Sapphire To Release Atom Netbook

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Sapphire, until now, hasn’t ventured outside the realm of ATI graphics cards and AMD motherboards, but now the company is expanding in a new direction. At the CeBIT trade show, they had a netbook on display branded with their own name and logo. As far as netbooks go, it’s a fairly standard fair, with a Intel Atom N450 processor and a 10-inch screen.

Sapphire (according to their website) sells more ATI components than anybody, which sounds a bit off, but I have no reason to doubt them. Because of this, it’s odd to see them going with an Atom processor (since AMD and Intel are, you know, rivals), but I guess they didn’t feel comfortable going with the AMD equivalent. Or perhaps the whole netbook is being made by OEMs.

The device will be named the “Sapphire N450″ and will ship with the following stats – an Intel Atom N450 processor (with 1.6GHz clock and 512KB cache). It will have 1GB of DDR2-667 RAM and a 250GB SATA HDD. It’ll have a webcam, card reader, HD audio, etc. etc. No mention of graphics, so presumably it’ll have the typical integrated graphics.

It’s a bit disappointing to see a major graphics card manufacturer not include any special graphics in their netbook, but if we’ve learned anything from the netbook revolution, it’s all about getting the lowest price possible.

It will come in black, and will be running Windows 7 (probably the Starter Edition). No word on pricing or a release date – expect $250-$400, as usual.