> Hello List, > > I want to setup a new freevo box. I want to make it small, flat and > silent. I got a case with a passiv DC/DC PSU. > I will use the box mainly for watching AVIs and listening to music. > > At the moment I am using the matrox g450 on my old CRT TV. But I want to > use a default LCD Display in future. I am booting the box via network, > so there is no harddisk (making noise and heat) in it. > > So I am looking for a board that is passively cooled, that has a onboard > graphics card and that is capable of doing the above things. > > Is a ViaC7 or an Atom 230 OK? > Would a Via Chrome9 or and Intel GMA950 be sufficient? > Do you have any experiences here? > > Kind regards > Cornelius
You mention wanting to use an LCD in the future, I assume that means you will want HD playback at some point in the future? If so I would recommend that you use an external graphics card, or at least have the ability to use one, there are some very cheap nvidia cards that have no fans and will allow playback of HD content even with a very slow processor. They MythTV wiki has a good list of hardware testing with HD playback and the new nvidia VDPAU api: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU#User_results That would seem to indicate that an Atom 330 is fine, and given the CPU usage an Atom 230 would probably be OK too. Personally I would not go with Via mini-boards they seem overpriced compared with the Atom boards and in my experience it is a paid getting everything working properly on them, I used to have an SP13000 which I never got working 100% things like suspend etc. never worked correctly and getting reliable playback of even mpeg2 SD content was a pain. By comparison I now have an Athlon LE-1000 with nvidia graphics card that was really easy to set up and is massively faster than my old machine and quieter too as it has large fans not the anoying 40mm one my old via mini-itx machine had! If your small case has no room for an external graphics card later, when you want to use HD / LCD, then I would probably try and hold fire and wait to see what happens with the Nvidia ION platform. That is supposed to be based around the Atom 330 but with a built in nvidia GPU which is capable of HD playback. Hopefully the ION will also support the linux vpdau api which will make it a very small and quiet self contained machine capable of HD: http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIAs-Ion-Small-FormFactor-PC-Platform-/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
