Jetway MiniTOP review JBC600C99-52W - Introduction

Over the past years we've seen a lot of things altered but most of all, in the PC industry. Where a PC 5 years ago was predominantly either a work or gaming rig, these days it has become more of a multi-media piece of hardware. We work on it, play games on it, listen to music on it, watch photos and movies on it. And especially with that last segment in mind, we noticed the PC making a move into the living room.

A couple of years ago when the PC entered that living room we all started a new trend ... building HTPCs, PCs designed for media playback of music and movies. However having a full blown, and often noisy, PC in the living room distracts and annoys a lot of people. To address that trend in the last year or so we have seen the HTPCs getting smaller and smaller and more silent. Especially with a lot of development in the GPU video processing segment and micro processors segments a nice and spicy HTPC these days can be very small.

Pretty much what most people want these days is something compact and fairly noiseless that accelerates and post processes high definition movies and music, preferably the content is streamed over a network. And that's where we land at net-tops and mini-tops. Now, when it comes to the ladies, I've always really liked mini-tops ... but does that work the same way with hardware ?

Jetway has jumped on that market with their new and quite funky looking Mini-TOP. In its bare essence this is pretty much a tiny PC that is armed with an Atom D525 Processor clocked at 1.80GHz and then combined with NVIDIA's ION2 GPU / chipset implementation to make the most out of a typically very limited environment.

And with successfully, the processor is dual-core AND hyper-threading to four threads, the GPU implementation is fast enough to decode and accelerate 1080P video content, it comes with connectivity we see everything you need included, like HDMI with audio pass through, Gigabit Ethernet, wireless 802.11n WiFi and so on.

A very fun and interesting product alright. Let's have a peek first, and then head on onwards to the next page ...