ASUS may soon release its Eee PC netbooks and Eee Box nettop PCs running on the NVIDIA Ion mainboard that would tie in Intel's Atom CPU with NVIDIA's hybrid graphics and system controller combo. The computer maker is apparently already testing such configurations, Digitimes reported on Monday, citing industry sources. The same source has an Ion-based Eee Box B1006 coming to stores in the summer of this year, though no estimated dates are being guessed at.

Another recent report hypothesized ASUS would ship a flagship Eee Box nettop with a dedicated graphics card, albeit from ATI. Whether or not it will use the Ion platform is unknown, though unlikely. Current Eee Tops and Eee Box PCs use Intel platforms.

ASUS also recently made headlines for developing the MARS 295 Limited Edition graphics card that is marketed as a variant of the GeForce GTX 295, but really combining the MARS in fact combines two GTX 285s to make for more powerful graphics processing.