[Goga777]

what do you think about a new ION2 nettop
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar...00ht&num=1

[poofyhairguy]

Its not ION2. It uses Intel Graphics. To me that equals its garbage.

[Riffmaker]

Its not ION2. It uses Intel Graphics. To me that equals its garbage.

Isn't a Core i3 fast enough cpu to decode 1080p without gpu acceleration? It has built in gpu acceleration that I assume a windows build could take advantage of and possible live down the road. I'm speculating but I'd think it might work very well sometime in the future. Of course I wouldnt touch it now.. wait til someone smarter than me works out all the kinks.

[Hannes The Hun]

with VA-API it should work just fine but seeing the price point and power consumption I see this little baby more as a small office desktop replacement than an ideal HTPC alternative

[PatrickVogeli]

last time I looked at vaapi it was a mess.. in the end, only the mpg2 decoder was working, the 264 and vc1 were both under development.

At the moment, I'd stay away from anything but nvidia to hardware decode movie streams.

[poofyhairguy]

Isn't a Core i3 fast enough cpu to decode 1080p without gpu acceleration?

More than fast enough. But then you lose GPU based color correction and upscaling.

It has built in gpu acceleration that I assume a windows build could take advantage of and possible live down the road.

From what I understand (I am kinda a low end GPU guy) this particular Intel chip has trouble (even in Windows) with many streams we are used to Nvidia hardware tearing through.

There is only three reasons to get one of these boxes:

[the not XBMC reason]
1. To use the only advantage this GPU has over Nvidia hardware (HD audio bitstreaming/DRM) with Window 7 and Blu Ray playback software blessed by the media overlords.
[/the not XBMC reason]

2. To use it with XBMC and to be able to use streaming sites outside XBMC (this thing could do Hulu with Linux, ION can't).

3. To hackintosh it for a higher value Mac Mini.