Eee Box to ship in September

Having already used the 'Eee PC' name for its successful and rapidly expanding range of mini- (and increasingly not-so-mini — see the latest 1000 model) notebooks, ASUS must have scratched its collective head when seeking a name for its Eee-branded mini-desktop. It came up with the catchy 'Eee Box', and it'll be available in the UK for £199 from September.



This little 1kg system can be desk-mounted on a stand, or VESA-mounted to the back of a flat-panel monitor. It's powered by Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, comes with 1GB of RAM and has an 80GB hard disk. Connectivity includes Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi, and the system is powered via an external 65W AC adapter.

ASUS is proud of its Express Gate firmware, which (it says) enables a 'super-speedy' 8-sceond boot time to 'Internet ready' status. We look forward to investigating this — Windows XP will be available first, with Linux to follow. Other claims we'll be looking at are power consumption (reduced by '90 per cent when compared to full-sized conventional desktops') and noise ('50 per cent of the noise levels of the average desktop').

Watch this (compact) space.