eMachines ER1402

eMachines ER1402

We’ve seen our share of miniature PCs over the years. They generally get smaller, more power-efficient, and quieter—but they never seem to get faster. Take eMachine’s ER1402 machine, for example. This unique-looking, pedestal-mounted machine is the epitome of the original “nettop” concept: a low-power PC designed almost exclusively to browse the web. And that’s about all you can do with its single-core, low-clock chip. The ER1402 is similar in design to two recent “rigs” we’ve looked at: Polywell’s gorgeous Giada and Dell’s Zino HD. The ER1402 sports an external power brick, HDMI and VGA ports, and an integrated chipset in the form of Nvidia’s GeForce 9200. The CPU is an AMD 1.7GHz Athlon II Neo K125. The bad news is that the Neo K125 is single-core—pretty much an Athlon 64—so expect performance to be on par with, say, a Newcastle Athlon 64 3000+ circa 2004. Yeah, 6-year-old CPU technology. The good news is that the Neo K125 sips but 12 watts and runs amazingly cool. That’s because the K125 isn’t built on 130nm technology, it’s built on AMD’s, err, rather Global Foundries’, latest 45nm process, which makes it very power-efficient.