Nvidia ION - Page 8

Naah, anyone can run their own website, with the amount of posts you have accumulated here you could probably fill half of wikipedia...


I mentioned HDMI because that's another way to get digital audio, I know a DVI to HDMI adapter for video is trivial, there is even one included.

However the SPDIF header is a valid option, but not suited for someone inexperienced as tracking down the right back panel adapter or making your own is not trivial unless you know what you are doing (I'm sure YOU do!)

Uhh, some numbskull actually wrote a coax SPDIF HOWTO

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=997533

True, but I'm not so certain that the power usage gap is all that wide between Atom/ION and the latest crop of Athlon II 45nm CPU's...

My Atom ION 330 with 4 gig RAM and 1T drive consume 25 watts. Doesn't the Athlon itself consume more than that?

Measured at the wall? Full load?

Yes, measured at the wall. No, not full load. I'll play a 720p video through Boxee and see what it says.

It bounces between 30 and 32 watts, sometimes going as low as 28 what playing 720p full-frame under Boxee. But the CPU cores are only averaging 25% utilization. The nVidia chip is at full clock speed: 450 MHz.

EDIT: I'm running Ubuntu on it.

Good looking numbers.

What codec? x264? MPEG2? VC1?

I don't know. I'm a bit of a nubie at all this. How can I tell? It's Earth-Touch videos under Boxee.

But don't expect this mobo to play full screen HD w/o use of nVidia acceleration. I'm hoping something will come from the Adobe/nVidia collaboration soon. Non-Boxee Flash is 1 to 2 fps!

If the file(s) are on your local drive or network, just drop to the desktop, open a Nautilus window, browse to the file, right click, Properties. One of the tabs should show the video and audio codecs.

If streamed from the web, it's probably FLash video, which is usually an MPEG4/x264 variant.

What did you use to measure the power draw? Kill A Watt?

Pretty much all reviews I have seen have confirmed that an Atom+ION draws between 20-30Watts at the wall-plug, so these measurements seem consistent to me.

A Athlon II will never be that low for the whole system, we are talking 50 Watts at the very least.
Also despite the TDPs, Intel E5xxx series cpus are still more efficient than even the latest 45nm Athlons (look at recent Fudzilla reviews for example), not by much anymore though (not like the 65nm Athlons that were quite inefficient, especially at full load).

Athlons can be a good choice if you take costs into account though as mobos and cpus are cheaper than Intel equivalents.

Anyway, nothing beats the ION+Atom currently from a power-saving POV for HTPCs.

It is streamed. I don't have ANYTHING on that 1T drive yet.

I'm using a "Watt's Up?" Pretty believable numbers. I'm running dual monitors. When I turn on my 17" 1280x1024 monitor it goes from 28 to 53 watts (25 addn'l watts). When I add the somewhat dimmer 19" 1440x900 it goes up to 74 watts (21 addn'l watts).

It comes with a DVI-to-HDMI dongle, and you do get audio over HDMI with this board. I have two 8200 boards (one Jetway, one Zotac), and they both have the same audio-over-DVI setup. I bitstream DD and DTS to my HT receiver over HDMI using the DVI-to-HDMI dongle. I think it's common to all 8200-based boards. Probably 9300 as well, but I don't have any of those.

Also, the Jetway board, the JNC62K, does have rear-panel SPDIF input and output, via 3.5 mm jacks.

That's interesting to know, it still lacks a rear SPDIF connector though, for all those people like myself who don't have a hdmi AV-receiver.
The on-board header is a solution for that, but that's not as good (extra hassle) as if they had included a rear panel connector (I don't understand why that had to save a few extra cents by leaving that out).
I'm not bashing the board, I'm sure it can be a good low budget choice (for an ITX board), it's just not as good as some other boards.
The Jetway seems a bit overpriced to me, you might as well chose a GF9300 board for little more money.

Any we are drifting a bit off topic here me-thinks...

Okay I'll try to steer this back on topic.

The Atom/ION boards have another advantage that people are missing. You can run these completely fanless for a totally silent PC! (At least the single core Atoms. I heard the dual cores put out enough heat that a fan is recommended.)

I'm thinking about picking up another Ion board and setting it up as a carputer. I loaded linuxice onto the ion I have and it works really well.

Yes, you do need a fan with the dual core. But you can take the stock 12v fan that comes with the Zotac mobo and plug it into the 5v supply (with a 3 to 2 adaptor). It is silent at that point. You just need to move the air along, no gale force winds necessary. It keeps the temp to 50 degrees on a hot day, usually more like 40 degrees.

I was having various issues with my Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H (GeForce 9400, Celeron 440 Conroe L) system when it came to de-interlacing 1080i content. In Windows, I either got occasional stuttering combined with frames that were not de-interlaced at all. With later Nvidia drivers, no more stuttering, but the frames were only partially de-interlaced. Both problems seemed to point to a lack of processing power, and I know I was able to repeat at least the first problem on another system using the same motherboard and a more powerful dual core CPU. In Linux with MythTV, I was experiencing a slight video lag when using the Temporal 2x de-interlacer with 1080i content. Again, that to me suggests lack of processing power. I then put together an Ion system using the ZOTAC IONITX-A-U motherboard (dual core atom with power supply). To my surprise, this system seems to be handling 1080i content perfectly! I checked the Nvidia X Server configuration on the Ion and noticed that it had several different performance levels ranging from 200 MHz to 450 MHz (I think those were the numbers). I thought that maybe since the Gigabyte motherboard didn't have a fan on the graphics chip that it was getting too hot and staying at a slower speed. I looked at the Nvidia X Server configuration on that system, and there was only one performance level, but it was 580 MHz! So it would seem that the Gigabyte should be outperforming the Ion, yet it is the other way around. Does this sound right? Is the Gigabyte system faster than it should be? I did not intentionally overclock it myself if it is.

Matt

I found a fix for the shutdown problem.

1. Go into your image (sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386)
2. Edit the file /etc/init.d/mythbunt-diskless-client
3a. Find the lines that say
mkdir -p /var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/
pidof nbd-client > /var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/nbd-client
3b. and change them to
mkdir -p /lib/init/rw/sendsigs.omit.d/
pidof nbd-client > /lib/init/rw/sendsigs.omit.d/nbd-client
4. Exit the chroot
5. Rebuild the image (sudo ltsp-update-image)

This I found on a bug report labelled SRU_292319.debdiff. After this change, the shutdown and reboot has worked properly for me.