Amid the excitement and hype surrounding Nvidia's Ion, it's easy to lose sight of what's actually on offer from the green team's latest silicon. Is it a processor, a system-on-a-chip, or something entirely new and uncategorised?

Nope, nothing so far fetched: it's just an integrated graphics chipset. Admittedly it's quite a clever chipset and one that ï¬lls in some of the Atom's shortfalls to produce a brilliantly focused platform, but it's just a chipset all the same.

This is a chipset pitched against Intel's own 945GC offering – the one that's found itself working alongside the Atom in all those netbooks, as well as a few nettops. It's the weakest link in the Atom speciï¬cation and therefore an easy target for Nvidia to go for.

Even so, Nvidia may be guilty of believing some of its own hype and tripping itself up by promising something it can't deliver on – gaming.

Before we get on to what Ion can't do, it's worth focusing on what it can; indeed, it's the Acer Aspire Revo's reason for existing. If you're looking for a low-powered but capable media centre, then you can stop searching – here's the hardware of your dreams.

This wonderfully styled system will take your 1080p content, throw it out to the screen of your choice and barely make a noise as it does so. It'll happily handle 7.1 audio, 1080p content and even make you a cup of tea while you enjoy the ï¬lm. Okay, we lied about the tea, but you get the idea.

You're looking at less than 20 per cent CPU usage for the ï¬lm bit, so you could theoretically do something more productive with the spare cycles.

Media mogul

Ion isn't just about video playback either, thanks to the modern wonder that is GP-GPU, this tiny box can turn its hand to other tricks too. Nvidia's been tub-thumping about CUDA for a long time, but it actually makes sense when it transforms a fairly lowly graphics engine into one that's capable of cleaning up your old videos, re-encoding them on the fly and, of course, decoding them to your screen as well. It's the best media player in the world then? Not quite…

There are a few things that hold Ion – and this rendition in particular – back from being leader of the pack, not all of which can be laid at Nvidia's door. One of the more annoying points is the inclusion of Windows Vista Premium.

This choice of OS forces the 2GB of RAM to its knees, calling on the system swapï¬le (on a slow 5,400rpm hard drive) far more than anyone would be comfortable with. It takes a good two minutes and 34 seconds just to get into Windows too – hardly a positive consumer experience. This has left us eyeing up the Linux rendition of the machine (even with its paltry 8GB SSD) with far more interest – it's only £150 for that model at the moment as well.

The Atom seems mismatched with the power on offer too – especially this single-core rendition. A dual-core chip would offer better system response, while a Core 2 Duo would shift things forward (albeit it at the expense of power consumption). Dropping to XP would be wise too, although this would mean Nvidia would be unable to show off the DX10 prowess of the Ion's graphics core – not that it's anything to crow about.