MSI J800I opinions?

[LeeC22]

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this board in a system? I am looking at building a small Steam streaming PC and this board seems to fit the bill.

My current list of components is as follows:

Silverstone SST-ML06B USB 3.0 Milo Slim HTPC, Mini-ITX - Black
J1800I Intel MSI Mini-ITX Motherboard with Celeron J1800 Dual-core 2.41Ghz CPU
Corsair Memory 2GB DDR3 SO-DIMM PC3-10600 (1333) x 2
CIT 400W micro-ATX Power Supply (PSU)
Cherry DW 3000 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse

I have only included that PSU as it's the smallest I could find on the site I was picking the components from, so I could reduce the power of that if I find a lower powered unit. That all currently totals approximately £142. I haven't added a HD because I have a spare 60GB SSD that I can use.

 

[LeeC22]

I'm sorry, I don't understand your response.

Have you used a J1800I board, found it unsuitable and used an Am1 system instead? If so, what problems did you have with the J1800I? Considering an Am1 system would be more expensive, what benefits did you get from using a more expensive setup, that would be relevant in using it as a Steam streaming client? Are Am1 CPUs somehow better suited to Steam streaming?

I have always followed the general consensus that you never answer a question with another question, as it doesn't actually answer anything, so I am perplexed by your comment. Could you please clarify your reasoning?

 

[LeeC22]

I did actually build my system, based on the J1800I, I was just curious as to why I got a "why don't you use x?" type response when I was asking about opinions on a specific item. Quite often you get that because the person only has that alternate hardware, which is fine, but it doesn't address the question in any way.

The current J1800I bios now supports pretty much anything, it was locked to Win 8/8.1, but not anymore. I tried Windows 7, OpenElec, Ubuntu 12.10 and SteamOS and all installed with no real problems. The problem came from the Intel HD driver support, which I discovered Valve added in the Beta update last August.

So I installed Ubuntu 14.04, joined the Beta programme to get the update, and with an extra libva package, now have full hardware decoding. As a result, I get full 60fps decoding @1680x1050 (resolution dictated by my main PC monitors running a pair of NEC 20WGX2 Pro monitors), with an average latency of around 7ms - 14ms. The beauty is, that the GPU only has to really handle decoding, and it does that no problem.

I suspect that if you gave someone the controller, they would fully believe that the streaming computer was actually playing the game maxed out... I'm quite impressed.

The whole thing is housed in the Akasa Crypto X1 case, so it's completely silent, small and takes up far less room in the living room, than the Coolermaster Cosmos case that my main PC is in. In fact, it sits quite nicely in my AV rack, which is exactly what I wanted it to do.

I appreciate that there are always better CPUs and better GPUs, but sometimes, getting something that just does the required task, is often the right option. It will never have to do more than it is doing right now, so in that sense, it turned out to be the perfect option.