News - ASRock's dual-core ION-based system revealed

[HEXUS]

Acer's Revo paved the way for NVIDIA ION-based PCs, but ASRock is joining in with a dual-core alternative.

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[Funkstar]

Now this is interesting.

Though in my opinion, there should be a version withough the optical drive and the case squeezed down as much as possible.

[scaryjim]

ASRock has also managed to squeeze in an optical drive

DVD or BD? I'd like to think the latter, but that's going to push the price up...

[Methanoid]

Those logos look like DVD to me....

I wonder what the price will be.

[Funkstar]

Definitely no BD logo on that thing.

I any idea how the Atom 330 performs compared to the 230?

[MadduckUK]

I any idea how the Atom 330 performs compared to the 230?

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...tom_330/6.html 330 against a 270 (and an e8500 ).. thats close enough to get the feel for it though.

[Funkstar]

Just had a look at that. There isn't *that* much of a difference is there.

I wonder how one of these would handle the MediaPortal front end basically.

[Skalp]

I am lucky enought to have a couple of the asrock units right here, so will try and answer any questions you have.

It comes with 2gb ddr II 800, 320gb 2.5" hdd and a DVDRW. No option for a Blu ray drive yet.

So far we have loaded up vista ultimate and it seems to be handling it just fine.

Regarding price, i think you will be looking somewhere around £250 + Vat without operating system.

The unit is almost silent, only noise is when using the dvd drive


Any other questions?

[Funkstar]

How well does MediaPortal run on it? (http://www.team-mediaportal.com)

[Skalp]

getting the techies to test media portal now

[blade-uk]

I'm also interested to see how well media portal runs on it.

Keep us updated

Andy

[Funkstar]

Nice one.

If it runs well, I know a lot of people over on the MediaPortal forums would be interested in these as front end systems. I know I would probably buy two

[Skalp]

Never seen media portal before, do you need it if using Vista Home premium?

[Funkstar]

MediaPortal is a free open source alternative to Windows Media Center. It's far more feature rich, especially when dealing with vaious different TV sources, there are no limitation with the number of tuners, types of tuners etc. For example I have 4 DVB-T tuners in my current system. You can easily mix and match analogue, DVB-T, DVB-S, and web streams.

The main thing for me though is that you can setup a backend server with all your tuners, then have remote front ends that just get all their TV from the TVServer. all recordings are stored on the server and shared between clients. Multiple clients can all be watching the same thing, a previous recording each or completely seperate channels. All while the server is recording other shows as well.

It has its problems and isn't perfect, but it is a lot more powerful than MCE

It also has some pretty intensive skins, such as StreamedMP which can struggle on some systems. Hopefully Ion can handle it though.

[Skalp]

thanks for that

Does it have CUDA support?

[Funkstar]

Pass. I don't think it does explicitly.

I know MP rlies on things like EVR on Vista a lot, but as far as the details are concerned it's a bit beyond me