2013-04-24, 21:49
I bought one of this units back during Thanksgiving. Newegg was offering them a free SSD. I added 4 gigs of RAM and I could not be happier. Total cost of the system was $201.
Hint: Upgrade the BIOS to the newest version before you load any OS.
I've had this lil system on almost constantly since I've got it. That's about 5 months of every day use and abuse. It has impressed me so much that I bought another one. A few of my friends have bought them as well and are equally as impressed. I've had zero issues with it. It It was running Openelec 2.0. It plays high bit BluRay rips with no issues. These are MakeMKV rips with no compression. There is no video stuttering or artifacts at all The CPU usage is at 70% to 80%. Since upgrading to OpenElec 3.0 CPU usage has dropped to about 15% to 20%. This PC was made for OpenElec!
BTW - I also loaded Windows 7 as a test on one of these system. Loading the OS went smoothly. I copied the included OS to USB stick so loading the drivers went smoothly as well. What was really painful was loading all the windows updates. I believe the CPU has only a single DMA. The decompressing of files took forever. If you're loading Win7 let the file updates run over night. Loaded XBMC 12.1. I had zero playback issues as well. The menus were a bit laggy however.
Since the last AMD announcement regarding open source drivers, payback under Linux will continue to get better.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar..._uvd&num=1
Hint: Upgrade the BIOS to the newest version before you load any OS.
I've had this lil system on almost constantly since I've got it. That's about 5 months of every day use and abuse. It has impressed me so much that I bought another one. A few of my friends have bought them as well and are equally as impressed. I've had zero issues with it. It It was running Openelec 2.0. It plays high bit BluRay rips with no issues. These are MakeMKV rips with no compression. There is no video stuttering or artifacts at all The CPU usage is at 70% to 80%. Since upgrading to OpenElec 3.0 CPU usage has dropped to about 15% to 20%. This PC was made for OpenElec!
BTW - I also loaded Windows 7 as a test on one of these system. Loading the OS went smoothly. I copied the included OS to USB stick so loading the drivers went smoothly as well. What was really painful was loading all the windows updates. I believe the CPU has only a single DMA. The decompressing of files took forever. If you're loading Win7 let the file updates run over night. Loaded XBMC 12.1. I had zero playback issues as well. The menus were a bit laggy however.
Since the last AMD announcement regarding open source drivers, payback under Linux will continue to get better.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar..._uvd&num=1
