Asus has announced the latest in their EEEBox line of nettops. The new EEEBox 1501 is based on the nVidia Ion platform. While details are still sketchy, some pictures were revealed at a press conference in Munich.

The nettop packs a dual core Atom N330 processor and upto 4GB of DDR2 RAM coupled with nVidia Ion chipset. Storage is in the form of a 250 GB hard drive. One of the biggies being touted by Asus is the 1080p High Definition output capability via HDMI. Connectivity is available in the form of Gigabit Ethernet and the 802.11n wireless. 802.11n is the new wifi system standardised by IEEE recently which offers speeds of upto 300Mbps.

The build quality looks pretty good from the first looks and it has appealing styles. If you are looking for a replacement desktop that has a small footprint and won’t burn a whole in your pocket, this may be the right thing for you. The inclusion of a DVD-RW optical drive and Windows 7 operating system makes it a viable option for home users.Other details include a microSD card reader, an eSata connection, four USB ports and 5.1 audio via S/PDIF.

The EeeBox 1501 with Atom processor but one is more advanced than the classics. Specifically, the N330 dual core, which is a good complement to the Nvidia graphics platform Ion and HDMI output. The standard RAM is 2 GB.The media item we will be able to manage with the Asus Total Media Center, which promises better user experience and compatibility with multiple formats. It also comes with the role SimHD that rescale DVD or SD content to HD.The hard disk is 250 GB, which forces us to be aware of passing video content mainly to an external hard drive, then we will not be able to put in there our whole media collection. Another option is to use the DVD recorder unit that is included, allowing us to use this Asus EeeBox 1501 as DVD player.

EB1501 is powered by Intel duo core Atom 330 processor running at 1.6GHz. Further coupled with Nvidia famous Ion solution with GeForce 9400M graphics core, it provides necessary horse power required for full HD (High Definition) hardware video decoding that being criticized not to be able to be handled well by Intel own legacy 945GSE chipset. Other hardware specifications include a 2GB memory RAM, a 250GB SATA based hard disk drive, Gigabit Ethernet controller, eSATA port, 802.11n wireless technology as well as a slot loading DVD player for nettop market.

The quality of the videos played on this machine is far better because of the Total Media Center which is able to support multiple media formats as well as codec file formats. Plus with the SimHD the video pictures have become much sharper and allows you to scale up your DVD/SD movies from 720 x 576 pixels to view them in HD quality so they can be increased up to 1280 x 720 pixels or higher.This is the perfect Nettop to use for part of a home theatre system as each of the Asus EeeBox EB1501’s come with output ports for HDMI and S/PDIF. So allowing for full HD 1080pixels and allowing for 5.1 surround sound as well.