[mythtvnz] Has anyone seen the new Zotac units?

[Daniel Giddens]

My frontend - In production for around 2 months now. Disclaimer - full
of one eyed opinions and ramblings :)

You can get the Zotac in NZ from http://www.playtech.co.nz  I bought
online and got it the next day. I found out other NZ advertisers buy
from Playtech as well so this is the source I believe. I checked there
site .... they show a picture of one under mini itx but if you click on
it it says no products. It may need you to call them.

If you use an Intel SSD (solid state drive) it will be silent and boot
in around 10 seconds. I bought 40gb versions for around $225 ish ex GST
from memory. You want the Intel versions as other brands have
historically had longevity and performance issues (these issues may be
fixed now but why risk it). 

SSD drives are fricken auwsum and i'm in the process of upgrading all my
rigs with them. The speed of booting is one of those PC history
milestones in my opinion.

The only fan and or moving parts, would be the one fan in the case which
if you do a 7 volt mod to the 12 volt fan it is also silent. Can't hear
it at night in the bedroom. You need a fan as the CPU has a passive
cooler and we tried it with no fan and it got up over 80 degs .... to
hot .... runs under 45 deg with the fan in the case.

It has all the features you could ever want for a front end. HDMI out,
nvidia on board, optical out, and the wireless works well if you don't
want to run a network cable to it (you are likely to run into issues
trying to stream full 1080p across wireless so hard cabling always
recommended :). I only use VDPau for decoding and I haven't had anything
not work. It is all done on the chip. I only put 1GB memory in and only
allocated 256M to the graphics. If it can't process on the chip then it
will definitely fail .... which it hasn't.

This is the case I used. We hide it behind the screen anyway. I didn't
bother with a dvd drive in the frontend as I can't recall the last time
I played an actual DVD, all my collection is archived on my backend. But
they support a slimline DVD drive if you need one.

http://procase.co.nz/pc/cs3688.htm

Setup of this hardware in Myth/ubuntu was a breeze. No issues with
drivers or bit nots working. I used the a standard full Ubuntu install
and using the avenard repositories for the myth install. After I
finished setting up everything I install ratpoison and have it boot
straight into ratpoison, auto login and run mythfrontend. This takes
just over 10 seconds.

On the backend I do the same but I run gnome. This rig lives in the
garage as it has a few large disks and makes a bit of noise. I did use a
SSD drive in the backend as I love the boot times. Also I run the live
TV directory and recordings directory off the SSD drive as it can read
over 300MB/s on multiple streams which is achievable on my GB network.

I noted people talking about using compact flash .... this is what I did
before the latest SSD versions. Compact flash is very slow, has very
limited write life and you always need to watch what you put on due to
the small sizes. It was doable but you always had to be careful and
think about what you were doing.

Hope this is useful to someone. 

cheers

Daniel



On Mon, 2010-04-19 at 09:25 +1200, Ross and Jemima Knudsen wrote:

> On 18 April 2010 17:31, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> They look nice. I wouldn't call it a thin client, more a small PC like a revo.
> 
> Fair call, I was just trying to make a distinction from the MBs.  If
> you network boot them they will be more like a thin client than a
> mini-PC.
> 
> I think someone mentioned that they would rather have one of the Zotac
> MAG units without the HDD - wish granted.  Now I reckon the only thing
> thats missing is a built in IR/RF sensor
> 
> >> As you didn't point to a particular product but mention the Atom 510 I
> >> assume you are talking about the ZOTAC ZBOX HD-ID11 which has
> >> previews here:
> >>
> >> http://www.legitreviews.com/news/7503/
> >> http://www.slashgear.com/zotac-zbox-hd-id11-ion-2-nettop-announced-0276369/
> >>
> >> and google will find you others. From googling it appears to be ION2
> >> which I believe means it's based on an nvidia 2xx series chipset, not
> >> 9400 like the ION1. This means it will be able to accelerate more
> >> codecs, like xvid, as well as mpeg2 & h264 that ION1 can do.
> 
> Looks like they haven't really launched the products yet, at least
> from the reviews you posted.  I was just wondering if there was
> performance gains to be had from integrating the GPU on the same chip
> as the CPU.  Maybe the only gain is the space saving?
> 
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