Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

This all-in-one is backed up by the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, delivering in terms of video output. Another point is HDMI port located along the spine of the nettop. Wireless keyboard and mouse.

Thumbs Down:

The nettop delivered really bad performance. Online support was very tough to navigate, and took us too much time. Cheaper and more efficient desktops are in the market. The need for these expensive, low performance gadgets is mind baffling.

Inside The Trunk:

The Intel Atom 330 is a 1.66 GHz is mounted on a NVIDIA Ion chipset and fired up by the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, the same graphics card that is mounted in the latest MacBook. The nettop has 2GHz of DDR3 RAM. The system has 320 GB hard drive. The Eee Top comes with wireless keyboard and mouse in the package, which is a nice inclusion. You have the benefit of the HDMI, which you can use to plug-in the camcorders and digital cameras. You can use your screen to view any data on the devices. The system also has a standard DVD burner. Good audio speakers are enough for a small room or your den.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

The nettop generation is somewhat bothering me about the decline of demand for performance. People are reluctantly welcoming the all-in-ones. But that being said, these systems seriously need a lease of life and a good performance boost. That’s exactly what NVIDIA tried doing with the Eee Top ET2002. While it managed to cheat some performance out of the snail-pace Intel Atom 330, it has not managed to impress many. The Eee Top barely crawls through most of the applications and programs. In comparison to the Gateway SX 2800-01 is 5-6 times faster than the Eee top, in spite of being $50 cheaper. While the gateway embraces the Quad, the Eee Top sticks around the Atom. I feel that there is lot of work to be done on nettops before people are serious about buying them. The simple desktop in the same price range as the Eee Top performs much better. I would suggest you to hold back, and try watching the market for some time before you seriously decide to go in for a nettop.

Razzle Dazzle:

The small size is impressive, although along with the small size come serious performance issues. The system comes with a variety of ports, one of them being the HDMI port. You could use this to view videos directly from your camcorders. The All-in-one system lives up to its nomenclature but fails to excel in any one particular area. The system takes excruciatingly long time to execute some applications. The Eee comes bundled with a wireless keyboard and mouse. This is attractive, since none of the sub $900 nettops are offering the wireless set and the HDMI port. The Eee Top takes around 15 minutes to convert a CD worth batch of MP3s. That is slow by any calculation and if you can live with this kind of snail-pace processing, you could consider buying the Eee Top. The Eee Top is priced over the top, and low on performance. You could consider a slim tower like the Gateway with a standalone LCD, instead of being stuck with the nettops. The Gateway will hardly require any space for accommodation.

The gaming prowess of the Eee Top was strictly mundane. There was no edge even after using the NVIDIA chip. The games that we tested did not even display average graphics at default settings. We tried toning the settings down, but that did not help at all. There are no corners where the Eee Top feels competitive, and it needs a lot more work under the hood before showing up on the streets. There are no volume control buttons and is frustrating to be controlling it from the system settings. The Eee Top has a bunch of USB ports, a card reader and a headset and mic port duo apart from the Ethernet port. There are no FireWire, eSATA and digital audio outputs and all these factors are largely disappointing.

Inside Dope:

The system runs on a Windows Vista Premium Home edition, even after the Windows & has been introduced into the market. There are no major technological highlights in this system; rather it is a slow, outpaced system that needs a revival other than the inclusion of just the dedicated graphics card that NVIDIA provided. The 20 inch TFT screen would’ve been attractive had it had a touchscreen. The system has not played on its strengths as a small compact nettop, thus it is lagging behind the competition and hasn’t been able to create any waves in the market.

Nitty Gritty:

The Eee Top Et2002 is a donkey in a horse derby. It is seriously lagging behind by a mile. Asus may have to change the strategies if it has to ensure that its range of Eee Tops and eee Pc systems enjoy a certain rate of success. As of now, there is sadly nothing to recommend about this system, rather I would give a word of advice. Wait; watch till Asus irons out the creases before jumping on the bandwagon of Nettop users.

And that’s definitely not where the list ends. This one has an Nvidia GeForce GTS 240 Graphics Card and this coupled with the Core i7, it’s surely something worth placing your bets on. This brings along with it a spectacular gaming experience with 3D graphics. According to the makers, the curves that this one offers haven’t been put up there just for the heck of it. Apparently everything out there on display has been built for convenience and endurance. With all these features it already has many gamers going gaga over it.

This one could be yours for £799 without the monitor and if you want the whole assembled version it could cost you around £1,029.

Thumbs up: Good graphics, killer looks, pocket friendly rates, optical drive support.

Thumbs down: Low speaker volume, keyboard has some flex, mushy touchpad.

Inside the trunk:
CPU : 2.1-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6500

RAM Included : 4GB

RAM Upgradable : 4GB

Hard Drive Size : 320GB

Hard Drive Speed : 5,400rpm

Native Resolution : 1366×768

Graphics Card : Nvidia GeForce G102M

Video Memory : 512MB

Wi-Fi : 802.11a/b/g/n

Operating System: MS Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit)

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Comes loaded with an attractive design, a two year warranty and good graphics at rock bottom prices which makes it a compelling choice for the students. Anyways moving ahead with the review…

Razzle-dazzle: This one surely screams ‘style icon’ at the top of its voice. Its like born to be a headturner. Anyways all those superfluous adjectives aside, this one has got an eye catching lid with finespun blue dots arranged in a grid like pattern all over it. This pattern continues till the base of the system after lifting the lid. This one also like most of the other laptops is a fingerprint magnet and would frequently need some quick wipes. This 14-inch laptop weighs a modest 5.2 pounds and is a bit heavy if we compare it to the rest of the lightweight netbooks.

The keys on the keyboard have some amount of flex, though they have been placed quite spaciously and the palm rest is also pretty much roomy. Typing this  review on the K40 was a simple non daunting task. The touchpad was kind of mushy not offering much feedback but the texture over the touchpad let me move the cursor swiftly over the screen.

This 14-inch display has a resolution of  (1366 x 768) pixels and watching Dark Knight on it was quite a pleasure. The visuals were pretty much bright accentuating the dark scenes. This one kind of kicks back the reflections offering very less viewing angles.

On the right side it houses 2 USB ports, Ethernet, VGA and headphone jacks and on the left side there are two additional USB ports 8X DVD±RW drive. On the back it has two Kensington lock slots and on the front it has 2-in-1 memory card reader.

Inside dope: The audio quality was pretty decent enough displaying comfortable amounts of highs and lows and the audio had a very deep feeling to it. Although I guess the speakers could benefit if they had a higher maximum volume range.

The inbuilt 1.3 megapixel webcam offers some good visuals and video qualities. Using it while chatting with friends, they said that the visuals were pretty much clear but they complained about some slight motion distortion when we moved. The videos and the images can be edited and enhanced by using the LifeFrame software.

Thanks to its 2.1-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 CPU this one performed quite decently in our overall system performance test. It loaded Windows and the other menus within no seconds but it took some time to for the media player menus to open. ‘zombie’ by Cranberries almost took like 9.1 secs to load fully.

The 5,400-rpm, 320GB hard drive managed to duplicate a 4.7 GB media folder at a rate of almost 19.1 MBps. It took like 1 min and 2 secs for the windows vista version to get fully booted which a bit above the category average.

The Nvidia GeForce G102M GPU offered pretty much decent graphics well above the category average and offered a decent frame rate while playing a game of  “Raven squad”. Also there were almost no hiccups while playing a clip of  Guitar heroes. A high definition video of  an episode of the 70’s show played through without any intermediate stuttering. In all to sum it all up… the graphics offered by this one are much decent enough and offer some good gaming experience.

Coming to the battery life… I must say that it is pretty much disappointing. It lasted for around 3 hours and 51 minutes which is quite a bit less than the normal category average. Also it took around 2 hours and 10 minutes to fully recharge the battery of the K40 during which it consumed around 46.2 watts.

This one has a sibling to offer to which is the K40IJ with almost the same configurations except for the 250 GB of storage and an integrated GL40 graphics chip and is being offered for $699.

Nitty-Gritty: There are quite a few 14-inch laptops in the same range being offered at the same price but if your looking forward to an enhanced grphics experience then this could be your pick. Also not many in the same range offer an optical drive. So if an optical drive and graphics are what your looking out for then the K40 is the one for you.