I'm planning to buy a cheap HTPC. I will use it mainly to watch fullhd content and listen to music. The Asrock Ion 330 seems good to me. http://www.asrock.com/nettop/overview.asp?Model=ION+330 Any advice?
As you're in brazil, I don't know what the selection is like. I wouldn't settle for anything less than a setup that can push full hdtv. I doubt the ion can do that.
Advice: while cheap, AND you're in brazil, so overinflated prices abound, ion is better than GMA950, just not by much. You can play h.264 1080p, TRUE, but not X.264, or a pile of other more obscure formats. And I'm certain a question like this is implying videos not from your own bluray collection as you make no mention of bdr... basically- Core 2 Duo 2GHz with +/- 2GB ram will play about half the 1080p videos out there, but between needing more than 2gb ram for prefetching, and needing a bit more power in software decoding "open" formats like X.264, you'll find even this fails pretty bad at decoding ALL 1080p content that abounds. do yourself a favor, invest in a moderate video card that offers h.264 acceleration (not sure if any support hardware x.264 yet), and a cheap micro or full ATX board with a i5 or core quad with cheap ddr2 and lots of slots- don't waste your money on overpriced mini-itx hardware unless your home theatre only has 8" of space left in it.. The performance/price ratio is low on small formfactor hardware due to the smaller audience and inflated costs. Also, if you were to decode hd video on that, the nvidia chip would be doing all the work- an atom is powerful for a small cpu, but not nearly enough to even do 720p. YOu'd be at the mercy of what codecs the nvidia chip can handle, and as i say, watch out for the fact that h.264 support does NOT mean X.264 support, even though they are related!
Read this: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=663&type=expert FYI, hardware playback largely depends on the software. If you search tomshardwareguides, there was an article there about what media software out there supported hardware playback of HD videos of ALL formats. I'd still go with the Atom. Lowe power usage compared to a C2D setup.
Here we don't have many options. An HTPC goes over us$ 1k. I can get the Ion 330 here for about us$ 500.00. This is not a bad price since an dedicated hd media player goes for us$ 300.00. The Ion can decode fullhd at fullspeed Some reviews says it can handle x.264: http://gdgt.com/asrock/ion/330/review/1r2/ "Everything you've read about this machine's performance is true. It has no problem handling even HD x264, and runs both cool and quiet. Even towards the end of playing back a 1080p MKV, the case is only a little warmish to the touch." Sure it will depends on decoder support in GPU and some codecs may not work. But if it run x264 1080p, it will be fine for me.
ION and Flash Currently the Atom and ION setup is too weak to handle full screen online HD streaming like Hulu which uses Flash. Before the end of the year Adobe will be updating Flash to 10.1 which will allow ION GPU acceleration. There's some good articles over at Anandtech about various Atom w/Ion motherboards and how they perform with different types of HD.
I finally bought the Asrock ION 330. Should I install Windows 7 32 or 64 bits? This machine will be used to code in dot net. It's possible to code in 64 bits and compile for 32 bits? Actually there is a 64 bits version of Visual Studio?
For what application will the dot net code be use for? I would probably check out microsoft's site on what route to take. For compatibility I would go with 32bit.
If it supports it, I would highly recommend Win7 64bit. You can most certainly develop on a 64bit machine and deploy your apps to a 32bit machine. Visual Studio 2008 supports both architectures.
