Hey! Just wondering, did you also get hold of the magnetic optical drive? I saw the preview from Engadget and think the whole system is pretty small and really slick lookin'
Very nice looking. Very temped by one of these. Just need to add a tv tuner card in and you have an almost perfect HTPC. Suppose you could always have a media server handle recording and storage duties.
What are the temps like bindi? and does that fan handle them well?
Originally Posted by Yoy0YO Hey! Just wondering, did you also get hold of the magnetic optical drive? I saw the preview from Engadget and think the whole system is pretty small and really slick lookin'
It sounds like all that Ion is any good at is decoding HD video. I expected a lot more of it. A low-end cpu with a 9400m can handle flash and a handful of games with ease. It's all flash and no pants, without the flash.
Looks good, but I think I'd still opt for the Asrock NetTop Ion 330 over this. For the same £ with no OS you can get a slightly larger unit that has a dvd burner and takes standard DDR2 dimms. It also has optical audio out. However you don't get wifi, or DVI with the Asrock, just gigabit ethernet, hdmi, vga, 6 usb ports. I got one for the mother-in-law and I have to say it is excelent. If you use the Asrock softwere on windows you can get the boot time down to around 10 seconds. Running Ubuntu 9.04 it boots in <30 seconds and shuts down in about the same.
The review doesn't actually mention any of these "older games" that didn't run on it very well. Couldn't they have given us some names and numbers to go with the assertion? Pretty useless review with any hard figures to base buying decisions on.
I'd be interested to hear more about what the video acceleration technology is technically capable of doing.
I watch quite a lot of HD video in all kinds of wrappers - principally quicktime, and mp4 (which is effectively identical). I appreciate that this is technically difficult since various subsets of the h.264 spec are used by various different encoders, and implementing them all in hardware would probably be impractical, but that just makes it even more important to know exactly what aspects of 264 decoding Ion supports, and which it doesn't.
Sorry but you say in the article, the nvidia ion and this system cant play games...
Who in that sort of market is looking to game, lets be honest?
As long as they can play HD videos, HD youtube vids and so forth that the bogstandard 945express intel chip couldnt do then its pretty dam good considering its size.
Dual core version would make opening several browsing pages a lot quicker too.
and nice to see bigger harddrives included now too
Is it the Ion LE chipset that's used? Reading a review of a different unit, but with the afore mentioned chipset, they say in 1024x768 on all lowest detail that Crysis runs at 17fps and a version of Trackmania at 1366x768 (iirc) runs at 27fps. In retrospect, that sounds pretty good to me, for a low power gfx chipset.
This looks great, but is there anything out there that's similar, but can also record from an external source? I'd love to be able to archive stuff from my Sky HD Box via it's component out sockets...
contents are good. Fan needs improvement. Buy the thing, rip the guts out, and mod your own case to include an optical drive, TV Tuner card, and improved (quite) airflow. Now you've got a great HTPC.
Originally Posted by jon contents are good. Fan needs improvement. Buy the thing, rip the guts out, and mod your own case to include an optical drive, TV Tuner card, and improved (quite) airflow. Now you've got a great HTPC.
Or just buy an Atom mobo and do the whole thing yourself..
This thing is so small, it could literally be velcroed onto an LCD.
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Replylink: http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/28/viewsonic-vot130-and-ion-based-vot132-nettops-handled-in-the-ope/
What are the temps like bindi? and does that fan handle them well?
link fail! the hyperlink is actually your comment with space replaced by %20! had to copy and paste the link...
link corrected in quote!
I watch quite a lot of HD video in all kinds of wrappers - principally quicktime, and mp4 (which is effectively identical). I appreciate that this is technically difficult since various subsets of the h.264 spec are used by various different encoders, and implementing them all in hardware would probably be impractical, but that just makes it even more important to know exactly what aspects of 264 decoding Ion supports, and which it doesn't.
Who in that sort of market is looking to game, lets be honest?
As long as they can play HD videos, HD youtube vids and so forth that the bogstandard 945express intel chip couldnt do then its pretty dam good considering its size.
Dual core version would make opening several browsing pages a lot quicker too.
and nice to see bigger harddrives included now too
Totally agree about Flash though. Any webpage with it on performs poorly.
Or just buy an Atom mobo and do the whole thing yourself..
This thing is so small, it could literally be velcroed onto an LCD.
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