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thank you for the breakdown. I have a 3d tv, however that particular TV is running my beast of a media box and I am positibe that it can handle the 3d movies just fine if I chose to try one... so far I have only tried a physical 3d bluray, and while it was alright, I much prefer 3d gaming to 3d movies.
I'm thinking the NUC is the way to go, however I may have to wait as I need at least 3 of the suckers, and I'm not real keen on dropping that much on machines that are 99% going to serve as media decoders =)
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No, the Q190 is not discontinued. When I asked the guy about a Q190 with an 847 processor he said it was lno longer available, however i think he was confused and it was never available. The Q190 appears to only be available with the 887 chipset. Thanks very much for the heads up on the sales for $249. I would definitely purchase at that price.
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Looking forward to hearing your results.
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Dezz
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I finally received the ID61 (added 4GB Ram + 64GB SSD) and loaded OE on it.
Around 9 seconds from cold boot to being in XBMC.
The provided remote works out of the box, including for switching the Zotac Nano on and off.
Navigating around the XBMC menu (Confluence) is incredibly responsive and quick.
Picture quality, even at 1080p (2D) is smooth without any stuttering.
The only slight complaint I have is the average picture quality when I added a TV tuner.
Upscaling is not all that good and provides a sort of foggy picture with no sharpness when compared to a HiMedia box I have.
I'm sure this is due the VAAPI drivers requiring further development and is probably a completely different story using Windows.
Overall, I'm very happy with this little box and think it would be much better than a Celeron NUC for XBMC (especially at the $153 I got it for).
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$153? Where did you order from?
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Dezz
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2013-08-04, 08:07
(This post was last modified: 2013-08-04, 08:16 by Dezz.)
It was on sale at Amazon for $153 and free shipping (within the US) at the time I posted the link in the last page.
There was only 4 left at that price when I bought mine.
With the exchange rate (AU to US) and shipping to Australia (they're not available over here) through an onforwarding company, it worked out to about AU$220.
Still very well worth it for what it is and how it performs.
It's now $187 at Amazon.
If you hunt around you might still find cheaper somewhere else.
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FWIW, I am running an i3 NUC with Aeon Nox (a very heavy skin) and XBMC is butter smooth. I can do perfectly smooth playback of uncompressed 40+ GB bluray isos I have ripped to my NAS including DTS HD MA and Dolby Digital HD both bitstream and down-mixes. With Aeon, I have a few extra custom tabs on the main screen (like "Kids Movies" and "Kids TV Shows") on top of the standard ones. ALL tabs have widgets enabled as well as slideshows running as backgrounds.
Ya, its a pricy box but I wanted there to be no doubt that I had enough umph and high WAF. If you want to save money you can probably skip the ssd and go off a stick for the OS.