Asus EeeBox EB1501 ION Mini-PC

Most of the clips, except for the WMV-HD video played smoothly using CPU power alone, though with high CPU usage — above 60% in most cases. However, with the GPU assisting, CPU utilization dipped below 30%, and H.264 and Flash playback used slightly less power. Ultimately, GPU acceleration really wasn’t needed to play through most of our video test suite as a dual core Atom at 1.6GHz is powerful enough on its own. However, taking advantage of ION’s decoding capabilities frees CPU resources for other tasks and ION gives you that all important HDMI port, which Atom systems with Intel’s antiquated GMA 950 graphics lack.