[famulor]

One plus for the ChromeBox is that it comes with a SSD and RAM, as well as a wifi/BT card, so the only thing you need to add is a remote (and possibly an IR receiver). And while it requires a little bit of hacking to initially set up, 99% of the issues encountered are documented (with mitigation) on the wiki. All you need is the base Celeron/2GB/16GB model.

So we agree that its the M118U? What sort of issues can i expect and when you say "a little bit of hacking" what does that cover?

In terms of bang-for-the-buck, I think the NUC is the best one that I've seen that fits into the "hockey puck" style computers. If you want to go with something larger, ASRock mini-itx boards are nice. I like the NUC because of its size and having IR, BT and dual-band WiFi all built in. Just add some RAM and the storage medium of choice (SD, SSD or HD) and it's good to go. All those USB 3.0 ports are nice too. It has an internal header for USB 2, but nobody seems to make a cable that you can hook up to it. If it had display port or HDMI 2 and an M.2 slot it would be perfect, but then Intel would be hard pressed to sell their next model. As it stands, it's still an excellent choice for a self-contained media center especially with h.265 capabilities, just no 4K @ 60fps, oh well you can't expect to have everything for $170.

Thanks, I've never added to a wiki before, I might need some guidance on that. First, I have to get 7.1 passthrough and the IR port working. It's been a really long time (>10years) since I last battled with LIRC, so I'm sure that I'm in for a real learning experience again. It's been that long since I last played with MythTV as well. I have to say it's gotten a lot more stable (once you get it working), but it's still pretty temperamental about getting things the way it likes, especially with MythWeb. I tried several different distros (regular Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint), but I had a bunch of trouble with each one trying to get everything working, so I went back to Mythbuntu since it brings the lightest weight desktop and a working MythTV to the table. The trick is not breaking things while doing outside the box kernel and package upgrades to get the Braswell hardware all working. VAAPI acceleration was a real chore to figure out until I found the right ppa, then it just worked more or less. Hopefully pulseaudio will upgrade as well since Mythbuntu only comes with version 4. They are up to 7 now, and it's only about a month old. Hopefully, I won't have to go that far to get 7.1 support and pass through working with the HDMI port.

EDIT: BTW, it does appear that the IR is capable of transmission as well as receive. That's pretty neat IMO. The hardware also has near-field capabilities. I have no idea about how that works yet. That will be way down the list of my priorities I'm afraid.

The only NUC i can find in that pricerange is the Intel NUC Celeron N2820 2.5" Barebone. Is that the one you are talking about?

[noggin]

The only NUC i can find in that pricerange is the Intel NUC Celeron N2820 2.5" Barebone. Is that the one you are talking about?

No - that's the previous generation NUC - no H265 hardware support and quite underpowered with a low-spec GPU.

Suspect the NUC in question is either the NUC5PPYH or NUC5CPYH. They are the Pentium N3700 and Celeron N3050 Brawell NUCs recently launched. The N2820 is a previous-generation Baytrail Celeron model, probably best avoided now.

[afremont]

I bought the NUC5PPYH which is a quad core Pentium running at 2.4GHz. I got it from Microcenter for $170. I paid about $24 for 4GB of DDR3L 1600 RAM and $50 for a 1TB 2.5" HD from Best Buy. Microcenter sells the Celeron based NUC5CPYH for $130. For running OE, you don't need an HD; an SD card will do fine.

You have to use DDR3L (1.35V) RAM, 1.5V memory will not work.

Here's a link to a Celeron NUC for $130.
http://www.microcenter.com/product/45172...nes_PC_Kit

I don't know how well the Celeron performs, but it only has 2 cores whereas the Pentium has 4, so.... Another poster tried Windows 8 on the Celeron version and wasn't very happy with the performance. I find the Pentium version to run regular Linux distros pretty well. The GUI in kodi on the Pentium runs very well on top of a full Linux distro, OE from a flash card is even better since it is so well optimized. I haven't tried OE from an HD, but it's probably not much (if any) faster. That said, OE from an SSD should be quite impressive. I still think that if you're just going to run OE, the RPi2 makes more sense in terms of bang for the buck. The NUC is serious overkill for a kodi only box.

I would stay away from the 2820. As I understand, it has some CPU problem that affects the USB ports. Intel is discontinuing the processor and replacing it with a 2830. I don't know a lot about the 2820, but the NUC5CPYH has more ports and an IR transceiver built in. I think that makes it worth the extra $10 that Amazon charges for it. Personally, I couldn't resist spending the extra $40 to get two more cores that run faster.

Now for my opinion. Unless I'm missing something, I don't get why the Chromebox is so hot. It's so low end on everything, 1.4GHz Celeron, 2GB RAM and a measly 16GB SSD. You can buy the RAM and SSD for like $35 total bringing the NUC5CPYH in at less than $170 and it has HD5000 graphic vs HD4000, 4 USB 3 ports, BT 4.0, IR transceiver and dual band wifi. To me it's a no-brainer, the new NUC machines blow the Chromebox away. You don't even have to hack anything since the NUC was designed to be a PC from the start. For the $300 the M118U costs, you can get a NUC5PPYH (4 core Pentium 2.4GHz) and outfit it with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Am I missing something here?

[noggin]

Now for my opinion. Unless I'm missing something, I don't get why the Chromebox is so hot. It's so low end on everything, 1.4GHz Celeron, 2GB RAM and a measly 16GB SSD. You can buy the RAM and SSD for like $35 total bringing the NUC5CPYH in at less than $170 and it has HD5000 graphic vs HD4000, 4 USB 3 ports, BT 4.0, IR transceiver and dual band wifi. To me it's a no-brainer, the new NUC machines blow the Chromebox away. You don't even have to hack anything since the NUC was designed to be a PC from the start. For the $300 the M118U costs, you can get a NUC5PPYH (4 core Pentium 2.4GHz) and outfit it with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Am I missing something here?

The key advantage of the Chromebox is that it has a Haswell Celeron, not a rebadged Atom. Totally different CPU core family, as it is based on the same CPU design as the Core i-3/5/7 series, rather than the lower powered CPU design used by Atom. This absolutely blew the Baytrail N2820 away in performance terms. The Braswells are a different matter though.

In CPU benchmark terms :

2955U Dual Core @ 1.4GHz : Passmark 1475 (Single threaded 794) (Haswell)
N2820 Dual Core @ 2.13GHZ : Passmark 993 (Single threaded 520) (Baytrail)
N3050 Dual Core @1.6GHz : Passmark 809 (Single threaded 415) (Braswell)
N3700 Quad Core @ 1.6GHZ : Passmark 1824 (Single threaded 529) (Braswell)

As you can see the Haswell 2955U in the Chromebox has a much higher performing core design, as given by its single threaded performance. It runs at a lower clock speed, but delivers the highest performance per core. The N3700 has a higher overall CPU performance, but achieves this by using double the number of cores. The N3700's individual cores are not as powerful as those on the 2955U. Single threaded performance can play quite a big impact in some areas - as lots of software isn't fully optimised for multithreading (which is how you optimise for multiple cores) This explains why the Chromebox usually feels pretty snappy and responsive.

The GPU in the Baytrail N2820 is also very underpowered compared to the Haswell and Braswell devices, which is why the N3050 may well be a much better bet than the N2820 though it benchmarks slightly worse in CPU terms, this is offset by the GPU improvements.

HOWEVER Braswell has HEVC (8 bit?) hardware decode - which is a potential advantage for a new device.

[afremont]

I see your points there, for single threaded apps, the 2955u has a moderate advantage. OTOH, as even playback from kodi is mulithreaded, the 3700 rocks it. I still think in terms of bang for the buck, the Chromebox is lacking in a few areas including graphics performance. All things being equal (though they never really are) I think the NUC5PPYH (N3700) is the best thing out there. It's only $170, though you do have to add RAM and storage, but 2GB of RAM and 16GB of SSD is really cheap these days, not to mention really small. Those components would barely push the NUC over $200 before tax, though I did find a Chromebox 2955u for $150 at Newegg. With 4GB RAM and 1TB Toshiba 2.5" HD, I'm barely over $250 including tax.

In the end, I guess I can agree that the Chromebox isn't all that bad, but it isn't all that great either when you consider the NUC Pentium has built in BT, IR and dual band wifi. The Chromebox does have a display port though and I see your point about performance vs. clock speed. Thermal dissipation is high on the 2955U, it's going to be much more noisy. Plus it's a Celeron.

cpu-world doesn't much care for the 2955U:
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/593/Int...N3700.html

There base frequency in their chart is incorrect as far as I can tell. I see the N3700 idling at around 500MHz per core. It also tops out at 2500MHz even though Intel claims 2400 is the limit. I'm getting my numbers from /proc/cpuinfo running various kernel versions.

Here's another comparison (written in German, but Google will happily translate it for you). Outside of single core activities, the N3700 kicked its butt.
http://www.technikaffe.de/cpu_vergleich-..._n3700-510

Me thinks that the N3700 is just better in too many ways to justify buying a 2955U today. Two years ago, different story.

[Matt Devo]

Me thinks that the N3700 is just better in too many ways to justify buying a 2955U today. Two years ago, different story.

regional price/availability plays a big part here too. The 2955U-based ChromeBoxes were available for $125 new for a time (in the US), which made them an untouchable value. At $150 now vs ~$220 for a N3700-based NUC w/ram, ssd (cheapest I could outfit it), I'd say its less compelling, but still the best low-cost x86 setup one can buy. Besides overall power comsumption, the N3700's only real advantage from a Kodi perspective is GPU decoding of HEVC, which isn't all that compelling at the moment due to lack of content.

PS - I'm sure you are aware, but the Atom/Celeron/Pentium designations are purely marketing driven, so saying the 2955U is 'just a celeron' really doesn't hold, since it's really just a slightly lower clocked Core i3-U without hyperthreading.

[noggin]

Thermal dissipation is high on the 2955U, it's going to be much more noisy. Plus it's a Celeron.

But it's a Core-i based Celeron, not a relabelled Atom

[A-Swiss]

I have the ASRock Beebox N3150. Installed with latest Openelec (5.95.5). I added a 250GB mSATA SSD and 2 x 8 GB DualChannel DDR3L SODimm.
It plays all you need, and with 2 HDMI & 1 Display Port (1.2) you can connect to Full HD TV or 4K Monitor.
4K h265/HEVC is only played with max 30p (24p is sufficient for most Movies). If 4K is not a Key Feature - the Beebox gets my 100% Recommendation.
Reboot takes about 12-15 Seconds until its ready to use... faster than most of the BD Drives.
Music DB Scraping took about 6 hours (NFS Mount, Gigabit LAN, 4600 Album, 83000 Tracks) including the donwload of add. Interpret Pics.
Movie DB took around 1 hour (can't remember, for 1400 MKV (1080p)

If it must be cheap, go for the barebone model, add 2 x 2 GB RAM, and a 64 GB mSATA SSD is sufficient für Openelec... Price would be less than 300$.
at startup, you will hear the fan speed up - after 2 seconds - no fan hearable anymore - even after 2 hours of 100% CPU, it remains silent.
temp. will raise to 56 - 61° C. with 100% CPU - during Movie Play, its below 56° C.

[afremont]

@matt, given the $40 lower price, would you still say the 2955U Chromebox is a better deal than the NUC5CPYH N3050? I really like the built in IR transceiver and BT on the NUC. The 3050 seems to compare okay with the 2955U in various comparisons out there. I do like the display port on the Chromebox though vs the VGA dsub on the NUC.

BTW, where are you getting the Chromebox for $150, Microcenter wants $170 for an ASUS Chromebox-M004U? They're $160 on Amazon.

Personally, I just don't find an M2 16GB SSD all that attractive, maybe that's just me. Microcenter currently has a PNY 240GB SSD for $70, that's not a bad deal IMO. I like the fact that you can put a standard 2.5" drive (SSD or HD) in the NUC. It would have been nice if the NUC had room for both.

I was just kidding about the Celeron thing. Like you said, there is a lot of marketing tripe at work here with Core vs Atom vs Pentium vs Celeron.

@noggin It might only be an Atom, but in terms of performance per Watt, it stomps the others in the ground.

[noggin]

Personally, I just don't find an M2 16GB SSD all that attractive, maybe that's just me. Microcenter currently has a PNY 240GB SSD for $70, that's not a bad deal IMO. I like the fact that you can put a standard 2.5" drive (SSD or HD) in the NUC. It would have been nice if the NUC had room for both.

If all you need is OpenElec, then the 16GB M2 SSD is a pretty good fit. It boots very quickly and OE isn't disk intensive.

@noggin It might only be an Atom, but in terms of performance per Watt, it stomps the others in the ground.

Yep - though the Chromebox is hardly burning up Megawatts, and the additional performance over the N3050 is definitely worth having IMO UNLESS you need HEVC, then the N3050 is definitely the better bet. The N3700 looks to be a very good 'best of both worlds' device though.

As for VGA vs Displayport - I'm not sure I'd use either device in dual display, but VGA is kind of useless to me these days (and as I live in 50Hz land it's pointless having a non-50Hz compatible display output)

[Sunflux]

Yeah, for a standalone OpenElec box designed to play files on a NAS, the 16gb SSD is plenty big enough. In fact, I still have 14gb free. :-)

[afremont]

Why won't the VGA output do 50Hz? I was under the impression that display port was capable of 4k at 60Hz vs HDMI 1.4 being only able to do 30Hz at 4k resolution, but I don't know if that's exactly true. Not that any of that matters to me since my max TV resolution is 1920x1080p. I still have one TV that can only do 720p, but it still looks okay to my old eyes.

I have to admit that 4k displays in the store sure do look good. Too bad there isn't much 4k content yet and I don't think the standard is completely set yet either, though I might be wrong on that.

I like my 3700 NUC, but I have plans to use it for much more than just OE or Kodi. I have mythbuntu on it now along with Kodi. It doesn't boot as fast as OE, but it's up in around 30 seconds or so from a regular HD. It's completely usable as an Internet browser and for mild development. I'm not sure I'd want to build a kernel or AOSP on it, but it's snappy enough for casual things. I'm just amazed at what they can pack into a <5" square box 2" thick.

I have an I3 based Mythbuntu backend for my home stuff. It has a 5TB HD for media storage (soon to add another) and boots from a 60GB SSD that I had laying around. I'm not saying the 3700 is as fast because it isn't, but it's not extremely far behind and it's certainly a whole lot smaller in size. The 3700 could easily do the job that it has to do, it would just need some kind of external storage to keep up with the capacity. I have it running with a Hauppauge USB tuner stick and it doesn't have any problems handling that for live TV or recording, but then it shouldn't either. My main myth back-end uses two HDHomerun boxes for TV. I really like those things, they "just work".

I plan to use my NUC as a portable demonstrator for potential cable cutting customers since it's a small, self-contained full media system. I still have some wrinkles to iron out, but it's coming together nicely. I've got VAAPI working on it and I made some progress with the IR receiver last night. With kernel 4.2.1, everything works hardware wise. I really wish Netflix and Amazon could be integrated with Kodi the right way.

Those SDXC flash cards aren't that bad for booting something like standalone OE. I tested mine with HDPARM and it does 60MB/sec. It claims it can do >90MB/s on the package, but you know how that goes.

[noggin]

Why won't the VGA output do 50Hz?

Analogue VGA, for some reason, doesn't usually support 50Hz refresh. It isn't part of the VGA standard(s) and most displays and sources that are capable of 50Hz via DVI-D (or the D bit of I), HDMI and DP don't support it via VGA.

[famulor]

All this talk is getting confusing Is my best option to go with the beebox? (N3000/N3150) or the Asus chromebox? (Is it the M118U or?) and if its the chromebox what else do i need to buy for it? something for flirc?


Btw can i with either box make it boot up into Kodi?

[afremont]

I think they might be talking about the M004U:
http://www.amazon.com/Asus-CHROMEBOX-M00...rds=odroid

If you only need it for playback of network stored media, I recommend the Raspberry Pi. For wayyyy under $100, you can get playback of most everything, but H.265 (HEVC). It will play that too, but maybe not as well as you'd like. I don't have any firsthand experience with files of that type, but I do know that OpenELEC is developing support for that. The Pi will play 3D video as well. As it is Arm based, it's not going to run windows or even be very good at internet surfing, but it's not terrible at that either assuming you get a Raspberry Pi2 with quad cores. I have two in my home and they work very well for running OpenELEC from a micro-SD flash card. They don't have built in IR, BT or WiFi, but all of that can be achieved by connecting to one of the 4 USB2 ports. They have built in 100Mb/S Ethernet and combined with one of these (http://www.amazon.com/Ortek-Windows-Infr...B00224ZDFY) it will "just work" out of the box once you copy OpenELEC to the flash card.

If you "need" more power, internal storage capability, built in Wifi, BT and/or IR ability, or you simply wish to be able to run Windows or a full Linux distro of your choice, then by all means buy something with a 3050 (dual core Celeron), 3150 (quad core Celeron) or 3700 (quad core Pentium), but be prepared to invest approximately $200 in it. Many of these boxes contain fans as well, so if you're really concerned about absolutely silent operation, keep that in mind. I recommend avoiding a 2955 based box, but that's just me; others will disagree.

As for which one you want, just find one with the abilities you desire. You will have to decide if you want built in IR, WiFI, a 2.5" drive area or M.2 SSD and how much storage you really want inside. I've hacked a lot of devices in my day, but I haven't had the pleasure of doing a Chromebox so I can't tell you how much work is involved.

Again, if you just want playback and are going to dedicate the device to that, don't be afraid of the Raspberry Pi. I've got 4 of them, 2 are single core B+ boxes and 2 are quad core Pi2s. The Pi2s in my house are dedicated to driving home theater systems. The main one is an Optima projector with 7.1 surround sound, the other is a 65" "smart" TV connected to my old 5.1 surround system. Both work excellently and give me very little trouble, even though the main one runs nightly OpenELEC builds on the bleeding edge. The other runs the currently released version of OE. They are network connected to a MythTV back-end running an I3 with Mythbuntu (way overkill, but I use it for other things besides MythTV). Two network streaming HDHomerun devices are my TV tuners and are connected to an outdoor antenna.

One of my B+ boxes replaced an old dual processor Pentium-II MAPI mail server. It's severely underworked too, but at least it's not buring up 150W of power all the time. The other B+ has the camera option installed and I use it for general tinkering as I like to do the embedded thing in electronics. Everything works very well. The mail server deserves special mention since it has been subjected to way too many power blinks from the electric company and a particularly nasty surge that actually damaged some other equipment in my home, including taking out another full size PC server. I've yet to experience any data loss issues with it. It's running Raspbian and so is the other B+. They will run X, but it's painful since they are single core boxes. The Pi2 runs X about as well as my quad core Pentium NUC that has a real hard drive in it. I would't want it to be my only internet browsing machine, but it does work.

I also have an experimental "dumb" TV that uses an Amazon Fire TV Stick to smarten it up. The Fire TV Stick also runs Kodi and connects to the MythTV backend the same as the Pi devices. Everything has a very consistent look and feel though each one has different remote control devices.

I may be beating a dead horse by suggesting the Pi, but I feel that it's not being treated as a viable alternative by many folks. Even though it's on the low end of things in terms of raw power and flexibility, it makes a great device for hosting OpenELEC especially in a dedicated role. In my personal experience, outside of installing Kodi in Windows, it's been the easiest device to set up and maintain. It can be a bit fussy about HDMI cables, but I also found the NUC to be somewhat the same in that respect.

One other thing I'd like to add, is the problems I had with trying to use a standard Linux distro with the NUC. I tried several, including Mint, Debian and regular Ubuntu 14.04. I had some trouble with the Braswell based NUC I own in getting 7.1 channel sound out of it and with pass through. The wifi didn't work with a version 3.x kernel and neither did VAAPI graphics acceleration. I had some other minor issues as well, such as the kernel spewing out messages every few seconds, until I upgraded to a version 4.2 kernel, downloaded the right firmware from Intel for the WiFi and installed some pulseaudio thingys. I will say though, that OpenELEC had none of these issues when I installed a pre-release beta build of it. Such is life when you're running the latest hardware. Windows users still don't have video acceleration with Braswell and they're running Windows. Linux is actually ahead of the curve on that thanks to people like Fritsch and others that give away their free time so that others (me included) get to ride for free.