0.80” x 6”.
Once you connect it to a big screen LCD or HDTV you will be able to fully appreciate the good quality performance which it can pump out on videos and photos, while the sound music also makes it entirely suitable for anyone looking for a compact music system which doubles up as a PC.
It comes with a 60 day McAfee antivirus program loaded on it, meaning that you need to pay to extend it or look for a free program pretty quickly, and the Lenovo Rescue and Recovery option lets you switch it back to the factory settings if it becomes infected with a virus or has some other problem which you can’t solve.
The US price is $400, although you can snap up cheaper bargains with a bit of online browsing. Like most of the best nettops, it is a stylish little machine which takes up next to no room and gives you a fairly powerful performance while making no noise and looking good at the same time.
We looked in our last feature at the two top reasons for choosing a nettop (size and price). While those benefits are undoubtedly the main ones for most of us you should be aware of the remaining advantages which are commonly given for choosing this kind of computer over bigger, bulkier alternatives. Here are the remaining 3 from our top 5 list.
3. Power consumption. A standard home computer will consume around 100 watts of power, while a nettop usually comes it around a tenth of that figure, or less. This means that you use less power to do the same things you would do on a bigger, more conventional PC. This will mean a saving on your electricity bill and a small step towards being more environmentally friendly.
4. Style. Small, sleek and slim are the in thing with gadgets these days, and the nettop is up there with best of them in this respect. The eye catching design and smooth lines mean that this machine will definitely attract admiring glances from your visitors. It also means that it can fit in seamlessly in any modern, cutting edge room.
5. Lack of noise. One of the benefits of the lower power consumption we mentioned earlier on is that these machines tend not to need fans to keep them cool. This in turn means that there is little or no noise generated by them.
No matter which of those benefits appeal to you the next step is to take a look through the models which we have reviewed on the site to see if there are any which you particularly like the look of. New models are being released all the time and we will aim to keep you updated with all the best reviews and articles on the latest features which are added to the latest nettops.
