The HP Mini 311 is an 11.6″ Atom powered netbook an Integrated NVIDIA ION LE chipset, aka a GeForce 9400M without DX10.  Along with the usual input and output ports there is also an HDMI port and HP offers an external USB Blu-ray/DVDR combo drive for only an extra $130 to take advantage of the video capabilities of the ION LE chipset.  If you pick up the new Flash 10.1.51.45, HD flash video plays without dropping frames.  Drop by AnandTech to see if this netbook measures up to the competition, or is just an interesting alternative.

“NVIDIA’s ION attempts to mix things up in the netbook market by introducing much faster integrated graphics. ION is essentially GeForce 9400M for Intel Atom processors. In the case of the HP Mini 311 we received, it uses ION LE, the difference being that the LE version doesn’t support DirectX 10. While gaming is now more feasible than other netbooks using GMA 950 graphics, the Intel Atom processor is slow enough that a huge number of games are still unplayable, so losing DirectX 10 support isn’t a huge issue. If you feel otherwise, there are other netbooks (i.e. the Lenovo S12 and Samsung N510) that include the full ION with DX10.”

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