[protocol77]

hi guys i have a friend who wants me to put together a Openelec mini-itx machine and the first thing i though of is buying something like a AMD APU Fusion board like ASUS E45M1-M-PRO Motherboard

however as i have not used one of these before i am unsure how well Openelec handles AMD Radeon Graphics as i would be using the onboard Radeon HD 6320 graphics he wants to be able to watch 1080p video


i would assume this would work fine but unsure on radeon drivers on linux (as openelec is linux) so i though to be safe i would install a graphics card onto the board as it has a couple pci and pci-e slots but i would go for a nvidia card


so basically want i want to know is 3 things

1st is this a good board to go with as it is all built in i might be able to save a couple bucks

2nd are Radeon Graphics including the ones for this (HD 6320) well supported on openelec

3rd If needed is it possible to install a Nvidia card onto a AMD Board i have never tried i have always stuck with Intel CPU combined with Nvidia Card or AMD CPU with Radeon Card never mixed the two

[illiac4]

First of all this motherboard is not mini but micro.
Second I would buy rather Nvidia one because you will have much less troubles. I have owned ATI one and have faced a lot ot troubles in Linux with it so i have later decided to go with Nvidia platform.
I own http://www.zotac.com/products/mainboards...preme.html and it is rock stable for me. I am using linux.
If you are from USA you can also get the model D2700 but in EU it is impossible to find.
As far as i know also FernMenta uses the same setup so it is perfectly supported in this branch http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=116996

[Dougie Fresh]

The ASUS E45M1-M-PRO is a microATX board. Do you mean to do a micro-ATX or mini-ITX build as it says in your thread title?

For the money, you'd be better off getting a Celeron 847 motherboard. Not only will it be 2/3 the price (depending on where you are located) but it will have better support in OpenELEC. The Celeron 847 CPU is much faster. It has an PCIE x16 (running at x8) slot that you could put a Nvidia card into if you absolutely had too though you shouldn't. The AMD board is PCIe x16 running at x4. The Celeron's HD2000 GPU can handle 1080p with ease, especially with OpenELEC. There's a Celeron 847 thread, Intel NUC thread and Lenovo Q190 thread with information about how the Celeron mobile chip performs if you want to read up on those.

ASUS and Gigabyte have Celeron 847 boards with HDMI, USB3, all the bells and whistles.

BTW, even though the heatsink on the E-450 is fanless, they run very hot you'll still need a case fan to keep it cool.