techETA » HTPC

Zotac Zbox HD-ID11 reviewed, muscles high def content with ease

Rafael Hernandez — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:00:37 +0000

Most barebones computers out there leave the bulk of the setup choices up to you which..is the point as it saves you a bit of cash in the end but for the purpose built PCs out there something a little more turnkey would be nice in order to get things going quickly.

The Zotac Zbox HD-ID11 won’t win any speed awards with its Intel Atom CPU and the Pine Trail platform’s distinct graphics chip snub, via a single PCIe link, means the onboard NVIDIA ION graphics chip doesn’t exactly get to stretch its legs but, through some driver tweaking trickery, you can get some serious high definition multimedia playback going especially if you pop in the system’s XBMC Live CD or roll your own USB key for that OS-free feeling.

Zotac’s Zbox HD-ID11 barebones nettop @ The Tech Report

SAPPHIRE Ultimate HD5550 works its magic quietly

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Building a home theater PC means making a few concessions here and there in order to enjoy your movies and music without an insane amount of noise coming from your setup.

The SAPPHIRE Ultimate HD5550 uses a passive cooling solution which means you have one less component to worry about silencing. LANOC has the details:

The HD5550 Ultimate being a silent card I couldn’t let it get away without letting it do a little decoding. I swapped out our DVD burner for a BluRay drive and watched a few movies (with hardware acceleration turned on of course). At no point did the card have any trouble with the full HD movie decoding.

SilverStone GD04 brings some style to the HTPC

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:39:11 +0000

HTPCs should, in a perfect world, fit in with the rest of the components in your home theater. They tend to get a little over sized when you opt for features or compromise on the design.

The SilverStone GD04 keeps things classy with its MicroATX format suporting layout and sleek black design. Ninjalane has the review:

The front of the SilverStone GD04 has a classic brushed anodized finish and is very similar in style to a high end stereo component. The front is only disturbed by the minimum of components, featuring a easy access front panel with two USB and output for headphones as well as a mic input. On the right side near the bottom you will find square power and reset buttons as well as a small HDD activity light.

It’s difficult to fault its look and its cooling capability is top notch.

Dell Zino HD is minuscule but sports some muscle

Rafael Hernandez — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:05:46 +0000

The the ever shrinking computer got a little more stylish today with Dell’s launch of the Inspiron Zino HD in the US. While you might mistake it as some Intel Atom sporting nettop the machine actually sports much more robust AMD processor options.

The machine offers up configuration options of single or dual core chips, integrated ATI graphics or a dedicated GPU with 512MB of video memory for those Blu-ray playing builds, two eSATA ports, and a slew of colors to choose from.

Their pricing starts at $229 which is a bargain for a PC you can stick just about anywhere.

Source: Dell

Inno3D GeForce 210 aimed at your HTPC

Rafael Hernandez — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:32:30 +0000

Nvidia’s GeForce 210 GPU isn’t designed to wow you with its 3D prowess or further computing, instead it was made to get some decent multimedia playback into your basic desktop or office system. Thankfully such a pared down product comes with a smaller price tag.

techPowerUp has a look at Inno3D’s take on a GeForce 210 graphics card and tries to push it as far as it will go:

The overclocks of our card are 774 MHz core (31% overclock) and 943 MHz Memory (77% overclock). Wow! Simply amazing overclocking potential, very nice. Whether overclocking makes any sense on a graphics card like this is up to you to decide depending on your requirements.

Impressive overclock percentages but you aren’t going to see much of a performance improvement, just accept that it’s a budget card.

Zotac GeForce GT 220, redefining the low-end…sort of

Rafael Hernandez — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:35:44 +0000

Nvidia may be having a tough time coming up with a high end alternative to the competitions products but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas to attack them on.

techPowerUp has a look at the Zotac GeForce GT 220 graphics card which sports a purpose built design to keep power usage down:

What it is made for is desktop use. The power consumption in idle is an amazing 10W which will help save you some money, especially if you are running a whole office full of computers. Feature wise everything you need is there, the lack of DirectX 11 doesn’t seem to be that important considering you won’t be enjoying many games on these cards and as NVIDIA told us for years, DirectX 10.1 is useless anyway. I really like the switch away from S-Video output to native HDMI on recent cards. It will help with the widespread adoption of media PCs to play back content on HD TVs.

It’s not for the gamers out there but should fill in those office and HTPC duties quite well.

Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB, quiet as a mouse

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:32:00 +0000

In cooling silence is a completely relative term. What may seem whisper quiet to someone is annoyingly loud to someone else. There is of course a way to get complete silence but it used to mean setting your performance sights low.

Testseek has a review of the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB graphics card and its completely silent and fan-less cooler that’s perfect for your next HTPC build:

Another outstanding feature of this card is its PCB, which is built upon the “Ultra Durable VGA” principles. The UDV technology uses almost double the normal amount of copper, which helps better lead the electricity and also improves on the cooling and general stability of the card. On the PCB we also find the 6 pin PCI-E power connector and the connector for CrossFire mode.

A nice looking card but you’re going to want some decent airflow over it in order to keep it cooled off.

The ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim, Big Sound Small Profile

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:05:00 +0000

Home Theater PC owners are a picky bunch. They expect performance and rich feature sets out if increasingly smaller computer parts. Their graphics needs are being well served by integrated graphics chips on their motherboards of choice but the audio factor is still an issue.

The Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim Sound Card solves the space issue by cramming some mighty fine audio components into a half-height form factor. Benchmark Reviews has a look:

Most sound cards sold today are advertised as 7.1 sound cards but that doesn’t mean they can decode the Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound formats. Due to the bandwidth limitations of Toslink and coaxial digital cables, these new formats cannot be carried across those mediums. Instead they’re transported on the HDMI cable to the home receiver where the sound is then directed to each speaker. This sound card does have a coaxial output jack but it can only be used for Dolby Digital 5.1 output. You have to use the HDMI outputs in order to experience the Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound formats. This sound card is basically identical in features to it’s older and bigger brother, the ASUS HDAV 1.3 with the exception of it being a slim profile thus making it more compatible with smaller HTPC cases.

Decoding those audio tracks for your high end audio setup is obviously this card’s strong suit, if you’re looking for a gaming sound card you may want a different product all together.

Zotac's ION A-Series ITX Board, WiFi'ed Atom Goodness

Rafael Hernandez — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:10:00 +0000

It’s tough to match the flexibility that Nvidia’s ION platform offers. It takes the lowly Intel Atom processor, pairs it with a power friendly system chipset which sports a moderately competent graphics core built-in, the perfect combination for media playback.

Zotac’s ION A-Series ITX motherboard nets you the Intel Atom N330 dual-core processor and the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset combination as well as built-in wireless connectivity to get you on the web with fewer hassles and unsightly USB dongles. Tech-Reviews has a look:

The bottom of the Zotac ION holds the CMOS battery. Next to the battery is a Mini PCI-E slot with an AzureWare AR5B91 802.11b/g/n WiFi card installed. Of course, this Wifi card is optional and if you wanted you could remove it completely and install some other device into the Mini PCI Express slot it occupies.

A nice choice for those HTPCs out there and the included 802.11n wireless should be more than capable of streaming high definition content.

ASRock's ION 330-BD, A Compact Tweaker's Home Theater Dream PC

Rafael Hernandez — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:56:00 +0000

The old concept behind a home theater PC was to create a system that would visually fit in with the other components which usually turns into a noisey mess because you’re cooling off some power hungry components.

ASRock’s ION 330-BD on the other hand uses an Intel Atom 330 dual core chip paired with Nvidia’s ION platform for some low-power and high-performance media playback. TweakTown has a look:

As far as noise goes, the system is super quiet at default settings at
around 25db. We used the ASRock EZ Overclocking feature in the BIOS to
overclock the Atom CPU from 1.6GHz to 2.1GHz and to be safe we
increased the fan speeds by using the “Overclocking” fan speed option.
This does increase the volume from the system, but it’s not that loud
and cannot even be noticed at all whilst playing a game or watching a
movie.

Overclocking, dual channel memory, well this is one of the most interesting nettop PCs since…ever.