Basilcy its a atom 330 with ion in it. Can be easilly fitted behind a tv as a htpc.
Besides this, also a question, does anybody know about something similar like this but withou a hard disk and cdrom (so fanless) with same form factor and atom 330/ion? (This box i could take out the hard disk and use a SD card, but the price is high)
(Asus Eee Box EB1012 NVIDIA ION Graphics Intel Atom 330 Dual Core CPU is one for instance, but i have not seen them without a HD or Cd player)
it even comes with cdrom and hdd enclosure (if needed) but its form factor is small and is fanless. So this would be a killer (not to mention better cpu + ion2 chipset) but no date yet
I use a FitPC 2 http://www.fit-pc.info/ It uses 7 watt. It has a Atom processor 1.6 ghz. And 1 GB memory. I use i SDD harddisk, so it's complete silence.
j.hoekstra wrote:You can however forget watching Full HD-media with it. Other than that nice piece of hardware that's well paid....
i have connected it to my tv in the bed room, with HDMI. And I can play MKV files perfect. (when the are on the harddrive). I needed to be complete silince because of the "WAF". I have a IMO touch connected to it as well, wich is on the desk near the bed. I use is to control the lights, and as alarmclock.
I have several atom/ion-boxes around in my house and find them extremely useful. They all can run HD, both 1080i and 1080p. My prebuilt acer revo has a fan, the homebuilt others have no moving parts. I use diskless booting form a server, which means that I can plug them into any network outlet and boot them as a frontends for my tv-system (and of course a personalised desktop). I also have two non-ion laptops which are dual-boot. I have a basement mythtv-server with 4 dvb-s2/t cards and storage for all my videos/music. All Ion-powered boxes can show sat-TV and movies in 1080i/p without effort. Before the ion came with its VDPAU cabability, I had a couple of dual core micro-atx htpc's. These where rather big, power-hungry and noisy. The arrival of the ion chipset was a revelation, I am tempted to keep a small stockpile of ion motherboards just in fear of them being discontinued. As of today i have a singel core Acer Revo, and three Zotac dual core MB's (all with fanless external power). The dual cores are really overkill for my applications. I find that most prebuilt Ions come with a (often small, noisy) fan, thats why I build my own. They run hot when I run lengthy compiles or other cpu intensive tasks (I have to take my livingroom ion out of the cupboard sometimes), but none has failed so far. The itx cases you can buy is (unfortunately) bigger and therefore cooler than the prebuilt ones, I would not recommend anyone disabling the fan in a prebuilt Ion.
The upside to my setup is that every member of the family can watch what they want, where they want. I can put a TV/stereo into any room and have it running in a minute or two, or take my laptop outside in the garden. I can watch both terrestial and satellite TV (100 + channels) with no coax cable mess (it's all in the basement), and all my recordings/music/movies/pictures are available everywhere. Since the tv-cards all can record several streams from the same multiplex I rarely run out of tuners, even with multiple recordings going. The quality and performance of VDPAU-decoding is stunning, it is easily on par with my previous Dreambox 800, and in addition give you the option to manipulate a lot of options, like deinterlacing methods.
The downside is that you need a network outlet nearby (except for the wireless laptops). Gaming is also bad, however all older games and my kids less gpu-intensive games run fine. The Ion motherboards are somewhat more expensive than Intels, however I consider all of them cheap (especially when you factor in power usage).
Next purchase will probably be an Asus EEEtop with a touchscreen for my kitchen.
luria please, could you explain how to set an ion device to reproduce video HD from a Mythtv server ? I can not image how to play a hd movie without OS and player.
Could you give the list of what is necessary (sw i mean)
Your setup is really interesting !
Thanks a lot.
it sure looks nice and small though, but i'll wait for the shuttle one if that doesn't take too long.
