AMD Fusion Eee Box 1020 and 1021 appear at webstore

The Eee Box 1020 and 1021 are two nettops from Asus that were introduced during CeBit a couple of months ago. They are the first nettops from Asus to come with AMD Fusion chips, as the company focused until now on machines powered by Intel Atom chips and usually ION graphics.

Obscurely enough, the EB1021 appeared on a rather unkonwn webstore and will cost you around $417, but I wouldn’t say that this is the actual price of the nettop, as we’ll have to see it listed in more places before making an idea about it.

The EB1021 is powered by AMD Fusion E-350, which is the line’s best APU, as it comes with a 1.5 GHZ, dual core processor and HD 6310 graphics. The system also has 2 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard disk drive, a USB 3.0 port and basic internet connectivity: WiFi. Additionally, there are a couple of USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, audio output and card reader.

As all nettops, the 1021 tries to take in as little power as necessary and has a power consumption rate of maximum 27W when fully working, and about 11.2 W in idle mode. Thanks to the HD 6310 graphics, the system can play 1080p content without a problem and if you’ll hook up a BD drive, Blu Ray disks will also play without a glitch.

Still, considering this is a ultra low power device, don’t expect gaming capabilities, a good HTPC is the most you can expect from a machine like this.

The design is similar to those of previous Boxes; what's under the hood it's what matters with these two

The other entry, Eee Box 1020, sports a C-50 dual core 1 GHZ processor and HD 6250 graphics. There’s also 1 GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250 GB hard disk drive and no USB 3.0 port. It’s clear that this is the cheaper of the two and is aimed at the budget conscious user. The C-50 is also HD capable, but probably doesn’t deliver the same type of smooth experience as the E-350, so you might have to settle for 720p playback if everything is to run fine.

For now, we don’t have the price for the 1020, but expect it to be at least 100-120 bucks less than what you should pay for the 1021. As for looks, the two models look identical to other Eee Box entries, so I guess Asus just swapped the internals and left the edgy plastic cover the same, with the WiFi antenna awkwardly emerging from the back of the device.

As usual, there’s no optical drive and the device weighs just a little over 1 KG. For now, it’s all we have about the availability of these two new nettops, but we’ll keep you posted as the device will be listed in other (maybe better known) stores.

Tags: AMD Fusion, Asus EEEBox, powerful nettops

Last updated: March 29, 2012 | Published: May 12th, 2011 | Add the first comment!