{"id":50,"date":"2010-03-13T09:56:07","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T09:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/?p=50"},"modified":"2010-03-14T16:13:56","modified_gmt":"2010-03-14T16:13:56","slug":"my-new-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/03\/13\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"My new Computer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a new computer!\u00a0 My time has come to get a dedicated Home Theater PC (HTPC), to connect to my <a href=\"http:\/\/http:\/\/www.sony.co.uk\/product\/t32-w-series\/kdl-37w5500\">Sony 37&#8243; 1080p LCD TV<\/a>.\u00a0 I spent several weeks researching, as I was quite specific with my requirements.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Must be quiet<\/li>\n<li>Should look good in the living room<\/li>\n<li>Needs to have a good range of video\/audio outputs<\/li>\n<li>1080p (full HD) video shouldn&#8217;t pose a problem<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With the above in mind, my first stop was check out the usual suspects.\u00a0 First, I considered the wonderfully designed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/uk\/appletv\/\">Apple TV<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/uk\/macmini\/\">Apple Mac mini<\/a>.\u00a0 These are massively expensive, and really don&#8217;t offer that much in terms of performance or features.\u00a0 The Apple TV dies with it&#8217;s lack of optical drive, while the Mac mini is low spec and doesn&#8217;t have HDMI output.\u00a0 Next up, was the <a href=\"http:\/\/www1.euro.dell.com\/uk\/en\/home\/Desktops\/inspiron-zino-hd\/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&amp;s=dhs&amp;cs=ukdhs1&amp;~ck=mn\">Dell Inspiron Zino HD<\/a>.\u00a0 Again, this box looks brilliant, but the hardware specs aren&#8217;t great given it&#8217;s price.\u00a0 The glaring omission is the lack of multi-channel audio output, so no surround sound here!<\/p>\n<p>At this point I decided to start looking at the range of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mini-itx.com\/\">Mini-ITX<\/a>\u00a0motherboards on the market, with the aim to building my own machine.\u00a0 Mini-ITX are tiny PCs, which are 17cm square in size.\u00a0 Very quickly I came to the conclusion that I would need a dual core Intel Atom N330 and an nVidia ION chipset.\u00a0 The other options on the Mini-ITX format are either too low performance or have too many fans so are pretty loud.\u00a0 I settled on the following:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_52\" style=\"width: 235px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/DSC00812.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-52\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-52\" title=\"Finished Product\" src=\"http:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/DSC00812-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/DSC00812-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/DSC00812.jpg 576w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-52\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The final PC, along with the keyboard sitting on top.<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mini-itx.com\/reviews\/zotac-ion\/\">Zotac ION-ITX-A<\/a>\u00a0motherboard, including the Atom N330 and nVidia ION chipset<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.psile.com\/index.php?page=catalog_details&amp;CID=2\">Nexus Psile<\/a>\u00a0case, including a slot-load DVD-RW drive (i&#8217;ll replace this with a Blu-ray drive when prices drop)<\/li>\n<li>2GB of Crucial RAM (single DIMM, so it&#8217;s easy to upgrade to 4GB later)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wdc.com\/en\/products\/products.asp?driveid=779\">640GB Western Digital Caviar Green<\/a> SATA 2.0 Hard Disk<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.logitech.com\/index.cfm\/keyboards\/keyboard\/devices\/3848&amp;cl=us,en\">Logitech diNovo Mini<\/a> palmtop wireless keyboard\/mouse<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Assembly of the above was a breeze, with one exception.\u00a0 The SATA cable supplied for the slimline DVD drive doesn&#8217;t fit in the case.\u00a0 The back of the drive is too close to the edge of the case, but thankfully I have a pile of them and found one that fit.<\/p>\n<p>Upon first boot (connected via HDMI to my TV), everything worked fine.\u00a0 I booted and installed Windows 7 Ultimate, and then started to test a few videos out.\u00a0 At first the results were poor, with many videos not playing smoothly.\u00a0 I quickly discovered that the CPU was pegging at 100%, causing all the issues.\u00a0 Video&#8217;s were being decoded by the CPU, rather than taking advantage of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nvidia.co.uk\/object\/cuda_home_new_uk.html\">nVidia&#8217;s CUDA technology<\/a>.\u00a0 I installed <a href=\"http:\/\/corecodec.com\/products\/coreavc\">CoreAVC<\/a> and almost everything is fine, with videos playing at 1080p without trouble.\u00a0 Cue <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\">BBC iPlayer<\/a> problems.<\/p>\n<p>Adobe Flash 10.0 (the current version) also uses the CPU to decode video, however the upcoming Flash 10.1 will fix this.\u00a0 You can download this from <a href=\"http:\/\/labs.adobe.com\/technologies\/flashplayer10\/\">Adobe Labs<\/a> to test for yourself.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not very stable at the moment, but does work.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I wanted to get a nicer interface than just vanilla <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/windows\/windows-media-center\/\">Windows Media Center<\/a>.\u00a0 As I am used to it, I have decided to go with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xbmc.org\">XBMC<\/a> using the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aeonproject.com\/\">Aeon skin<\/a>.\u00a0 Now it&#8217;s all up and running and works perfectly!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a new computer!\u00a0 My time has come to get a dedicated Home Theater PC (HTPC), to connect to my Sony 37&#8243; 1080p LCD TV.\u00a0 I spent several weeks researching, as I was quite specific with my requirements. Must be quiet Should look good in the living room Needs to have a good range [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,9],"tags":[29,28,26,27],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-technology","tag-coreavc","tag-cuda","tag-htpc","tag-xbmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}