[hvb83]

what about akasa fanless case ?

I think they are only for thin m-itx :/

Asrock also has a thin m-itx mobo with a N3150 available!

[User 280158]

They sell some stuff but not that case. :/

.. http://www.streacom.com/where-to-buy/

Yeah I know. I asked resellers avout the cases :/
They dont have that one at all, nor not much cases at all :/

@fritch can you fix the link please

[omnium]

one Reseller in Germany https://www.caseking.de/streacom-st-f7cs...c-058.html + 25€ shipping costs.

[User 280158]

Why in the earth they are so expensive :/ All what I wanted was small cleqn case without optical drive but with one wzpansion slot

Thank you all for your replies

-Home

[JuhaManninen]

I was going to do the same, but amazon have the n3150 beebox barebones for sale at a good price. Add 4gb memory and storage and it works out cheaper than building from scratch.

I agree, it makes no sense to build yourself this kind of machine.
I am also a Finn like OP is. I got the fanless N3000 BeeBox from Amazon Germany over 2 months ago. Not a barebones but a full system with 4 GB dual-port memory and SSD. Just plug in an USB stick with Linux and install it.
The price was less than 300 €, including FedEx transport.

There it is up and running :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/slc6llufczs919...x.jpg?dl=0
The performance is super. This gadget replaced my big old 3-core AMD machine which had 3 buzzing propellers inside, yet it is slightly faster.
Intel's new Braswell is truly advanced. Just a year ago a similar Intel CPU had TDP 15W, this N3000 has TDP 4W.
The GPU and dual-port memory interface have improved a lot. According to specs it can show "4K resolution" streaming video smoothly.
It is not a gaming machine really but at least Sauerbraten runs smoothly, although the bots killed me quickly but that is not BeeBox's fault.

The CPU's nominal clock frequency is 1.04 GHz but it has Turbo-Boost (like the Knight Rider's Kit had at 1980's).
I checked the Turbo-Boost operation with a "i7z_64bit" program.
It works beautifully, frequency changes between 0.5 GHz and 2.08 GHz gradually depending on load. The nominal frequency has no relevance, it is never used.

I built Kodi from sources. It took an hour. Both CPU cores ran with max turbo-speed all the time, thanks to good thermal design. The case became warmer but still not hot.
I know, C++ compilation would benefit from a faster system. I also know the real high-end PC's today are much faster. How fast are they? How long it takes to build Kodi clean?
I do mostly Pascal programming myself and BeeBox is perfectly enough for that.

I expected to see this gadget for sale in Finland, too, but no. It is still not available.
On the contrary, Verkkokauppa offers some poorly performing MIPS or ARM TV-boxes for high price, like this :
https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/...diatoistin
or expensive Intel NUC barebones, none of them fanless.

For some reason Beebox has no real competition now. It is fast. It has enough connections (including 3 USBs). It is 100% silent. It is a PC in every sense. And it is quite cheap.
I feel "liian hyvä ollakseen totta" (too good to be true). It is like a peek into the future. My prediction is that most personal computing will happen with small fanless gadgets in 10 - 20 years. The old big boxes with propellers inside will then look funny.
Competition will come soon for sure. There are many fast low-power CPUs and SoCs but they are now used only in tablets and high-end phones. After a year the market will be different already.

Regards,
Juha Manninen

[User 280158]

Hi Juha,

Thanks for your reply.
You have helped me and Ive decided to get N3150 version.
Some people said that if you attach 2,5" SSD the box will over heat?
I will get Samsung Evo SSD because it will go to my main PC and my current Crucial MX100 will go to BeeBox.


Br,
Home

[JuhaManninen]

You have helped me and Ive decided to get N3150 version.

The N3150 version has a fan inside (if I understood right). I don't know where they placed it, the cases look identical in pictures.

Some people said that if you attach 2,5" SSD the box will over heat?

Oh, I have not tested that. Maybe you must place the box so that air can flow more freely, eg. lift it up from table a little.
Without the extra 2,5" SSD it is not even close to over-heating. If it did over-heat for some reason, the CPU protection would slow down its clock but that has not happened yet.
I have read that some 4-core Android phones have serious heat problems, their CPUs slow down during a normal video session.
I dare to say that Beebox's thermal design is much better.

[Edit] I wrote Beebox has no competition but I should be careful with such statements.
New Zotac ZBOX CI323 nano has N3150, too. Amazon sells it for under 200 €, but it has less memory (non-dual-port I guess) and a very small SSD. Strange. Almost like a "barebone +" model. Must be very new, Amazon has even no picture yet.
How does Zotac's passive cooling cope with the higher TDP of N3150? Don't know.

BTW, Intel's N3150 itself has a marketing trick. It has the same max frequency as N3000 but higher nominal frequency. My tests with the sibling model show that only the max frequency matters, nominal frequency is not used. I guess they just pulled the higher 1.6GHz from their hats to position it differently on market.
With properly threaded code it is faster of course due to 4 cores.


Regards
Juha Manninen

[noggin]

BTW, Intel's N3150 itself has a marketing trick. It has the same max frequency as N3000 but higher nominal frequency. My tests with the sibling model show that only the max frequency matters, nominal frequency is not used. I guess they just pulled the higher 1.6GHz from their hats to position it differently on market.

Isn't the point about Turbo Boost on the Intel CPUs that it only kicks in on code that is largely single-threaded? It detects that only one CPU is being pushed hard and allows that CPU to go to a higher clock frequency, and thus generate more heat, because the other CPUs are idling (and thus not generating much heat)? If your code is multithreaded or you are running multiple single-threaded programs across the cores, it can't enable Turbo Boost, as all cores are running reasonably hard (and thus all of them generating heat), and thus they are running at their base clock speed, so this figure is still significant?
Or am I missing something?

[JuhaManninen]

Isn't the point about Turbo Boost on the Intel CPUs that it only kicks in on code that is largely single-threaded? It detects that only one CPU is being pushed hard and allows that CPU to go to a higher clock frequency, and thus generate more heat, because the other CPUs are idling (and thus not generating much heat)? If your code is multithreaded or you are running multiple single-threaded programs across the cores, it can't enable Turbo Boost, as all cores are running reasonably hard (and thus all of them generating heat), and thus they are running at their base clock speed, so this figure is still significant?
Or am I missing something?

Apparently I have used wrong terms. Sorry about that. I am not the first one though, I have seen similar errors in technical articles.
The CPU datasheet says :

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology ‡ | No
but
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology | Yes

... which is explained as :
---
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology is an advanced means of enabling high performance while meeting the power-conservation needs of mobile systems. Conventional Intel SpeedStep® Technology switches both voltage and frequency in tandem between high and low levels in response to processor load. Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology builds upon that architecture using design strategies such as Separation between Voltage and Frequency Changes, and Clock Partitioning and Recovery.
---

I was in doubt if it can work as well as advertised, but damn, it does!
Both cores run with max 2.08 GHz when needed. Thus it is the "real" effective operating frequency. The clock would slow down if the heat protection kicked in but that never happens with Beebox thanks to its good thermal design.
While building Kodi with "make -j2", both cores really ran with max 2.08 GHz for an hour.

I hope people with N3000 and N3150 CPUs could verify it, for example using the i7z_64bit program :

Code:

$ wget http://i7z.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/i7z_64bit
$ chmod +x i7z_64bit
$ sudo ./i7z_64bit

Data for the 2 CPUs are here :
http://ark.intel.com/products/87259/Inte...o-2_08-GHz
http://ark.intel.com/products/87258/Inte...o-2_08-GHz

As you can see the "Burst Frequency" for both is 2.08 GHz. This is the only frequency that matters. The frequency scale starts from little over 400 MHz (not 500 like I wrote earlier) and the "Base Frequency" is not really used. It is just one value in the scale.
Thus, my interpretation is that the higher 1.6 GHz Base Frequency for N3150 is only a marketing trick.

This screeshot of i7z_64bit shows both cores running at max speed. They are building a Pascal IDE (Lazarus) which supports compiling packages in parallel, thus stressing both cores.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lap9dj5rwp67a5...t.png?dl=0

[noggin]

My apologies too - I mixed up Turbo Boost with SpeedStep. Probably more my fault than your's!

[User 280158]

Hey again,

So what you mean in nutshell that N3000 = N3150 in term of perfomance. Do the extra 2 coresmake any difference?

-Homw

[noggin]

Hey again,

So what you mean in nutshell that N3000 = N3150 in term of perfomance. Do the extra 2 coresmake any difference?

-Homw

With properly threaded code it is faster of course due to 4 cores.

Yes - if your cores have the same performance in a dual and quad core design, then single threaded code will run at pretty much the same speed, but perfectly multi-threaded code will run twice as fast on the quad core.

Whether you get he same performance or 2x the performance will depend on what code you are running, and also if the speed of that code is entirely dependent on the speed of the core it is running on. (Some applications are limited to the speed of incoming data from IO systems etc.)

If you are running Kodi alongside other code (TV Headend, VDR etc.) then you may well see better performance on a Quad Core as the various apps should, ideally, be spread across the cores even if they themselves aren't in multithreaded code.

[User 280158]

Hey again,

So what you mean in nutshell that N3000 = N3150 in term of perfomance. Do the extra 2 coresmake any difference?

-Homw

With properly threaded code it is faster of course due to 4 cores.

Yes - if your cores have the same performance in a dual and quad core design, then single threaded code will run at pretty much the same speed, but perfectly multi-threaded code will run twice as fast on the quad core.

Whether you get he same performance or 2x the performance will depend on what code you are running, and also if the speed of that code is entirely dependent on the speed of the core it is running on. (Some applications are limited to the speed of incoming data from IO systems etc.)

Ahh OK, I understand now. Ohh well I'm leaning towards to BI323 (Looks better imo) and it comes ibly with N3150 version

-Home

[wrxtasy]

@ JuhaManninen,

Nice info there on the Beebox !
I had a good laugh about all the propellor madness you had on your old AMD machine.
Must be bliss with a silent device now, when all you are likely to hear are the bees buzzing outside the window !

[JuhaManninen]

Must be bliss with a silent device now, when all you are likely to hear are the bees buzzing outside the window !

Heh, the name BeeBox is misleading indeed because real bees make some noise unlike this box.

@HomeDope,
if you buy a Zotac box, remember also buy a memory chip and fill the second slot. For some reason they have filled only one memory slot.
A dual port memory is crucial for speed. It is shared with the GPU and especially with high-resolution video it makes a difference. As a bonus, it helps with any memory intensive application.

The Beebox page has some videos at the end.
http://www.asrock.com/microsite/Beebox/
The second video with a Asian looking guy is interesting. It shows the difference in 4K video with and without dual port memory.

The remote control bundled with Beebox sucks. They should have left it out and recommend a proper one for extra price instead.