Look For The Best

If you are going the way of Small and Power saving design... be wary of what you are buying and look for the best.

I am very pleased with the performance of the Intel Atom Processors as found in my Asus eeepc.

Fortunately, with my knowledge of computers, however, I know what to look for to get the best "bang for my buck".

The Intel Atom D2700 (known as Cedarview) which has a clock speed of 2.13GHz has been up until now, my favourite of the Atom family of Processors.

Combined with the Next Generation of NVidia Ion graphics... you couldn't go wrong for a rock-solid performing PC for general and HTPC use. It was far superior to its Intel based graphics cousin... in fact, I wouldn't recommend any Intel based graphics units for any use, I simply have had absolutely NO-LUCK with any of the Intel Graphics available to date.

Unfortunately, good things never last! Intel has dropped the D2700 and has remained with the D2500 series which are fine... but for myself (harkening back to the days of the Pentium 4 Cedarmill) I simply have a fondness to the D2700.

A dual-core with Hyper-Threading (effectively a 4-core processor) coupled with the Ion graphics makes for a rippin little power-saver equally at home for every day use or to power a home entertainment system delivering full 1080p video to your flat screen.

This delivers good performance running Windows 7... but even better running Ubuntu. I am currently running Ubuntu 12.04 on mine along with XBMC it makes a kicka** system that excels at everything you throw at it. 

Anyone looking for a budget build that can handle the demands of every-day use as well as the demand for 1080p streaming... this is your diamond if you can find one.