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+--- Thread: Lenovo Q190 - Test results & 2 questions (/showthread.php?tid=157563)
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - aohus - 2013-05-01
I'd rather pay a bit more and for about $500 shipped if you build one yourself using a m350 mini-itx case it can be effective as it's small and VESA mountable.
For these specs
- Quad Core AMD A10-5700 @ 3.4 GHz + integrated 7660D GPU
- 8GB g.skill DDR3 1866 RAM
- MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 motherboard
- Integrated WiFi and Bluetooth
- 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM
- Universal m350 case (2 front USB ports)
- PicoPSU 150w w/ 120w power adapter
Ends up costing under $500 after everything but is definitely a more capable mid-range gaming setup imo.
On BF3 you'd be able to play on ultra texture settings with everything else set to medium and get decent fps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7RIcrqzgkg (BF3 gameplay on A10-5700)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl70kI5ityI (Planetside 2)
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Capstan - 2013-05-01
(2013-05-01, 00:07)aohus Wrote: I'd rather pay a bit more and for about $500 shipped if you build one yourself using a m350 mini-itx case it can be effective as it's small and VESA mountable.
For these specs
- Quad Core AMD A10-5700 @ 3.4 GHz + integrated 7660D GPU
- 8GB g.skill DDR3 1866 RAM
- MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 motherboard
- Integrated WiFi and Bluetooth
- 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM
- Universal m350 case (2 front USB ports)
- PicoPSU 150w w/ 120w power adapter
You forget the OS, which in the Lenovo is included. Win 7 costs about 100 euro. For little more than 600 I'd rather go for the Macmini i5. I am not interested in gaming.
Ale
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Dougie Fresh - 2013-05-01
(2013-05-01, 00:07)aohus Wrote: - Quad Core AMD A10-5700 @ 3.4 GHz + integrated 7660D GPU
- 8GB g.skill DDR3 1866 RAM
- MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 motherboard
- Integrated WiFi and Bluetooth
- 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM
- Universal m350 case (2 front USB ports)
- PicoPSU 150w w/ 120w power adapter
You'll need a low-profile cooler and some case fans. Having built many of these but in the Realan E-i7 case I can tell you this will run very warm, especially in the M350 case and with the 2.5" HDD.
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Capstan - 2013-05-01
Last update.
For the Vimeo playback, after having seen how a Core2duo performs, I see the i3 does a pretty decent job, the issue is in the fu*@&ing Flash used by Vimeo.
Similar videos in YouTube are fluid in 1080 mode. So I feel more relaxed on this respect.
Setting speedfan is proving to be a nightmare to me. The softare is capable of sensing and controlling the fan via PWM1, this is a fact since I succeeded at some extent.
However, every time I am able to find a reasonable way to control temperature in proportional way using advanced curve, after exiting and relaunching Speedfan seems to control nothing although the settings are retained correctly. I am going mad. Any experience/idea to share?
I have a good news on my Amazon experience, I have discovered that the unit I purchased (i3 version plus remote keyboard) from UK store not only actually comes with the DVD unit in addition, which in instelf is great, but this is actually a Blueray unit! This changes my overall evaluation of the kit, think this is overall a good package for the price. If only I could properly manage the fan speed I think I will be on heaven!
Capstan.
Re: RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - colemanuk - 2013-05-01
(2013-05-01, 12:54)Capstan Wrote: Last update.
For the Vimeo playback, after having seen how a Core2duo performs, I see the i3 does a pretty decent job, the issue is in the fu*@&ing Flash used by Vimeo.
Similar videos in YouTube are fluid in 1080 mode. So I feel more relaxed on this respect.
Setting speedfan is proving to be a nightmare to me. The softare is capable of sensing and controlling the fan via PWM1, this is a fact since I succeeded at some extent.
However, every time I am able to find a reasonable way to control temperature in proportional way using advanced curve, after exiting and relaunching Speedfan seems to control nothing although the settings are retained correctly. I am going mad. Any experience/idea to share?
I have a good news on my Amazon experience, I have discovered that the unit I purchased (i3 version plus remote keyboard) from UK store not only actually comes with the DVD unit in addition, which in instelf is great, but this is actually a Blueray unit! This changes my overall evaluation of the kit, think this is overall a good package for the price. If only I could properly manage the fan speed I think I will be on heaven!
Capstan.
If you use min 25% max 45% with target 70℃ , alarm 80℃,as suggested to me it was perfect. Completely silent temps perfectly fine. Temp will never get near 80℃ and idles around 55℃
You need to set windows task to open
30 secs after logon with highest privileges to autostart correctly.
I had to abandon windows 7 to openelec because of issues with my nas. It runs sooooooo much better!
Recommend give it go.
Only no fan control. Hopefully my inline fan controller will turn up soon
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Dougie Fresh - 2013-05-01
Don't worry about temps like 70C. The CPU is rated to 100C. I noticed with the Celeron 847 units I've built temps are usually around 70C. It just seems like that's normal.
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Capstan - 2013-05-02
(2013-05-01, 13:15)colemanuk Wrote: If you use min 25% max 45% with target 70℃ , alarm 80℃,as suggested to me it was perfect. Completely silent temps perfectly fine. Temp will never get near 80℃ and idles around 55℃
You need to set windows task to open
30 secs after logon with highest privileges to autostart correctly.
I had to abandon windows 7 to openelec because of issues with my nas. It runs sooooooo much better!
Recommend give it go.
Only no fan control. Hopefully my inline fan controller will turn up soon
Don't think this is a good procedure, in my opinion.
All machines are designed for respecting some parameters, so I find quite dangerous altering the standard parameters the way you have done. I would never let the machine to work unattended with these settings.
Let me explain. 45% correspond on the lenovo to about 3600 rpm. This is a max value that is lower to the current fan speed, around 4100 RPM. This means that in case of temperature raising above 70 degrees the fan will never have the possibility to remove the extra heat, possibly causing serious damage to the unit.
This is something not that impossible. Last year I discovered my MacbookPro that I used to do some Internet surfing before sleeping (and I put in standby mode by closing the screen as usual) with fan running at full steam during the night. This caused me to wake up and luckily force shut down. The machine was damn hot, but fans prevented a possibly worst disaster!
For this reason, I have used a pretty different setup for the Lenovo.
I think that a value of 3300 RPM is reasonably low for keeping the machine silent, but having a decent air flow for removing basic heat when idling or under not extreme CPU pressure, so I have set 40% as 'target' speed, retaining the 100% as max value if temperature exceeds 75 degrees.
This way machine is silent and I am sure that in case of software issue or CPU hog, you'll be always in the safe range.
Best
Alessandro.
Re: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - colemanuk - 2013-05-02
I just like to say that it idles at 55 . Rarely even 70℃ and it never gets to 80℃ alarm. If it did speedfan kicks in at 100%. 100℃ is Intel tjunction temp where the computer will turn off.
The case never even feels hot on the outside for me.
can't say I've used it for bitcoin mining tho
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Trooperlooper - 2013-05-02
I have mine locked to 30% min and 30% max (I think, might be 35%) so the fan is a constant speed. Temp idles without xbmc running at 55C, with xbmc on the menu screens (using aeon nox) at 65C and temp goes down to 60C when playing videos.
I leave it on all the time and am having no issues, no overheating or sign of overheating. It's not an expensive box, if it dies due this i'll buy another
I can't see why it would though, but i'll add in a 100% fan option at 80C or something like that, just in case.
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Capstan - 2013-05-04
Last update after I played with the box today (not much time during the week).
Speedfan: I have built a proportional control curve (Configure/Fan Control). It is non linear and keeps fan relatively quiet till 70 with a smooth increase to 45% an then there is a more steep ramp up to max speed if temperature exceeds 70 degrees. I have kept 30 and 100% as extreme limits. Tried and works beautifully.
I have the i3-HD3000 version, it is possible temperatures can be adjusted differently on the supposedly less heating Celeron version.
XBMC: I had to disable background effects (I don'like them anyway) because they cause GPU to work more than necessary and this is a cause for extra heat for no reason. I see also text crawling effects has some impact on GPU consumption, but there is no way to stop them (at least, I have not found).
I have ripped a Blueray disk with MakeMKV and XBMC plays like a charm. Quite impressed by the speed of the operation of ripping/encoding and the quality of playback. Speedfan reports CPU use of approx 10%, quite amazing, during HD playback, I guess this is result of GPU assistance on video decoding.
WiFi: I experienced some problems of performance of the wifi with the little Lenovo. It happened a number of times that internet connection performance dropped from the 16Mb/s of throughput -which is my normal adsl figure - to a damn 0,6... Tried to reinstall Realtek 8188E drivers (strangely only Lenovo has the correct ones for the board used for the machine I own), no result.
After modifying in control panel/device management/ network devices/RealtekRTL8188E by selecting the Advanced Tab /WiFi Config changing from "performance" to "wifi", the systems seems now stable.
Don't ask me how this worked by the way!
Now I have to say I am very satisfied from the little Lenovo... Hope this helps.
Alessandro
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Nine - 2013-05-05
How's the Q190 with streaming? I'm watching a lot of NHL on NHL Gamecenter and baseball on MLB.tv, high-def of course. Will the lowest value Q190 pull that off?
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Omega DZ - 2013-05-06
To those having problems with WIFI speeds you might need to change the config on your router.
I was running DD-WRT with Channel 6 / 40mhz / upper control and was only getting 3mbit tops. I could hardly stream a tiny divx from my NAS.
I switched my wireless settings to Channel 6 / 20mhz/ lower control and now I get 40mbit without issues.
There are some special settings on the WIFI card in the Q190 with regard to channel width but none of them seemed to help. Note I have 5+ devices on my wireless network and the Q190 was the only device having problems with the 40mhz channel width. After fixing that problem I've been very pleased with the machines playback abilities (1080p via WIFI no issue).
On a side note. Anyone having problems with pixelation on playback with MK3 files try disabling hardware acceleration. This fixed the issue for me.
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Capstan - 2013-05-07
Omega, thanks for your post.
After one full day of no issues with 190 wifi, yesterday evening the performance dropped again. What a disappointment!
So, being inspired by your post I have gone again in control panel/device management/ network devices/RealtekRTL8188E.
I have reset the Advanced Tab /WiFi Config to "performance" (q190 default),
I have set Advanced/Bandwidth from "20_40MHz" to "20MHz Only".
I see performance is more stable (the graphic in Speedtest.net is a more straight line) with throughput peaking at 17Mb/s. Keeping monitored in the next days, fingers crossed!
thank for the useful advice.
Ale.
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - Capstan - 2013-05-07
The Q190 (N5902) remote is quite comfortable now that I am accustomed to it.
Ale.
RE: Lenovo Q190 currently best value mini HTPC - Test results & 2 questions - wayneunique - 2013-05-09
Hello, first post here.
I've just brought a Q190, which should be delivered Friday and I was wondering if it's possible to replace the 500gb drive for a SSD?