First ITX Build : Zotac Atom N330 Dual

HEADRAT · 24 Jun 2009 at 09:31

Hi,

Well I thought I'd put together a new HCPC so I went for:-

Hardware
=======

Zotac ION Motherboard with Intel Atom N330 Dual Core Wi-Fi Mini-ITX Motherboard ( with 90w PSU )

Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive SATA300 7200rpm 32MB Cache

Silverstone SST LC03 Black (Was gathering dust in the cupboard)

2 x Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) (Had these lying about)

Software
=======

Vista Ultimate x32

WifiRemote (Allows you to control Media Center from Iphone)

Wake on Oui (Allows you to wake up a sleeping PC with a Magic Packet from Iphone)

I plan to retire my Popcorn Hour A-110.

Cheers

HEADRAT

bledd · 24 Jun 2009 at 11:30

nice

I'm sorely tempted to get the intel 330 board for an xp pro media server

Deadude · 24 Jun 2009 at 21:22

Are these boards good enough to play 1080p video very tempted to get one for downstairs...?

HEADRAT · 24 Jun 2009 at 22:20

Yes there fine.

surfermc · 24 Jun 2009 at 23:21

Deadude said:
Are these boards good enough to play 1080p video very tempted to get one for downstairs...?

Yes they will as long as you use hardware acceleration of the GPU

PaulyJay · 25 Jun 2009 at 00:18

Pretty much what I'm going for apart from a smaller case, tv card and a Xbox 360 as a media extender instead of hooking the Atom straight up to the TV. I've got a similar setup at the moment using an aging SD11G5 and it can no longer cope with VMC

HEADRAT · 25 Jun 2009 at 08:05

surfermc said:
Yes they will as long as you use hardware acceleration of the GPU

Indeed, good point

isoToxin · 25 Jun 2009 at 12:23

Deadude said:
Are these boards good enough to play 1080p video very tempted to get one for downstairs...?

Agree that they are fine using hw acceleration (nvidia purevideo) which is fully supported by the 9300/9400.

Something I have found though is that if you need subtitles (e.g. for foreign language films), you *won't* be able to use the "purevideo" GPU acceleration. Purevideo relies on having a direct path from codec to display and any additional rendering filters placed between will result in fallback to software decoding. So for example, the directvobsub.dll filter will cause this problem.

The easy solution is to use the latest CoreAVC codec, which uses CUDA acceleration instead (shader acceleration). It only uses a little more CPU than the purevideo route doing it this way (still well within the capabilities of an atom I would think), and it allows for additional filters to be used.

Btw, if I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me. It's based on my findings with the Zotac 9300-ITX board, XP pro, and Media Player Classic - Home Cinema.