I hope ASUS gets their act together with the cooling system for the Eee Box. According to Anandtech, it's relatively noisy. ....Although for $270 I'm sure there are many people willing to tear it apart and slap some NB heatsinks on it to run passive....Me...for instance...

Eee failage.. Funny to understand in all of a sudden that those things aren't small OR crazy cheap anymore

Well, concerning cheap side, MSI just announced Wind pricing and linux version will run at $400 while XP version will be $500. Noticeably less than EEE PC while having similar or better specs. Good bye Asus...

Sorry to highjack the thread, but MikeC, could you have a look into the Silverstone Raven RV01 case. It has I/O "back"plate at the top and utilises bottom to top airflow.

$500 is too much. Compared to the original Eee its positively expensive!

Yeah, but the original eee's 7" screen made it virtually useless to me. Scrolling up/down (in documents, web pages) is pretty much mandatory, but the amount of vertical AND lateral scrolling needed with a 7" 800 x 480 screen is simply unacceptable to me. I'd rather not have a laptop at all than to deal with that, and I'd happily pay double the money for a 10" 1024 x 600 screen. That screen size and the bigger keyboard make the MSI wind and Asus 10" eee viable alternative to 12" business mobile laptops, which I've been considering for working on the road (html, web surf, email, image editing).

I have always been interested in low power, small and portable machines. I have been keeping my eye on the eee pc craze. I still feel with its new 10" screen its more of a play toy/ learning tool than a road workhorse.

If I were you MikeC, I would just get a business UMPC. I have a Dell Latitude X1 from 2 years ago. It has a 12" screen (1280x768) and is lighter than the eee pc. Fanless. Only plus the eee pc has over it is the SSD.

CPU Performance should be around the same. By the time the eee pc reaches 12", the price between a business umpc and the eee pc would be similiar.

Why can't someone make this?
Antec Minuet Case w/80+ power supply
G45 mini-itx MB
E2140 CPU
802.11n
2GB PC6400 memory
SuSE/Ubuntu/etc
1 80mm case PWM fan for exhaust
LP passive heatsink

With manufacturer "juice", they should be able to make it smaller and more cheaply than msmr_average_consumer. They should be able sell it for what it costs me (US$325 retail) and still make a healthy 5% off it after Cost of Goods Sold, Selling Expenses, and Overhead.

The folks in Taipei just don't seem to get it, or they've decided they could make more money by pushing crap out the door for the time being. Maybe ASUSTek and others have grown so fast and fat that they've developed corporate gout.

Whatever the reason is, does anyone else see a "long tail" business opportunity here?

This is extremely confusing to me. If it doesn't replace the video card, what DOES the Splendid HD video processor do? Are they just trying to explain that this isn't a GPU, but that it DOES output HD audio and HD video over a single HDMI cable?

Definitely need more info on this thing.

a note on the Asus Xonar, it's not a dual HDMI output, but an input and an output, HDMI loop from the main VGA

That sounds more logical. My guess is you'll need a videocard that has an HDCP compliant HDMI output, which you'll plug into the HDMI input on the Xonar. In turn, the Xonar will add the HD audio to the HDMI stream and output it over it's own HDMI output.

That thing better come with a custom HDMI cable for between the videocard and the Xonar. I sure as hell don't want to buy or even use a 3 foot cable to go all of 3 inches!