[Papfox]

Hi,

I've been running OpenELEC on my Raspberry Pi for months. I love it but the Pi seems a little underpowered and has shown a tendency to hang up if you do anything whil eindexing media or if you leave it alone with the TV turned off for long enough. Frodo does seem to have improved this but it's still there. One option I have is to get the newer Pi with 512MB rather than the original 256MB model I have. I hope this might help with the hanging (I assume it's running out of something, probably RAM) but I think it will still be a little sluggish.

My local electronics store has a sale on until Monday. They're offering an MSI E350DM-E33 (Hudson) motherboard, an AMD Fusion E350 ZACATE Dual Core CPU clocked at 1.6GHZ and 4GB of RAM for £80. This seems like a really good deal to me. Is this a reasonable platform to run XBMC on Linux please? I can get a decent-looking case and PSU for £50 so I would be looking at around £140 for a complete machine (including a USB drive to boot it off) or should I just spend another £35 on a fat Pi?

I have 3D and I see that the board only supports HDMI 1.3 (so no 3D) but does XBMC do 3D anyway?

I'm not intending on having a hard drive in the HTPC as all my media is on a NAS. I'm going to boot off some kind of flash media. Bearing this in mind, how many watts should I be looking for in a PSU please?

Thanks,
Paul.

[nikc0069]

Coming from someone with an E350 and a 3d TV - it is a good buy as long as you are happy with sbs 3d- as the CPU on this board will not decode MVC so even if it had hdmi 1.4 it wouldn't do much good - but it outputs H-SBS no problems and looks relatively good.

I added a low profile nVidia GT610 to mine but still the only options for full 3d are TMT5 and PDVD12 - both of which get quite fussy with this board as the cpu power isn't immense (though if anyone can suggest a more lightweight player that does the full 3d on this setup then please let me know!)

[Papfox]

Thank you. I decided to bite the bullet and go for it.

My final buy list was an MSI E350DM-E33 motherboard bundle (E350-1.6 dual core, 4GB), a Novatech NOV-VISION media PC case, a Sandisk 64GB SATA SSD and a Novatech 2.5"-3.5" drive adaptor. All for under £200.

Compared with OpenELEC on my Raspberry Pi, it goes like stink (with 5x the CPU power and 16x the RAM, I would have been very disappointed if not ). It has more features (especially in the supported audio modes for my cinema amp) and the GUI is fast and fluid. I love it.

The NOV-VISION case was cheap at £50 and came with built-in media controls and a matching IR remote (the receiver/control button board is built into the case panel and attached to one of the internal USB connectors on the board). A real plus point I thought was that, if you connect all the right cables inside, the IR remote's standby button will switch the machine on from cold. I found the case a little flimsy when the top was off but I thought the quality was good enough for £50. It came with a 250W PSU that seems to be man enough for all the hardware listed above and a random DVD ROM drive I had kicking around. The only real down-side is that the PSU fan is a cheap sleeve-bearing one and is quite a bit louder than I would have wished for. I think I may crack the PSU open and replace the fan with a nicer one (Will void your warranty - Don't try this at home unless you're competent working inside devices containing mains electricity). The case is fine for my setup but I believe from other's comments that it would suffer cooling issues if the PSU was taxed too much or a full ATX board was put inside.

At the moment, all my 3D stuff is on Blu-Ray and I have a player. Having taken your comments on board, I think I will keep this as a 2D device and revisit 3D whenever I next do an upgrade.

Thanks,
Paul.

[nikc0069]

No problem - feel free to rep me Are you keeping your content on a server? If so just rip the blurays to half sbs for now and it will play them fine without any additional card and your tv will do the processing.

[The0ldman]

I have the NOV-VISION case and it gets really hot with my Amd A8 5600k. I have had to fit an 8cm intake fan on the bottom of the case, underclock and undervolt and take the back panel off our TV unit. It's a real shame about the heat issues because, apart from that, the case is a steal. I have swapped the remote for a logitech harmony and everything works fine (including the power on and off). The case is very similar to the Silverstone ML03b but that looks to have much better air flow, but costs more.