MSI Wind Top AE1900

Price

Good - sure, it's not powerful, but it's a cheap for what it is.

I still have a few issues with the durablity of MSI (others may have a different view), but still it looks a decent package for a second PC in the kitchen.

meh.

netbook spec for slightly higher than netbook pricing.

45W seems a bit steep as well, hopefully 35W of that is in the monitor.

Finally the GMA-950 seems like an odd choice. Why not put in the GMA-500 which can do codec stuff in hardware so at the very least a user can watch HD content without it stuttering? It's not like you have to worry about battery life.

Touch screen is nice i suppose, looks decent enough as well.

IMO not worth the 80% score

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit?

The 64 Bit versions of Windows 7 have a ram requirement of 2GB, the 32 bit version would have given better performance and could well have eleminated the performance difficiuties you refer to. The main benefit of 64 bit windows is support for over 4 gigs of Ram, which as this system only has 1 isn't really a concern.

For the record I'm not doing down Windows 7, I run the 64 bit version on my PC and think it's a great OS.

Not on a big screen

The Atom chip set is fine on netbook resolution screens, but couple them up to a TV size display and they really struggle. 1388x768 is just about liveable, but 1920x1080 is painful.

Can I be a designer...

..Why not add a wireless mouse and keyboard and attach a simply mount so that they (at least the keyboard) can be put out of the way when not in the use.

Talk to Intel

@spencer: the desktop GMA 950 consumes about 22w, so the power consumption seems pretty good considering. The GMA-500 does not support Atom, so that's why not (in fact your choices are basically limited to 945G variants or Ion).

@druck; RE: Not on a big screen

What netbook do you have? It would appear to be a very shonky one if 1388x768 is just about liveable and 1920x1080 is painful!

My NC10 will quite happily do DualView with 1024x600 on its own screen and 1920x1080 on an external screen... while playing 1080p video! Add "/watch?v=h42cm6gI25k" after "YouTube.com" to watch a video of my NC10 doing exactly that.

@Anonymous Coward 13:37 GMT

"The GMA-500 does not support Atom"

Look at the specs of:

Sony's VAIO P series,

Fujitsu's Lifebook U820,

ASUStek's Eee PC 1101HA,

Dell's Inspiron Mini 10 and Inspiron Mini 12,

Acer's Aspire One 751,[25] ,

ASUStek's EeePC T91 tablet

...For examples of an Atom paired with GMA 500

"GMA 950 consumes about 22w"

I hope it doesn't, i don't have the specs to hand but that doesn't sound right at all, can anyone verify?

what use is idle power ! ,fully loaded and productive tested metrics are whats needed

"But the amazing thing is that the idle power draw of the HD 5870 has been reduced to a mere 27W."

whats the point of stressing "idle power draw" if its running idle its not working for you and so not werth turning on in the forst place....

the only No's that matter is fully loaded WORKING device power draw, and if it not got a 330 in there its not werth the money.....

now if you were talking about a confirmed ARM NEON equiped Cortex- A8 or 2GHz Capable A9 dual cpu dual-NEON peak performance of 4000 DMIPS while consuming less than 250mW per CPU then we might be getting somewere as regards smooth High Profile@Level4.1 720P/1080P

http://www.arm.com/news/25922.html

as a more general baseline on a full real devs/consumer PCB, and evolving Firmware/SW

(remember "Efika" and 'Efika MX' Are two totally seperate PCB, one a PPC G3 ,discontinued, one the arm i.MX515 )

Matt Sealey,Developer Relations,Product Development Analyst

for Genesi said of their 'Efika MX' Open Client, Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8/NEON 800MHz) board

"BTW Open Client power consumption running Citrix is 5W maximum, tested using a Kill-A-Watt.

I've not been able to try out any video decoding yet, and again this is before any advanced power management has been enabled."

"the chip is running at top speed and the backlight is turned on full.. You can expect some very decent power savings across the board once the software is more mature."

"for instance Peter Czanik (czp) Jul 13, 2009 said

"I just measured the power consumption of my iMX515 based EFIKA system - display device is included. It also has 4x more RAM and 2x the MHz of the original EFIKA, but no HDD, just a larger SD card. Power consumption is 9W with the bundled LCD turned on. A 2.5" USB HDD add one more Watt and an USB Ethernet adapter another one. When the LCD turns off, it spares 2-3W.

"

"

fully loaded and doing something actually useful is a lot better than any idle power metric, so stop using that or at least include a basic fully loaded metric to compare against please paul.... even if its only an initial test to get the feel using the tested unit using a genric Kill-A-Watt ...

Enough already

For the love of all that is holy can we give up on these Atom products with their crappy intel chipsets?

Give me Atom + ion or something with an ARM processor and enough gfx performance to render properly on a FullHD.

If I could buy a wall mountable PC with 40+ inch screen, inbuilt tuner and enough grunt to do full HD then I might get interested.

These sad little "almost good enough" products are really starting to get annoying.

Tired design

So someone found an Apple Cinema Display circa 2001 and thought "that's cool, that is" and stuck a PC on the back!

I hear a major new feature of Windows 7 is that it doesn't launch multiple copies of applications. (sarcasm).

The gap is getting wider.