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Have you considered a little overclocking? My Zotac hits 2Ghz easy, my N270 Netbook overclocks to 2.2GHz. Atoms are very overclockable, and their out of order CPUs loves the extra cycles.
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I honestly don't know, as I am one of the few around here that doesn't like Aeon (I prefer vertical organized skins over horizontal ones), but I do know that it really provides a boost when I messed with it.
I mean, that is an extra .8 GHZ when you count in both cores. Add on top of that the fact that the Atom is hyper-threaded and a 30% performance boost seems reasonable, and is what I get from my experience.
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Is Aeon the heaviest skin to use ?
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I built my machine with ati x2 250, 4gb ram, matx board with 4250 onboard (didnt know when i bought it that ati vdpau under linux was a nogo, but was happy to look for a discrete nvidia card).
I played around with a ide>compact flash adapter, running 2x4gb 233X cards in a software raid 0, but couldnt get the livecd to successfully install to the flash cards. Ended up trialing an old 20gig hdd and couldnt handle the loud whine the drive made so unplugged it straight away and went and bought an ocz vertex 2 60gig drive. Got the Live install up and running, however it was one pain after another, since ive never used linux before, having issues with grub not using the right resolution for my finicky 1080p tv, not being able to get my wifi card working. I found that even though i could work things out, it was at a snails pace since i was learning everything from scratch.
I ended up reinstalling a stripped down performance edition of win 7, and was instantly able to resolve the issues i was having with resolution and wifi.
Even tho i wanted a system that would boot straight into xbmc fast and have an appliance like feel, (which is why i tried the live dharma in the first place). I am finding with the SSD, plenty of ram, and reasonable cpu, this is a very responsive system. Cold boot loading is fast, however, I usually tell it to sleep from within xbmc, its instant off, and then instant on (its ready to use before the tv is showing picture) and it wakes up in xbmc, so i get that appliance feel i wanted. I work as a systems admin in an windows environment, so i am very comfortable with dropping back to win7 for whatever troubleshooting i needed to do. and now that im in windows 7, I can use the ati integrated gpu for video acceleration.
The system isnt fully operational yet, because im in the process of putting together my 15tb server, just need to go buy ram tommorrow and i have everything. once i have my storage locations set up, then i can set up all my automation along the lines of torrenting etc.
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Extremely Useful info in this thread! Thanks so far guys.
Don't mean to threadjack but since most of my other questions have been answered here, i might as well throw out the others.
I was pretty decided on the Lenovo Ideacentre Q150. But based on what I've been reading, the different a SSD drive makes is pretty noticeable. So I'm back to the Zotac Zbox HD, with 2GB of Ram and a SSD. (Yes I'll be missing out on the remote that comes with the Q150...but so be it)
So my question is assuming i get the Zotac box, SSD and RAM. for the most part I'll be using it as a media playing machine via XBMC, however I'll still want to download a few torrents and play some pandora etc. So my intention was to Use windows as this is what I'm most familiar with. Will the ion box running windows 7 be able to do the following (not necessarily at the same time)
1. Play all 1080p & 1080i content?
2. Play those pesky Mts files
3. act as a regular pc allowing me to connect from my laptop and download torrents etc?
4. Is Linux performance better than windows on the ion (or vice versa) for both day to day computing AND video playback?
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Hi people,
Uhh. just wanted to chime in here. I've been messing around with my XS35GT on Win7 and man am I getting a lot of DCP's (Deferred Procedure Calls) and interrupts. You can see them on Process Explorer. When downloading stuff over torrent DCP's stole like lots of processor power and everything was freakingly slow. Also the box gets very very hot coz the processor gets so worked up.
Another test was that I copied 13GB mkv movie to my HD (normal 500GB sata hd) and run it as opposed to running it over USB from USB-HD. And it stuttered quite a lot from the HD, where the USB-HD wasn't that bad (only some slowdowns in fast movements). The HD is new and worked perfectly inside my Mac Book.
Install is fresh Windows 7 Ultimate and i tried to take down all services and apps that might have been responsible. No firewall/antivirus, nothing helps. Installed all the driver crap from Shuttle web-site.
Tried a Xubuntu 10.10 install but .. as a Linux n00b it didn't go very far = no tests. But running Xubu from USB as live seemed more responsive than running it from the HD. Freaky.. is it the Shuttle hardware accessing the disk ass-backwardly or something?
Looking to do that "vanilla beta 3 Dharma" as per Bossanova's blog but wait and see (downloading iso now).
Anyway.. my first post. Happy to find this great forum ,)
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I've been following along on this thread and am still considering putting together an HTPC as my fallback option if Boxee can't fix their remaining playback problems (although it's actually getting pretty solid now in the newest release).
The Boxee Box supports refresh rate matching as well as HD audio (True-HD is decoded to LPCM, DTS-MA is sent with bit streaming).
Is there a <$399 HTPC option today that will support these things with Dharma when running Live? I don't have a lot of desire to run Windows so I would probably be looking at a Live installation if I go the HTPC route.
