NT-A3500 Build (E-350)

Hi,

Just bought a NT-A3500 with 4Gb RAM. Running Openelec with AEON MQ3 from 4Gb SD card. No HD installed. And a Rapoo wireless keyboard.
I'm all new to Openelec (XBMC) and htpc's and learning all from forum's and wiki's. Just joined this forum.

I'm running fusion beta 5 and customized MQ3 with extra menu items for the kids, not possible in standard Confluence. All up and running (incl. digital 5.1 audio).

First observations:
- Great mediacenter coming from an AC Ryan due to openelec and possible add-ons.
- Bit noisy. Fan goes on quickly.
- Switching between menu items and activating menu items is rather slow. Is AEON MQ3 to heavy for the NT-A3500?
- Main menu backgrounds are lagging. I added backgrounds (approx. 600Kb - 1Mb jpeg's on the SD card) to my customized menu's and it takes 5 seconds for them to load so I don't see them because I'm moving quicker through the menu. Do I need an Extreme SD card for quicker reading of the images and/or make the images smaller?
- And most important: I see wrinkles when playing movies or tv shows (dvd5 and dvd9 iso's), not all the time but with change in scenes it happens a lot and it rather annoying (my AC Ryan runs all movies smooth). No interruptions in audio or video, just wrinkles (I hope this is the correct English word, I'm Dutch). Does anyone has the same issue? Do I need to upgrade drivers of the foxconn (firmware)? I have already activated DXVA2 in the video settings but no change.

Please your comments on my observations.

Thank you

I've been thinking about grabbing one now that Newegg is doing another deal with a free 64Gig SSD. Thoughts on that being a decent enough deal? Also, what's the difference between the white and black models? It appears as if it's a minor ram speed support and possibly usb ports?

Mainly, I'm wanting to eventually have this setup as a frontend for pvr functionality as well. I'm considering how a backend tvheadend would work. Any thoughts / recommendations on this? And does the E-350 have enough power for PVR -- recording would actually happen back on the server/NAS assuming that's possible.

Thanks!

1 Honestly, i don't think it would be powerful enough to do that stuff.

I would recommend it just for video playbacks.

Ugh, that's exactly the impression I was getting when I stumbled onto this thread. Right now I have a G530 with a mini-itx mobo as my main htpc (windows 8 & xbmc) and that's been good, but even in a small case it's big for mounting behind a flat screen in the bedroom.

I still need to get my setup going for recording tv onto a nas (or something) too anyway... We have Dish and it's really only around $52/mo. but it'd be nice to cut the cord completely. Any more thoughts and input on this stuff would be really appreciated as well of course!

Anyway, I really like the form-factor of the NT-A3500. That on the NT-A3700 seem to be the only things anywhere close to an Apple TV or some of the other media server boxes... Just need something that can do more in the same small package.

Thanks a bunch for the quick reply anyway though!

I bought Foxconn nt-A3700 and unfortunately I'm not happy with the temperature values of CPU and GPU ! But the box does the job well

CPU & GPU is 50C with idle and 70 C with load.

I made a stress test for 2 hours and max temp was 75C !

Does anyone know about the upper and lower limits of operating temperatures provided by Foxconn?

I can spend money on a better cooling unit if there is any available also..

I bought one of this units back during Thanksgiving. Newegg was offering them a free SSD. I added 4 gigs of RAM and I could not be happier. Total cost of the system was $201.

Hint: Upgrade the BIOS to the newest version before you load any OS.

I've had this lil system on almost constantly since I've got it. That's about 5 months of every day use and abuse. It has impressed me so much that I bought another one. A few of my friends have bought them as well and are equally as impressed. I've had zero issues with it. It It was running Openelec 2.0. It plays high bit BluRay rips with no issues. These are MakeMKV rips with no compression. There is no video stuttering or artifacts at all The CPU usage is at 70% to 80%. Since upgrading to OpenElec 3.0 CPU usage has dropped to about 15% to 20%. This PC was made for OpenElec!

BTW - I also loaded Windows 7 as a test on one of these system. Loading the OS went smoothly. I copied the included OS to USB stick so loading the drivers went smoothly as well. What was really painful was loading all the windows updates. I believe the CPU has only a single DMA. The decompressing of files took forever. If you're loading Win7 let the file updates run over night. Loaded XBMC 12.1. I had zero playback issues as well. The menus were a bit laggy however.

Since the last AMD announcement regarding open source drivers, payback under Linux will continue to get better.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar..._uvd&num=1