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I recently purchased a second hand Atom D510 setup intending to use it for a Netflix/ HD video client. Unfortunately, I've now discovered that this setup isn't powerful enough for what I intended. So I've now got a very nice low powered CPU/ mobo combo and an imagination failure - what could I use it for? I already have a very nice NAS so that's not something I need.
generic office machine to use just for emailing / web browsing? Saves booting up a big power-sucking PC for minimal usage (although modern PCs idle so efficiently that it's no longer such a big issue).
What's the actual combination / mobo, and what sort of uses do you have for computers? If you were into web development it could act as an at home dev server (web servers need very little performance), but that's a fairly limited usage. Know any friends / relatives how might need a computer? Or you could just sell it, of course...
The bin.
It's an POV mobo housing a Intel Atom D510 1.6Ghz(?) CPU with integrated VGA and sound. Currently have 2Gb memory with spare slot. Also have a soundcard for 5.1 digital output and space for a PCI-e 16x graphics card. Loads of spare hard drives kicking about here so not really an issue there.
I've been looking at media servers of sorts but I currently have a happy FreeNAS server and can't see anything that will knock it off it's perch.
Pancake - I don't want to have to buy any scanner hardware to start scanning what goes into the bin. Plus there's no power sockets next to my bin. I like your thinking though. Well left field.
An HD6450 should be able to offload a lot of video and flash decoding off the CPU.
Offloading the video decoding to the graphics card was something I was looking into but was finding it hard to find the necessary info. However, the killer for me was that Netflix, which uses Silverlight, is totally CPU reliant and my understanding is that we end up with a slideshow rather than a film...
mATX or mITX? tbh unless you need a basic web / email computer in the house as a spare there probably isn't that much you could do with it, but you should be able to sell it easily enough...
mATX.
You're thinking the same way I am but seeing as I've just bought it (without admittedly doing enough research) I was just wanting to pick more imaginative brains than mine to see what I was missing...
I read that Netfix is getting GPU acceleration later on in the year.
Use it as a firewall/router?