2010-01-03, 15:08
Im looking to buy a HTPC system to run XBMC. What I want is to buy a future proof system with 2year+ warranty. Any suggestions?
2010-01-03, 19:17
asrock ion 330
or one of those acer revos
anything ION, really
or one of those acer revos
anything ION, really
2010-01-03, 20:26
I ran a Zotac ION dual core with an 8gb SSD and 4 gigs of ram. Linux with VPDAU. I read from a NAS on a local network and ran in to problems with videos going choppy after an hour to an hour and a half. Diagnostics were not trivial. Your config may differ and thus you may not consider this a possible issue for your set up.
I have three rma's now. One on the SSD, one for the Zotac board and the again on the hard drives in the NAS. I cleaned house and went new mac mini with a usb to spdif adapter called the m-audio transit. Both hardware and software are under warranty. Its almost fanless whereas the mini has one inaudible fan in it. Has a disc drive/ dvd burner and remote receiver built in. Replaced the drives in my nas with raid capable caviar blacks and the results were good. The new mac mini needs an adapter to go hdmi and another to go spdif (long story see my other posts) but in the display preferences they are now supporting 1080p. This is on 10.6.2.
I was streaming 1080p files at near 11gb last night while downloading around 700kb/s at the same time from a different computer on the lan. My router is an airport and I feel the mac mini gets noticed better by the router since they are both apple products. When I had my DFI box (main computer now) in as my media center I had to shut down downloads to stream smoothly. The performance of the mac was impressive to me. I have cables going throughout. I did test 720p streaming to be good utilizing a wds wireless network but this required an airport express to act as client in a wireless bridge configuration with the airport extreme. As I want as much as I can get on bandwidth and cables are an option I go that route. More on WDS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Di...#Technical
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/tam...s-wds.html
I have three rma's now. One on the SSD, one for the Zotac board and the again on the hard drives in the NAS. I cleaned house and went new mac mini with a usb to spdif adapter called the m-audio transit. Both hardware and software are under warranty. Its almost fanless whereas the mini has one inaudible fan in it. Has a disc drive/ dvd burner and remote receiver built in. Replaced the drives in my nas with raid capable caviar blacks and the results were good. The new mac mini needs an adapter to go hdmi and another to go spdif (long story see my other posts) but in the display preferences they are now supporting 1080p. This is on 10.6.2.
I was streaming 1080p files at near 11gb last night while downloading around 700kb/s at the same time from a different computer on the lan. My router is an airport and I feel the mac mini gets noticed better by the router since they are both apple products. When I had my DFI box (main computer now) in as my media center I had to shut down downloads to stream smoothly. The performance of the mac was impressive to me. I have cables going throughout. I did test 720p streaming to be good utilizing a wds wireless network but this required an airport express to act as client in a wireless bridge configuration with the airport extreme. As I want as much as I can get on bandwidth and cables are an option I go that route. More on WDS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Di...#Technical
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/tam...s-wds.html
2010-01-03, 21:05
tehsoul Wrote:asrock ion 330
or one of those acer revos
anything ION, really
Isnt the ION 2 on its way?
2010-01-04, 10:54
quotaholic Wrote:Replaced the drives in my nas with raid capable caviar blacks and the results were good.
what are these drives you speak of? unless you are using old WD caviar drives and ran the WDTLER.EXE tool... because since November 2009 the current WD1001FALS caviars are no longer supported in RAID arrays due to WD not allowing users to modify the firmware via the TLER tool. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limite...r_Recovery) The RAID compatible 1TB drive from WD is the RE3 series as far as I know (and are also about twice the price)
I'm unimpressed with this as I am now having to replace my xmas gift of 4 WD1001FALS that i just mounted in a RAID5
2010-01-04, 15:02
Homebuild something? The new intel H55 chipset and intel core 3i is coming with integrated graphics support?
2010-01-05, 02:00
Quote:what are these drives you speak of?
I replaced a couple of seagate 1tb drives with two wd caviar black 640gb in a raid 0 array.
