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I have removed the PSU that came with my case and installed a PicoPSU rated at 80watts. I made a blanking plate to cover the hole left by the PSU with a hole drilled into it for the PicoPSU connector. I now get the following power results on an ASRock EM350M1 mobo;

Off - 0.6 watts
Idle (Windows desktop) - 18 watts
Idle (xbmc home screen) - 26 watts
Load (xbmc 720p DD) - 21 watts
Standby - 2.6 watts

Taking out the supplied PSU has also lowered my temps by about 5C.

Specs:

Case: Compucase 8k01 MiniITX
Motherboard: ASRock E350M1 (APU fan running at approx 3000 RPM)
RAM: 4GB Patriot DDR3-1333 CL9
HDD: WD 2.5" 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM
Case fan: Fractal Design 60mm Silent series running at 1000 RPM
PSU: PicoPSU 80watts
Storage: Netgear ReadyNAS DUO with 2x 1TB HDD in XRAID.
Remote: Ortek VRC-1100 & official xbmc Android app on HTC Desire.

Windows7 Professional 64bit.
XBMC 10.1 with Neon skin.

David

Very good results! Thanks for sharing Could you list the restof the specs as well?

Vicky, how did you get sleep mode to work on MSI?

fu with 11.04 Natty minimal, my selfbuild xbmc with VAAPI enabled crashes if i try to play a movie:

http://www.abload.de/img/img_0151omv7.jpg

VAAPI should work so far or?

MSI Zacate E-350

Edit:

Laserfreak got it running using 10.10, this would be my next try. With natty, i am able to install the latest 8.840 amd catalyst normaly, on 10.10 i did an manual 11.3 installation.

Does anybody got XBMC running on a zacate system with ubuntu using vaapi?

The all over XBMC speed seems to be good so far.

wicky Wrote:Very good results! Thanks for sharing Could you list the restof the specs as well?

Specs added to post #91

David

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=81286&page=13

Anybody able to help with zacate using natty and vaapi?

Looks like I'm the first to kill a zacate! Lol, not sure what happened, but it's completely dead. Temps were fine and had no issues, but after shutting it down to sort out a rats nest of cables in my cabinet, it doesn't boot up anymore. Good think I kept my e3200 build in the corner lol.

Heres hoping this is just bad luck.

oh boy wicky O.O thats sucks man!!

Hope its just acting up and that it'll eventually boot!

I too had my share of problems with my current HTPC...

altho not a ZACATE build, i encountered a BSOD twice so far....

First time happend when i was booting the PC for the first times...
it did it once but never saw it again since updating the drivers of my mobo..

but then, 2 months later, which is actually today,
after installing/playing around with the Realtek HD Audio drivers
i suspect my system had a rough time 'accepting them'
and gave me a BSOD while i was empty'ing the Recycle Bin...

But ive been monitoring the PC all day and having it play movies
and so far so good, seems stable and no BSOD encountered so Far....

Doesn't boot or power up or gives video?

You sort a rat nest of cables? Sure you don't leave something loose?

Tried a ClrCmos?

Sure isn't the PSU?

hehe, yea the ghost in the machine certainly does like to cause trouble from time to time xD

The system was running great and had no issues, but I shut it down and unplugged it so I could sort out all the wires that go into the 2 cabinets, one which houses the HTPC itself and the other for the UPS and network switch. Everything is plugged in, and my first thought was that the the external power brick had died, wouldn't be the first time either. But after swapping that, and trying an ATX unit, along with different ram, I still get no life out of it at all. Just seems like a total system failure. I did notice some discoloration around the power circuitry that feeds the DIMM slots, but I don't see any damage.

I'm sure its just a bit of bad luck, I've had my share of it recently lol. But figured I'd give you guys a heads up, these chips haven't been out for long and you never know when a defect is gunna pop up. I'll give it another shot tomorrow, but it seems completely dead. Not even powering the fans. I've already emailed MSI about an RMA, and in the mean time I'll probably continue to tinker..but yea...stone dead from the looks of it.

I'm thinking once I get it back I'll just sell it and see how well the LGA 1155 I3 2100T performs. A 35w sandybridge at 2.5ghz will certainly be quite interesting. Obviously it wont match the Atom/Zacate platforms for power efficiency but I am willing to bet it'll sit between the likes of them and the Core based systems like my trust E3200. In fact with the advanced power gating I bet it won't actually be that far off from Atom/Zacate.

Anybody happen to know if the HD 2000 has decent DXVA acceleration within XBMC? I still think I'll stick with a dedicated GPU unless it has decent support and allows me to keep power consumption down.

Realtek drivers, go figure . On my main PC the realtek LAN drivers were crapping on me twice a day. Went back to the default MS drivers in Win7 and all my problems got fixed.

As for the dead board, real bummer. Possible the PSU was crappy and short-circuited something when you unplugged it.

wicky Wrote:I'm thinking once I get it back I'll just sell it and see how well the LGA 1155 I3 2100T performs. A 35w sandybridge at 2.5ghz will certainly be quite interesting. Obviously it wont match the Atom/Zacate platforms for power efficiency but I am willing to bet it'll sit between the likes of them and the Core based systems like my trust E3200. In fact with the advanced power gating I bet it won't actually be that far off from Atom/Zacate.

Anybody happen to know if the HD 2000 has decent DXVA acceleration within XBMC? I still think I'll stick with a dedicated GPU unless it has decent support and allows me to keep power consumption down.

I am thinking of getting the i3-2100 or soon to be released i3-2105. In terms of power, I read somewhere that the 2100 compared very favorably to the 2100T so why not go for the extra processing power. Somewhere on this forum another member is having issues using hardware acceleration with the 2100 but you shouldnt need it with this chip unless you are streaming full bluray rips. Regarding power, woudnt a chip with its built in gpu use less power than a chip and a dedicated gpu? Looking forward to your findings with the i3.

well, my Zacate system works fine under 10.10 minimal too and 1080p VAAPI works fine too with XBMC.

Switching LiveTV channels is as fast as with Intel i3.

@wicky


DXVA works fine with all Clarkdale and Sandy Bridge GPUs

Under Ubuntu it works fine too.

I know technically the integrated graphics support the features I need, I was just looking for some confirmation that people have had problem free usage with XBMC GPU acceleration. So thanks guys for the input, really good to know!

A 2100T is extremely low power for the performance it offers and should be a considerable boost over the e3200/e350 systems I've been using lately. I don't intend to use a dedicated GPU if the IGP can provide performance and quality that I like, fewer components brings down the power consumption, heat output, and bill of parts...so all things I like to focus on :p

The 2105 will be interesting as it should pack the HD 3000 graphics instead of the HD 2000, but if the 2000 is sufficient for XBMC then I'm probably not going to bother waiting. The 2100T has a 35w TDP as opposed to the 65w TDP of the rest in the class, and that is pretty impressive. The Core based Celeron 430 I had used prior to upgrading to the e3200 was a 35w part, and that was just a 1.8ghz single core. AMD has some solid 45w parts, including the 600e series Athlon II X4 parts, but given the load this system typically sees, I don't think I can really justify the 4 cores, so for lighter or single-threaded loads the sandybridge architecture is far superior.

As for the 2100T vs the 2100, yea there will be a notable jump in performance jumping from 2.5ghz to 3.1, but it will be sufficiently fast enough. The classic e3200/Athlon II X2 builds run things as smooth as can be really, so I don't think I need to pursue the maximum performance, rather I'd like to focus on performance per watt. Plus it will be an interesting comparison, taking a fast chip and not stressing it to hell and back might actually be more efficient than taking a slower chip and forcing it to work much harder. It won't beat atom or zacate, but it might just be the sweet spot I'm looking for between those and 65w mainstream chips.

*edit

It seems before I even got the chance to test my theories, xbit labs beat me to it! Check out their comparison here. If xbmc can utilize quicksync then it could actually be a lower power platform than zacate or atom. Thanks to the advanced power gating idle power is actually lower as well. But under typical loads, atom and zacate are clear winners. Shouldn't be a big surprise, but it still manages to out perform everything in it's class without any real draw backs.

Also note some of the complaints about the gigabyte board, apparently it has rather shotty power delivery circuitry, lending to it's poor efficiency compared to better designed boards like the MSI e350 boards. Idle power on the MSI platform was as low as 7.3wcompared to 15.8w. 1080p power consumption was also shotty, 22.4 vs 14.9.

So NOT all e350 platforms are made equal. Cheap and inefficient components really can bring down all of AMDs hard work. Also note they used a standard atx psi, which is far less efficient at these loads so I guess these results may not be 100% accurate, but the difference can't be entirely based on that fact. Certainly I still think it's significant, and would be advising against the gigabyte on those grounds. Anyone looking to shave as much power as possible should be advised of this.

So they knew that the Gygabite mobo was flawed yet they included it in the benchmarks. Good job on being unbiased.

Anyway, the Core i3 2100 + the mobo combination still costs 2 times or more than the Zacate platform, beating the main purpose of the Zacate -> Cheapest hardware to build a 200$ HTPC than can compete with media streamers on price & power consumption while beating the hell out of them when it comes to the GUI and features (i.e running XBMC).

Like comebody commented on the article :

Quote:Readers first scan the bar plots and only the really interested person read the text.

You compare the i3 2100T to an E-350 with a highly power inefficient Gigabyte mainboard. The MSI board you tested (yourself!!!!!), http://www.xbitlabs.com/a...y/amd-e-350_12.html#sect0, is far more power efficient.

Power consumption:
Test -> Idle, CPU-B , GPU-B, CPU+GPU B
E350 MSI 7.3 15.8 17.5, 22.1
E350 Gigabyte 12.8, 23.9, 27.7, 31.2
i3 2100 9.7, 33.6, 22.8, 38.9

In conclusion: the MSI + E350 has lowest power consumption of the 3 tested platform in their tested configuration. (Actually it also beats the D525 + ion combo)

Why didn't you include the MSI data as well? Although you mention that the MSI is more power efficient, you still conclude "the Fusion power efficiency is just a marketing hype."

You can conclude that Gigabyte has launched a very inefficient E-350 board, power-wise the MSI is a far better choice and that the i3 2100 has a better power/watt ratio. However, idle the E350 is still a better choice (given the tested configurations!)

And you entitle the article "Every watt counts" ....
Quite embarrassing to be honest