Today I purchased a NUC5PPYH. I got it locally for $170. I'd have gone with the Celeron CPYH, but I wanted to see if it's capable of being a decent MythTV back-end as well as a Kodi front-end box. I went with a Crucial 4GB DDR3L 1666 stick ($24) and a PNY Elite Performance 64GB SDXC ($30) that claims up to 90MB/S transfer rate, we'll have to see how that really works out with hdparm testing. I already have a spare 250GB 2.5" laptop drive (toshiba) so I won't be buying an SSD as I have to keep the cost down. I plan to use the SD card for the Kodi (OE actually) install and the hard drive for MythTV (likely Mythbuntu).
The CPYH would have been $40 less and would put the whole bill, including tax, under $200, but I just feel like the extra 2 cores and GPU EUs are worth the $40. Maybe they're not, but I'd rather have overkill instead of incapability.
I would prefer two memory slots though.
I couldn't seem to find any of the other 4" boxes locally, and I don't want the size of an itx setup. I really like how compact these little boxes are. I plan to use it as a demonstration device for potential cable-cutter customers. I like to use HDHomerun network streaming TV tuners so I don't need any room for a tuner card in the box itself. I love the idea of built in wifi and an IR receiver that will work with Kodi.
I downloaded OpenELEC Isengard Beta 5.95.5 (x64) and after several times of it hanging at 25-28%, I went to get my daughter from the school bus. While I was gone, I guess it managed to successfully install itself to the the SDXC flash card. Go figure. :? I'm using a wired network connection for the time being, but it does seem to see the wireless fine. I was able to enable passthrough audio, but I haven't really tested it yet as I have it hooked to an HDMI monitor instead of my AVR. It doesn't seem to see my media-center type remote control yet. I'll worry about that later though.
Now, for the key things, let's start with the video. I left all the acceleration defaults on, and I noticed some jerkiness with a 1080i live TV broadcast. I disabled the VDPAU stuff, and it looks a little better using only VAAPI settings, but it is using a lot of CPU and experiencing some jerkiness and stuttering. The CPU speed is maxing out at 2500MHz according to /proc/cpuinfo. top shows the kodi app using 25-30% which seems way too high for this beast of a processor since the RPi2, uses less than 10%. I'd ask for help on that, but that probably warrants creating a new thread somewhere else. I only intended to give my first impressions here.
I am impressed with the GUI smoothness and responsiveness, this is obviously a much more powerful CPU than the RPi2.
I hooked it to my AVR, and I'm not getting any video out of the HDMI output for some reason.
Just discovered that there is no config.txt file to force the HDMI on like the ARM versions of OE. Time to start struggling and learning again. Sorry if this was too far off topic for this thread. I was hoping to end the debate about HD audio, but first I have to get video working and then properly accelerated. Maybe I should be using another build of OE?