Acer announced  a new version of their Atom-based nettop, addressing one of the key issues we had with the first-gen AspireRevo but then scuppering it in another way.  The Acer Veriton N260G switches the original AspireRevo’s mediocre 1.6GHz Atom 230 or 330 processor for a far more welcome 1.66GHz Atom N280, but simultaneously drops the NVIDIA Ion GPU we so admired.

Otherwise much is the same: there’s still a VESA mount for hitching the Veriton N260G to the back of your flat-panel display, plus both VGA and HDMI outputs, six USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, audio in/out and PS/2.  You also get a memory card reader, while storage is 160GB and RAM 2GB.

Instead of the NVIDIA Ion, though, you get Intel’s GN40 chipset with GMA X4500 graphics.  The Acer Veriton N260G nettop is already broadly available in the UK and Europe.

Two new ASUS Eee Box nettops are in the works, according to listings on the Energy Star website.  The ASUS Eee Box EB1002 and Eee Box EB1006 both use Intel’s Atom 1.66GHz processor, with the former having integrated graphics and the latter an unspecified discrete video card with 128MB of memory. Other specs include 2GB of RAM in both nettops, plus the EB1002 is listed as using a 250GB hard-drive.  No drive details are given for the EB1006.  As you might expect, there’s a fair amount of power information given for each Eee Box, with the EB1002 using between 1.320 and 1.416W in sleep mode and between 0.971 and 1.062W in standby mode. The EB1006 sees those figures climb to between 2.029 and 2.130W in sleep and 1.752 to 1.861W in standby.

The ASUS Eee Box EB1002 was listed in the market on May 11th, while the ASUS Eee Box EB1006  on May 25th.

The Shuttle XS29F pairs the Nano U1700 CPU with VIA’s VX800 media system processor, meaning that unlike many nettops the XS29F has both VGA and DVI Dual video outputs.The VX800 also brings with it the VIA Chromotion video engine, with support for MPEG-4, WMV9 and VC1 hardware acceleration, together with Chrome9 HC3 integrated graphics with full DirectX 9.0 compatibility. Alongside the video outputs there are ethernet, HD audio, PS/2 and four USB 2.0 ports.Shuttle are positioning the fanless XS29F as ideal for replacing bulky, noisy and power-greedy desktop PCs in homes and offices.  It can be customized with a number of SATA-II drives and up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM.