NEC releases line of quiet Crusoe-based desktops

NEC on Wednesday released an all-in-one desktop PC which runs quietly without fans and features low power consumption. The company also unveiled a new line-up of notebook PCs, including a model which offers twice the battery life of previous models.

NEC's MA90W/F Mate desktop PC is an all-in-one desktop PC which includes a 15-inch TFT (thin film transistor) color LCD (liquid crystal display) panel.

The MA90W/F carries either a 900MHz or 800MHz Crusoe TM5800 processor, which allows for low power consumption and generates less heat. As the PC's power-source units are placed inside the AC adaptor, a processor fan and a power-source fan are not needed, meaning the PC is exceptionally quiet, according to a NEC statement.

In comparison with previous models of the Mate series, the company has managed to reduce the new models' power consumption by 16 percent, it said.

The basic Mate desktop model is equipped with either the Windows XP Professional or Windows 2000 Professional operating system, 128M bytes of SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), a 20G-byte hard disk drive and an Ethernet interface for ¥246,000 (US$1,916).

Among the new models of NEC's VersaPro notebook PC series unveiled Wednesday, the VA10J/VH features a 3.3-hour battery life, which is twice as long as the company's previous notebook models, the statement said.

In addition to an internal modem and an Ethernet interface, the product can be equipped with an IEEE 802.11b interface for wireless LAN access and Bluetooth as options, the statement said.

The VA10J/VH VersaPro carries a 1GHz mobile Pentium III processor, 128M bytes of SDRAM, a 20G-byte hard disk drive and a 12.1-inch TFT color LCD panel for ¥232,000.

The Mate and VersaPro series are only targeted at the Japanese corporate market and the company has no shipment plans for overseas markets, the company said. The company will start shipping them for corporate users in Japan on May 15, it said.