MSI Wind Top AE1900
Touchscreen all-in-one PC
Review All-in-one PCs have been around for ages and it’s not hard to understand their appeal. They feature the wire-free tidiness of a laptop, combined with the big screen of a desktop PC. The concept sustains many admirers, with Apple’s iMac range doing very well indeed with just such a form factor.
MSI's Wind Top AE1900: touchscreen computing on Windows XP
Getting in on the act is MSI’s Wind Top AE1900. Appearing as a rather stylish widescreen monitor, the whole unit is set into a clear plastic surround, which forms a pair of feet at the front and at the top is a small silver 1.3Mp webcam.
A standard set of monitor control buttons fall easily beneath the fingers of your right hand, and it’s not until you look at the left hand side or rear of the unit that it gives away its true computer credentials at all. Tucked away to the left is a pair of USB ports, a card reader and a vertically mounted DVD Super Multi format drive.
The back panel houses another pair of USB ports, analogue audio I/O jacks and a socket for the external power supply unit. In the middle is a single clear, plastic stand finished with attractive silver-coloured, although plastic, detail.
The AE1900 combines the low-cost, and rather low-spec, hardware of a netbook with an 18.5in 1366 x 768 pixel, 16:9 format touchscreen display. Inside, the system is powered by an Intel Atom 230, 1.6GHz processor with 512KB of L2 cache and a 533MHz frontside bus. This is the desktop version of the N270 commonly found in netboooks. It runs at the same clock speed and delivers approximately the same level of performance.
Casing design akin to Apple's old Cinema Display
The integrated Intel GMA950 GPU provides a less-than-speedy graphics subsystem, which is fine, as long as you’re not hoping to play 3D games. Audio is provided by a pair of built-in stereo speakers that are entirely concealed from view. This unit features a modest 160GB hard drive, 1GB of DDR2 memory and rather more impressive Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi.
COMMENTS
Enough already
For the love of all that is holy can we give up on these Atom products with their crappy intel chipsets?
Give me Atom + ion or something with an ARM processor and enough gfx performance to render properly on a FullHD.
If I could buy a wall mountable PC with 40+ inch screen, inbuilt tuner and enough grunt to do full HD then I might get interested.
These sad little "almost good enough" products are really starting to get annoying.
Tired design
So someone found an Apple Cinema Display circa 2001 and thought "that's cool, that is" and stuck a PC on the back!
I hear a major new feature of Windows 7 is that it doesn't launch multiple copies of applications. (sarcasm).
The gap is getting wider.
@Anonymous Coward 13:37 GMT
"The GMA-500 does not support Atom"
Look at the specs of:
Sony's VAIO P series,
Fujitsu's Lifebook U820,
ASUStek's Eee PC 1101HA,
Dell's Inspiron Mini 10 and Inspiron Mini 12,
Acer's Aspire One 751,[25] ,
ASUStek's EeePC T91 tablet
...For examples of an Atom paired with GMA 500
"GMA 950 consumes about 22w"
I hope it doesn't, i don't have the specs to hand but that doesn't sound right at all, can anyone verify?
what use is idle power ! ,fully loaded and productive tested metrics are whats needed
"But the amazing thing is that the idle power draw of the HD 5870 has been reduced to a mere 27W."
whats the point of stressing "idle power draw" if its running idle its not working for you and so not werth turning on in the forst place....
the only No's that matter is fully loaded WORKING device power draw, and if it not got a 330 in there its not werth the money.....
now if you were talking about a confirmed ARM NEON equiped Cortex- A8 or 2GHz Capable A9 dual cpu dual-NEON peak performance of 4000 DMIPS while consuming less than 250mW per CPU then we might be getting somewere as regards smooth High Profile@Level4.1 720P/1080P
http://www.arm.com/news/25922.html
as a more general baseline on a full real devs/consumer PCB, and evolving Firmware/SW
(remember "Efika" and 'Efika MX' Are two totally seperate PCB, one a PPC G3 ,discontinued, one the arm i.MX515 )
Matt Sealey,Developer Relations,Product Development Analyst
for Genesi said of their 'Efika MX' Open Client, Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8/NEON 800MHz) board
"BTW Open Client power consumption running Citrix is 5W maximum, tested using a Kill-A-Watt.
I've not been able to try out any video decoding yet, and again this is before any advanced power management has been enabled."
"the chip is running at top speed and the backlight is turned on full.. You can expect some very decent power savings across the board once the software is more mature."
"for instance Peter Czanik (czp) Jul 13, 2009 said
"I just measured the power consumption of my iMX515 based EFIKA system - display device is included. It also has 4x more RAM and 2x the MHz of the original EFIKA, but no HDD, just a larger SD card. Power consumption is 9W with the bundled LCD turned on. A 2.5" USB HDD add one more Watt and an USB Ethernet adapter another one. When the LCD turns off, it spares 2-3W.
"
"
fully loaded and doing something actually useful is a lot better than any idle power metric, so stop using that or at least include a basic fully loaded metric to compare against please paul.... even if its only an initial test to get the feel using the tested unit using a genric Kill-A-Watt ...
Can I be a designer...
..Why not add a wireless mouse and keyboard and attach a simply mount so that they (at least the keyboard) can be put out of the way when not in the use.
