Building an Ion-powered Linux Media PC
December 3, 2009 | 12:46
Building an Ion-powered Linux Media PC
People continually ask us if Nvidia Ion motherboards would make the basis for a good media PC. Previously we've found that in Windows Vista, getting the right software support to play video files was at best, a pain, however Windows 7 has improved HD video performance no end.We liked the Viewsonic VOT which offered Ion and 7 in a neat little package, but it was too noisy. More recently we've looked at an ASRock Ion machine with a Blu-ray drive that does a similar thing, sans-OS, but also includes a tiny, noisy fan. Clearly what's out there isn't ideal. While Windows 7 has improved how Ion machines perform, it's still a full-fat commercial OS that's arguably overkill if you just want to run a few basic HTPC apps.
With this in mind, I decided to go back to Ubuntu and see how it combines with Ion. Once a year I make this trek, but I'm biting my lip for a reason: I'm also revisiting "social media centre" Boxee to see what's improved. And trust me what I say, it couldn't be more different than our first look.
The other reason we've gone back to Ubuntu with this setup, is that Nvidia now offers GPU accelerated video on Linux with its recent beta drivers. This means we can now let the Ion GPU take the strain for HD content where previously the Atom coughed and whimpered. As Boxee is built on the fantastic XBMC base, which includes the capacity for GPU acceleration - the three together, in theory, make the perfect complement.
On the hardware front we opted to use Zotac's new Ion-F motherboard (with a PCI-Express x16 slot, no less), powered by a Be Quiet! SFX 350W PSU because it's small and quiet and a Kingston V+ 64GB SSD for similar reasons. For all intents and purposes this made our Media PC silent. Yes, silent, as in "cannot be heard". The only fan is in the PSU and we were pressing our ears to it to tell if it all was on.
The Zotac motherboard can be run passively, although a thin 80mm fan is included in the box.
The Zotac Ion-F is a mighty bit of mini-ITX engineering: several SATA and one eSATA ports afford lots of potential for storage, so despite our single small boot SSD not offering much space it won't be hard to drop in a few terabyte drives. The rest of the board's features are great, too: 802.11n WiFi, PCI-Express x16 Gen 2.0, optical and co-axial S/PDIF out, HDMI, DVI, D-Sub, Gigabit Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports (with four more via pin-outs) and finally a PS2 keyboard socket. Underneath the super sized passive heatsink, there's a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom N330 CPU and Nvidia Ion MCP chipset.
It might be packed with features, but the board does have downsides. The Zotac only needs a 20-pin ATX power connection from the PSU, but be aware you can't use a PSU with a fixed 24-pin connector as Zotac has put a capacitor in the way. Of the six SATA ports supported by the chipset, only three are offered despite the physical space for more. Also, what about some colour co-ordination for the pin-outs? There are labels written on the board but in the corner of a small, dark case colour is easier to see than teeny tiny letters.
This Gigabyte, passive 9600GT dwarfs the tiny motherboard and is there for size comparison only. The SATA ports are not that easily accessible either.
For the record - we did not use the 9600 GT or any additional graphics card in the article: we simply used the onboard GeForce 9400 GPU.
We used an equally small SFX 350W Be Quiet! PSU in this build. It's not inaudible, but it is really very quiet and offers oodles of power for a tiny build should you want to use a graphics card or many hard drives.
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Posted by Stelph - Thu Dec 03 2009 13:04
http://hipporemote.com/
Allows control of several applications using your iPod Touch as a mouse, and also as a keyboard. Can even be set up to turn the HTPC on (wake on LAN) the only downside to it that I have found so far is if you are using Linux then you dont get the Auto App switching like you do with the Windows/Mac version, which is a shame.
Am looking forward to Sunday tho to see what Boxee are up to with their Beta! Apparently there have been some large changes to the software, so should be interesting.
Posted by Cupboard - Thu Dec 03 2009 13:09
We haven't got round to installing the OS but it seems pretty quiet sitting at the BIOS and the PSU is passive, though obviously limited to 65W!
Posted by Da Dego - Thu Dec 03 2009 14:07
For anyone curious to try a little more, errr, complete HTPC experience on Linux, I highly recommend that you go grab the XBMC Live! CD (www.xbmc.org) and install it. It has everything you need fairly "out of the box" and is a great way to try out a linux HTPC without a lot of installing hassle (comes with everything, including drivers in the install).
I'm personally not too much a fan of Boxee (though there are parts of it I like quite a bit), and XBMC does your proper DVD support and the like while giving you an interface to drool over.
Oh, and for anyone with a Windows MCE remote, soundgraph IMON or other common PC remote that's hoping to get away from a mouse or ipod on their HTPC, it's already pre-configured for both Boxee AND XBMC. All you have to do is plug it in, install lirc ("sudo apt-get install lirc") and select "windows MCE Remote/Transmitter (all versions)" from its setup menu. 30 seconds and done! Again, this is already included on the XBMC Live installer, should you give it a go.
EDIT: Stelph, I'd not seen hipporemote before. That is AWESOME. Thank you for pointing that out!!!
Posted by faugusztin - Thu Dec 03 2009 14:30
Antec ISK 300-65, Asus AT3N7A-I motherboard, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB WD Scorpio HDD, slim DVD drive 2x Noctua 8cm fans and we are done ! It uses 27W in idle, so what is the point of 350W PSU ? GeForce 9300 is more than enough to play Full HD videos through VDPAU acceleration.