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2010-10-31, 13:46
(This post was last modified: 2010-10-31, 19:44 by zenji2010.)
Hi guys, I was after some advice.... I'm looking at buying one of these to replace a full size PC running XBMC live.
I've read a lot of threads which seem to indicate the Foxconn is a pretty good unit apart from some who say the fan is a little intrusive.
I'm quite interested in the Zotac box too as it's using the 2nd gen ION chipset but I know in some instances this is little better than the first because of the internal architecture, plus I'm concerned that the 513Mb of DDR3 assigned to the GPU may not be enough for XBMC to work it's magic on big MKVs etc.
Can anyone give an opinon please?
Cheers!
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Seriously? - no opinions?
c'mon, someone please offer suggestions!
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prae5
Team-XBMC Forum Moderator
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Search about a million topics on this.
Summary - both are great for xbmc.
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I have a small HTPC that I put a zotac ION board in and I also have the foxconn nT330i. The Zotac was by far the easiest to setup, pretty much everything worked straight out the box with xbmc running on Ubuntu. I am on a wired network so not sure if wireless is an issue. It plays everything I chuck at it no problem, 1080p plays fine and 512mb of gpu memory seems plenty thanks to the ION chipset.
The foxconn I did have a few more issues with on setup, network, sound etc but once it got going it runs pretty much the same as the zotac and plays 1080p no problem. However to this day I have never been able to get suspend/resume working on the foxconn which is a big problem for me. I am sure it's possible if I spent a bit more time but I gave up after a few days of trying. Also I think the gpu will only be allocated 256mb of memory if you install 2gb of RAM. To get 512mb allocated to the gpu you need to install 4gb of system RAM, this is not configurable in the bios. As the foxconn is such a small unit the fan does kick in often and when playing most sort of media it will remain on. I think there is a new firmware out that does address some of the fan issues which I have yet to try but as it stands now the fan is just too noisy for my living room. Any other questions just fire away I will try and answer them for you.
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have it setup as my HTPC with 1G ram ... can smoothly play 1080P files ... moreover, the 512M graphics memory is not carved from system ram .. it is built into the card.
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Here's the deal. If you can get an ion 1 system cheaper, do that, otherwise, the id-11 is quite a nice little machine. It just isn't all that much better than a revo, for example. If I were you, I'd let price dictate the call here. While I like my id-11 (conveniently mounted on the wall behind the tv - I like that they include the wall mount in the box), it was a bit of a pain to set up properly (update bios, update nvidia driver, alsa upgrade script + messing about with config files...).
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either unit will do just fine. XBMC runs perfectly well with "only" 256MB shared RAM, but of course the 512MB dedicated GPU RAM of Ion2 offer more safety for future use. suspend&resume was never a problem with my foxconn, and the new BIOS version addresses the fan/noise problems, thank god for that.
as stated before, both will suit you just fine. only thing is that the zotac might need an alsa upgrade for HDMI audio.
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nothing special... you can see the connection in my sig. I always used XBMCbuntu and newest nvidia drivers from x-swat. if I had to guess, my TV stays dark at wake up maybe once in 10 resumes, so it's not absolutely perfect but I can live with it. in such cases I always supect an HDCP handshake problem which very well may also be caused from a bad HDMI cable.
