The nettop form factor is hard for the enthusiast community to swallow. On one hand, we want to love the fact that so much technology can be packed into such a small platform. On the other, it's frustrating to sit in front of a PC with so little performance compared to our full-sized (or even microATX) desktop machines.

Nevertheless, nettops are certainly better now than they were a year ago, thanks largely to the explosive popularity of mobile netbooks and the processing/graphics improvements aimed at that segment. While the earliest Atom processors were a little too anemic for my tastes, the Atom D500-series processors, with their dual-core, Hyper-Threaded resources, have taken nettop performance to a more respectable place. Similarly, Nvidia’s "next-generation" Ion platform pushes graphics performance beyond the basic functionality that a nettop would have had otherwise given Intel's track record in graphics.

Indeed, the nettop is bigger than its original billing lets on. It's able to handle more than just basic Internet browsing and word processing. But how much work can a modern nettop actually handle? How do Intel's Atom D500 processors compare to the comparatively powerful mobile Intel Core i3 CPU? Is the Ion 2 chipset strong enough to enable gaming from such a diminutive machine? Aside from raw benchmark performance, how responsive are today's nettops compared to more powerful desktop PCs?

These are the questions we set out to answer in today's story comparing three up-to-date nettops equipped with dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Atom CPUs and Nvidia's Ion 2 chipset. Our contenders: the Giada Slim-N20, the Jetway Mini-TOP, and the Zotac ZBOX.

Those are the specifications—now let’s look at the hardware.

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