[Review] Intel Atom 330 / Nvidia Ion based Media Center

I thought some of you may be interested. I've just bought a Point of View Mobii ION Mini PC to build a media center.
There are other Nvidia ION based Mini PCs available, but there are few points that made my choice for the Point of View one:
- Intel Atom 330 (Dual Core)
- Mini ITX
- 2 GB RAM
- 320 GB HDD
- 1 Available PCI-Express Slot (hopefully a good DVB-S(2) TV Card with CI will be available soon)
- SPDIF / Toslink Digital Audio Out
- 8 USB Ports (6 Back, 2 Front)
- HDMI Out (Thought that this would be important, but more on this later), DVI, VGA
- No CPU or Motherboard Fan
Additionally I bought a Keysonic ACK-540BT Bluetooth Keyboard with an integrated touchpad. I added 1 GB DDR2 RAM to the PC for a total of 3 GB.
Arch Linux worked straight out of the box, but there are a few things to note:
- The Intel Atom 330 does NOT support Intel Speedstep, therefore no frequency scaling is possible
- I don't want a login manager, just a straight lxde Desktop with an autostarting XBMC, but Blueman (needed for autopairing with the bluetooth keyboard) needed a ck-launch-session to get access to the bluetooth dongle (took me a while to find this out)
- XBMC supports VDPAU out of the box if you configure it, CPU usage when playing a movie is below 20%
- I disconnected the hdd and power LED because they are quite bright (the cabinet I use for my equipment has a glass door)
- The Mini PC is not hearable from 0.5 meters even when hdd is working
- HDMI Output works flawless but my SONY LCD TV is not a Full HD one but has a native resolution of 1360x768. With HDMI I could only choose between 720p (1280x720) which is too small or 1080i (1920x1080) which would be too large. I now use a standard VGA DSUB cable and get a perfectly sharp 1360x768 resolution. No need for HDMI
Just if anyone is interested:
- glxgears: ~2400 fps
hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1304 MB in 2.00 seconds = 651.94 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 358 MB in 3.00 seconds = 119.22 MB/sec
This is the perfect media center solution for me, capable of managing more than 15.000 mp3 and m4a, a bunch of divx videos and dvd isos, 10.000 photos and hundreds of shoutcast internet radio stations. All managable with a wireless keyboard and touchpad on my Sony LCD TV. Just the tv card is missing...
Last edited by freigeist (2009-08-14 19:39:23)

i am also working on my zotac-9300 itx. i also have the problem of get the right resolution. my tv was bought three years ago and i attached a hdmi cable to it in case some day (such as today) i will use it. however, the zotac hdmi does not work with the tv. either the tv does not detect the signal or the motherboard does not send the signal out. anyway, i use a dvi->hdmi adapter now. but the resolution is still not right. (will fix it later). the 9300 works great on h264, but somehow has trouble with the HD tv signal. although the cpu usage is low when playing those HD channels, but the frames are not smooth. i am using kaffeine to work tv. i am trying to get the vlc to work with vdpau (or vaapi) but has no luck. anyway, good to share our experience on htpc.
ps. my board is using a internal power supply which give me some noise when the room is quiet, but it is ok when watching moives.

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    Asker's Comment:
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    Can anyone comment on the CPU overhead associated with using a low power CPU such as an Intel Atom to function as a NAS running software raid1 (mdadm)?  Will it limit I/O?
    Last edited by graysky (2013-10-02 07:32:08)

    Logic says raid0/raid1 should not be much of a problem since you are splitting/dupplicating data without doing any or almost any math, raid5 or others that need to calculate parity information can be a problem with atom cpus I believe.
    Maybe you should check review sites for NAS boxes reviews, most come with atom cpus inside and will probably give you a good idea of how your specific cpu model will perform.

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