To wait for Ion or not?

iaind · 8 Mar 2009 at 14:57

Afternoon guys.

At the moment, I have a laptop (with 160gb storage) and a PS3 - I stream videos to the PS3 but I'm a bit fed up with slow responses with transcoding etc.

So, I want to build a PC as small as possible (I dont have a lot of space on my media cabinet!) for media duties. I was hoping for something about the size of a Mac mini, maybe a bit bigger because I want a 3.5" 1Tb HD and a BluRay drive.

I would just have my iTunes music collection and some HD (720p only) video on it.

At the moment, I'm looking at something like one of the mini ITX board with an Atom dual core CPU and 2gb RAM. Question is, would it be worth waiting for Ion motherboards to be released, or should I save the money and just get a standard Atom board?

jellybeard999 · 8 Mar 2009 at 18:57

I'd go with the spec you suggest, in a noah case maybe ?

They're cheap enough, and if ion will offer any benefit later, you can always upgrade.

iaind · 8 Mar 2009 at 19:09

Yeh, thats what I was thinking. Should be able to do the lot for about the £200 mark with a standard Atom board.
Apparently the Atom will play 720p but not 1080p, whereas the Ion will do 1080p with low CPU usage and maybe a bit of light gaming.

Guardsmon · 8 Mar 2009 at 19:34

if you can stetch over £200 you could get a Socket M mini-itx board and something like a T2600 or T2350 (cheaper). Then bang something like a HD4350/HD4550 in? Think the most expensive part is the motherboard.