[boxr0xor]

I am having a hard time deciding between the Lenovo Q180/190 and Acer Veriton VN2620G. I have done a ton of research and can't really come up with a decided winner.

I am looking to retire my slimline PCs for nettops. My goal is to have a system that does not run as hot, not as noisy, lower power consumption, smaller form factor (for possibly mounting behind a wall-mounted LCD TV), and great XBMC compatibility and performance. I am currently getting good performance from my HP and Acer slimline HTPCs. I am not quite sure how the nettops will stack up performance wise with my current setups.

New nettop duties will dedicated to XBMC streaming and will be mainly SD content (DVD ISOs) from a wireless NAS and also internet content through XBMC addons. Both nettops will be connecting to wall-mounted LCD TVs using HDMI and the living room nettop will be connecting through a Yamaha 9.1 DTS receiver. Since the new nettops will strickly be wireless streaming boxes so I am not concerned with the size of the hard drive, memory, optical drive, or has an operating system. I am mostly looking for the best video performance. Both will be running Windows 7 and XBMC, Netflix and Hulu only.

Both of my current slimline HTPCs have nVidia graphics (geforce 9200 in the Acer and onboard 6150se in the HP). I just don't want to be disappointed in the video performance if choosing integrated Intel HD graphics or the slow performing Atom processors for running apps.

Looking to spend ~$200-300


Lenovo Q180:
Processor 2.13 GHz Atom D2700, Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6450A, DVDRW, Lenovo Enhanced Multimedia Remote N5902, Win7

Lenovo Q180:
Processor Atom D2550 processor (2 cores / 4 threads, 1.86GHz, 1MB cache), Graphics AMD Radeon HD 7450, DVDRW, Lenovo Enhanced Multimedia Remote N5902, Win7

Lenovo Q190:
Processor Celeron 887 1.5GHz 2GB 320GB, Graphics Intel HD, DVDRW, Lenovo Enhanced Multimedia Remote N5902, Win7

Veriton VN2620G-UC887L: (only $230!)
Processor Celeron 887 1.5GHz 2GB 320GB, Graphics Intel HD, no optical drive, standard USB keyboard and mouse Linux

[Dougie Fresh]

You'll find many, many glowing reviews here of the Celeron and it's integrated Intel HD graphics, especially if you plan to run OpenELEC. In my own testing of the slightly less powerful Celeron 847 it handled everything I threw at it.

[boxr0xor]

Thanks Dougie Fresh. Glad to hear the Celeron and it's integrated Intel HD graphics are good.

I just saw that the new Celeron 1017U (1.60GHz 2MB) equipped Lenovo Q190 is out.

Also, I read this on cpuworld: http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/20130..._2013.html
"Mobile "Haswell" Celerons will be available earlier, in Q4 2013, but before that the company will refresh the mobile lineup with two new Ivy Bridge processors. Celeron 1005M and 1017U will be released in Q3 2013, and they will have slightly higher performance than existing 1000M and 1007U chips."

It looks like the 1017U Celeron and Haswell Celeron would give a little performance boost. Would it be worth waiting for the Haswell Celeron nettops to become available? I think I can wait a few more months if so...

[milli]

I recently bought q190(with celeron 887) and checking it out currently. I have mixed feedback. I just found out some HD videos have macroblocking/artifacts with Intel HD graphics. You can search for intel dxva and you would find tons of them. Thought it is fixed in haswell but I just saw a posting in windows forum that the issue still exists.

Tried openelec which plays the same HD videos fine(may be 'cause the driver is different than the one on windows). However I noticed frame drops while playing DVD images which played fine on Windows.

Wanted to give XBMCUbuntu a try but couldn't get it installed correctly.

[boxr0xor]

Ok, so I ended up getting the Veriton VN2620G-UC887L with Limpus Linux for a measley $170 on sale. I am looking to try OpenElec for the first time but I dont have any experience with it and I am not sure which version to install. Any recommendations for OpenElec over installing Window 7 on this nettop?