Last year, we came up with an idea for a living room PC that was so small you could Velcro it to the back of your HDTV. This PC would be capable of streaming all things TV and would allow you to finally tell your cable provider where to shove that RJ6 cable. That machine, unfortunately, never materialized, as the hardware just wasn’t ready for prime time.

Little did we know that Polywell was reading our minds when it designed the Giada Ion-100. About the size of a double-decker DVD case, the Giada Ion-100 is a mostly full-featured PC featuring a dual-core processor, 2GB of DDR2/667, a 250GB hard drive, five USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and even Windows 7. So, what sets this apart from other book-size PCs? The graphics. The Giada is the second PC we’ve tested so far with Nvidia’s impressive Ion chipset (the first being HP’s Mini 311 netbook, last month). Other small systems have featured Intel’s pathetic GMA integrated graphics. Ion is far more powerful than the GMA945 graphics found in most nettops and is capable of accelerating Blu-ray content. The system’s dual-core processor is Intel’s Atom 330, which runs at 1.6GHz and features Hyper-Threading and a 64-bit instruction set.

Continue reading this review after the jump.