Atom 330 Nvidia ION motherboard

[jcjefferies]

Has anyone used a motherboard like the ASUS AT3IONT-I which uses Atom 330 processor and Nvidia ION graphics. It is similar to the AMD E350 based motherboards and is supposed to be able to process full HD with the on board graphics processor.

[mvallevand]

I haven't hooked up my Asrock ION 330 client for a while (180 MB of Windows updates) since I have been using it is a linux XBMC box, but I gave it a try and it is working fine as a 2.1.5 client. It streams North American ATSC 1080i from my main PC server really well, but I have been disappointed with the CPU use for h264 from my HD-PVR at 58% CPU. That could be a decoder issue though since I can stream h264 with lower CPU using WMP.

Martin

[jcjefferies]

When the AMD E350 boards were mentioned several weeks ago the Atom/ION boards seemed to be more expensive but the ASUS AT3IONT-I seems to be considerably cheaper than their AMD E350 boards. I also have a preference for Nvidia graphics partly because there seems to be several threads around about problems with AMD graphics drivers. Unfortunately using these low end processors may mean that you cannot use catch up services like BBC iPlayer because they tend to be very processor intensive and I doubt they can use video acceleration.

[Bathman]

Until recently I used a Zotac Atom 330 Ion board. The unit was left on 24/7 used solely for NPVR and torrent download. I'm UK based and watch SD DVB-T and HD DVB-S programs. I put gig of ram in it.

It ran fine had no problems playing back content at all. Played HD TV and MP4 perfectly with very little CPU usage.

It could however get a little slow moving through the menus especially when recording a couple of channels and downloading a few torrent files at the same time.

Overall it was just good enough.

I was struggling for cash a few month back and flogged it on ebay and went back to a pentium m 2.0gz with a Geforce 210 card and overall this unit is better.

If I was doing it again (and I'm sure I will) I would want something with more poke that the current Atom line up

[tmrt]

Has anyone used a motherboard like the ASUS AT3IONT-I which uses Atom 330 processor and Nvidia ION graphics. It is similar to the AMD E350 based motherboards and is supposed to be able to process full HD with the on board graphics processor.

I am using it under linux as a client (I have not tried it with windows.) for NPVR using xnpvrcli (http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...t-for-NPVR). It handles noninterlaced full HD without any problems. When it comes to interlaced HD it is a bit on a weak side and it needs a lot of tweaking under linux. One needs 2 RAM sticks in both sockets to enable dual channel interleaved mode otherwise RAM is to slow even for SD deinterlacing (there is no separate ram for the graphic card). The advanced deinterlacing only works well for SD material. With HD the advanced deinterlacing modes do not work well because the hardware is to slow.