I've been as excited as anyone about the Acer Aspire Revo but there are some worries, that it uses a fan and the base product is a bit memory and cpu limited.
I then found this and rubbed my eyes. It's got everything you'd want, the nVidia ION board, 2Gb Ram (option 4Gb), the option of the dual core Atom processor, fanless and in a tough aluminium case.
Aleutia H1
Why is no-one talking about the Aleutia? I think it's a small UK company that presumably doesn't have the PR pull of Acer but I can't find any mentions of it.
And seemingly these boxes are ready to ship but I've not taken the plunge and press the Buy button yet, maybe you bad news is that the don't ship for a while. Who knows?
Pretty sure that is says Zotac on that motherboard. (click on specs, on the aleutia page)
WTF, that looks like the exact components here:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=53#ION-...009-bundle
As expected they are also charging around £50 more than the bundle (excluding RAM)
Resuming from sleep isn't a problem for me because I want mine to be awake all the time.
I was going to buy one of these today but if the machine can't resume from sleep via USB then there's no point, I don't think that anyone wants to walk across there living room to turn this thing on every time they want to use it. Might give Aleutia a ring tomorrow (Bank holiday in the UK today) and see what they say.
interest registered! maybe a group buy for uk people....?
TREX6662k5 Wrote:WTF, that looks like the exact components here:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=53#ION-...009-bundle
As expected they are also charging around £50 more than the bundle (excluding RAM)
Did you remember the VAT? When I put them both in the baskets, the Aleutia costs GBP 259 and the mini-itx store bundle costs GBP 261.05 - so the Aleutia is a tad cheaper.
The project has hit the buffers for me the dual core Atom version has to have the fan installed.
See the section "Will the ION-ITX-A work without its fan?"
Mini-ITX Review
They mention the fanless single-core ION-ITX-B but that doesn't have the DC board... on board, you need a regular Molex-y power supply. Zotac have mentioned possible C and D boards this year with unspecified specs.
evilhomeruk Wrote:Did you remember the VAT? When I put them both in the baskets, the Aleutia costs GBP 259 and the mini-itx store bundle costs GBP 261.05 - so the Aleutia is a tad cheaper.
The project has hit the buffers for me the dual core Atom version has to have the fan installed.
See the section "Will the ION-ITX-A work without its fan?" Mini-ITX Review
They mention the fanless single-core ION-ITX-B but that doesn't have the DC board... on board, you need a regular Molex-y power supply. Zotac have mentioned possible C and D boards this year with unspecified specs.
The Aleutia H1 is more like £295 the price you see on there site and in basket doesn't include VAT. We are having almost the exact same conversation in a different part of the forum
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=51625
If you're looking for the board and psu only, play have the best price i have found so far.
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9840403/ZO...oduct.html
£176 and free delivery, is out of stock but i have been reliably informed that they should be in within the next week or so.
medicineuk Wrote:The Aleutia H1 is more like £295 the price you see on there site and in basket doesn't include VAT.
DOH!
Thanks for clarification. The only way I could get a price on Aleutia was to go through to Google Checkout. Naughty.
Now a shade over £240 for the standard model. What's the situation with remotes and this, does it have a receiver?
Just to throw in my thoughts I spent around a year and a half "shopping" for a new media centre system to replace my XBOX that would support any HD videos I threw at it. My target price was £200 and my 2 mandatory factors were it had to support XBMC flawlessly and it had to be very quiet - my AV rack is immediately next to where I sit so any noise is annoying.
I knew an ION based solution was the answer and as the H1 was too expensive it came down to the Acer Revo (Linux Model) or Asrock ION 330. In the end the Revo was cheaper at £150 but as with many others I had concerns about it only being a single core atom plus I would need to upgrade the memory to 2GB and since you have to break the security sticker it would invalidate the warranty.
Meanwhile the Asrock ION 330 had dropped in price to around £230 delivered and pretty much had everything I wanted. I added up the cost difference in parts (CPU/Mem/HDD/ODD) from the Revo to the ION 330 and the price difference was justifiable.
I definitely made the right choice with the Asrock machine. Build qualtity is superb especially the motherboard with all solid state components. With the latest BIOS installed the unit is quieter than my PS3. Although there were a few issues getting everything running perfectly there has been a lot of support for this unit on the XBMC forum - MedicineUK's install guide is great!
From my perspective there are only 2 things stopping the ION 330 from being the perfect XBMC machine: 1. No front USB ports and 2. No integrated IR sensor. Both of these are nice to have but their omission is not a problem.