Mini Motherboard

Building Cheap AMD Fusion HTPC

KreCi — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:37:14 +0000

Today I have found an interesting post about making your own AMD Fusion Home Theatre PC. It would be quite interesting if not one thing. They have proposed building an AMD Fusion powered Media Center for “ONLY” $775 (article is here)! What…? Are they building some super duper gaming computer or what? After further reading I could not believe as they have been trying to build the cheapest possible setup. They have even chosen parts that are not expensive comparing to others on the market – but their prices were really high!

It is why I have decided to show you that you can build such (or even better) setup much cheaper and you can buy all parts online on one website and have all of those delivered to you doors without leaving home!

If you don’t know it yet the AMD Fusion APU powered motherboards are currently the best choice for building a Full HD, low energy consumption Media Center. You can read about it on my earlier post about AMD Fusion. Only good alternative may be the ION platform but I will write about it in another post. So let’s start the list with components of my choice.

Motherboard with AMD Fusion APU

In the post mentioned before the choice was MSI E350IA-E45. I would agree because of good price and quality. Only thing that may be disturbing are fans placed on this Mini-ITX motherboard. Anyway you may try to replace those small fans with some big and silent one on the case. This motherboard has 7.1 audio integrated, USB 3.0 for fast file transfer and HDMI output to connect to your Full HD TV. So it has all that may be required on modern HTPC.

Their price: $170.00
Online price: $139.99 (You may see and buy it here)
Saved: $30.01

Memory (RAM)

They have proposed Kingston ValueRAM 4GB DDR3 1,333MHz KVR1333D3N9K2/4G. Not to be too mean (as I might propose other ram way less than half a price of those) – I will propose the same memory. It is good quality to the value. But my price will be a way lower as well!

Their price: $99.00
Online price: $45.42 (You may see and buy it here)
Saved: $53.58

Mini-ITX Media Center Case

In this place they have proposed “Aywun A1-8989W White Cube Case”. I would not agree at all. Firstly as in most of listed by them components their price is high. Moreover that case do not have HTPC look & feel. This is just some small desktop case that I really do not like… And white one…? No way…

In this place I will suggest another very nice, much more cheap and good looking Media Center case. My choice is Apex MI-100. It is small and elegant Mini-ITX case that has classic black look. It is getting great reviews from people who bought it! It just have enough place to put everything and keep it looking good.

Their price: $72.00
Online price: $39.99 (You may see and buy it here)
Saved: $32.01

Blu-ray/DVD reader

No much change here but the price. They have suggested “Lite-On IHOS104 Blu-ray/DVD reader”. I can recommend the same but of course their price is a way too high!

Their price: $99.00
Online price: $64.99 (You may see and buy it here)
Saved: $34.01

Storage

They have suggested to put SSD disk instead of HDD. In my honest opinion this is not very good idea. Their choice was to install “Corsair Nova V64 64GB SSD”. It is only 64GB and cost $160! As it is so small they suggested to buy external “Samsung STORY 1TB” that is another $125! In total you would pay $285 and would have to keep additional box (external storage) near you HTPC. It is crazy!

My recommendation is to buy some internal 3.5″ HDD. As it is not passive and silent setup you will not hear it at all and you will not have to buy additional external storage. My choice is WD Caviar 2TB. It is almost double storage than in mentioned article and much cheaper!

Their price (1 TB): $160.00 + $125.00 = $285.00
Online price (2 TB): $79.99 (You may see and buy it here)
Saved: $205.01

Remote Control

On the mentioned post they recommended some standard looking not to well optimized for media center remote control. It is called “Compro VideoMate K200″. To be honest I have not even heard about this manufacturer… And it costs $50! Way to much for such ugly remote!

My choice is totally other. It is “Lenovo Multimedia Remote with Keyboard“. It is very handy remote control with full “qwerty” keyboard and awesome futuristic look! Great for everyday use and for HTPC configuration (you do not have to attach full keyboard any more!). And it is cheaper than previous recommendation!

Their price: $50.00
Online price: $35.49 (You may see and buy it here)
Saved: $14.51

Conclusion

According to mentioned post you have just saved $369.13! You have double storage for you multimedia, much more functional remote control and no any additional boxes (external storage) to worry about! Instead of paying $775.00 you can build it for $405.87 and have it delivered to your doors and not even leave your sofa! You can build a great AMD Fusion powered Home Theatre PC for almost half of the suggested price and with even better functionality! What is the conclusion…? It is worth to shop on-line and do not believe recommendations from all websites around…

HTPC Silverstone GD05B Case Review

KreCi — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 08:00:57 +0000

Silverstone GD05B is another very good product that fits the classic HTPC case design. It has been made of elegant classic brushed aluminium and plastic. It will fit to all your current Home Theatre segment as it is similar in size with other receivers that may be found on the market. On front of this case you will find a place for 5.25 device like DVD or Blu-ray drive, two buttons to power it up and reset, 2 usb ports and 2 audio ports. It is simple and great looking case to fit your Mini-ITX or even Micro-ATX motherboard!

You may be surprised how well this case is being ventilated. You will find two 120mm fans on the right side of it. It will blow across your motherboard to another 120mm fan that has been put on the left side. Moreover you will find two additional spots for 80mm fans that has been placed over I/O shield. For sure this case has not been designed for people that want to run their Home Theatre PC fanless and passively cooled. Anyway I still find it working silent for the number of fans it have.

On the back of this case you will find 4slots for PC, PCI-E or other extension slots and a fully sized ATX PSU. Moreover it has a fifth slot that has been put over the PSU that may be used for mounting some additional ports like USB or Firewire. It should be enough for most media center setups.

Inside of this case you will find place to mount two 3.5″ devices with isolating grommets and thick shank screws. And one place for 2.5″ SSD drive (not isolated) as those are more and more popular with each day. Personally I would not mount SSD to this case as the only advantage of such drive may be a completely noiseless work that would not give you much with all that fans around. At least not with current SSD drives prices.

At all if you are not looking for passive solution but want to build a HTCP with some powerful CPU this case may be a really good choice. It looks solid and will present well on your HTPC segment. It will fit with size many of high quality receivers (dimension are 440 mm x 150 mm x 325 mm). Moreover it may fit most of motherboards that you may be interested (not only Mini-ITX!). With a average to HTPC cases segment price (below $90 on Amazon) you get great quality and well recognized brand.

MSI E350IA-E45 Motherboard Review

KreCi — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 05:36:40 +0000

This new motherboard from MSI is quite powerful and uses the AMD Brazos platform. There are 2 DIMM slots and one full-size PCI Express graphics slot that are quite good in terms of their construction and power. The APU’s fan is attached with a heatsink on Hudson M1 chipset that makes a lot of noise. This noisy behavior was quite disappointing for us and an unexpected thing too. There is a possibility of using the PCI express slot for attaching an external graphics card but that is something I won’t recommend at all.

There would be 4 SATA 6G connections that will ensure an amazingly fast storage connectivity for the user and these four ports are just enough for any kind of HTPC for storing all kinds of DVR recordings. There is a single-channel DDR3 memory interface that can support up to 8GB memory. The board has the usual 24-pin ATX power connection which is perfect for a large number of mini-ITX cases.

The processor uses only 18 watts at maximum so there is no such need of power regulation, however, a 4-pin ATX CPU connection is still recommended. This mini motherboard is quite powerful and has some surprising configurations. It supports both the analog and the digital 8-channel audio (with optical and coaxial connections) while the display is offered in both VGA and HDMI. One PS2 port, a Gigabit Ethernet connection, 6 USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports are also there in this “magic box”. But one thing that it lacks is the integrated wireless connection that would have been great for setting up HTPC or SFF rig.

This new mini-ITX motherboard has a power draw around 50 watts while the maximum is 85 watts so I felt necessity of a good and reliable power supply and bought an HTPC AC-to-DC power supply that was amazingly efficient. I got it for around $20 and I just had to connect one of its ends to the converter board and other to the motherboard. This power supply also provides connections for the 4-pin ATX connection, two Molex and a SATA power connection which is for hard drives and optical drives. It is being shipped with a power brick that is to be inserted into the PCB and right after that, your system would be ready!

This motherboard is available from Amazon: MSI E350IA-E45

Brazos APU by AMD – what is it all about?

KreCi — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:55:10 +0000

“Brazos” platform has been released by AMD and is quite powerful. Two chipsets included in it are E-350 and Hudson M1 FCH. These are actually APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), a term being used by AMD instead of CPU.

These new APUs are quite powerful as well as work on low-power. Various models are known as C-30, C-50, E-240 and E-350. These names are kept “short” and there is no “suffix” or prefix with these names. These new APUs comes with the whole chipset, so if you want to upgrade, buying the whole chipset would be a must.

There are 2 cores of 1.6GHz in E-350, 1MB L2 cache and 492MHz DirectX11 capable Radeon graphics core that is integrated. This Radeon is known as HD 6310 that is actually an upgraded version of HD Radeon 5450 with single channel DDR3 memory and 80 VLIW-5stream processors. It is much better and faster than the previously available 40 VLIW-5 stream processors and AMD’s 700 and 800 series graphics chipsets.

There is a good news for those who like HTPC that AMD’ UVD 3 technology (with HDMI 1.4a support) that is capable of playing even a high quality Blu-ray 3D. The new IGPs are also supporting dual display out. This new chipset has support for DDR3 memory. The memory controller is usually limited to 1066MHz bus speed, but 1333 MHz is also available as an option. This APU is actually power-efficient and highly powerful with a GPU that doesn’t use CPU’s cache.

The Hudson-M1chipset is expected to be lower than SB850 6W TDP because there is no support for the PCI or RAID and PCI-W lanes are also much lesser in number. This is the first time when AMD has used TSMC’s services for the creation Brazos on a 40nm process. So, we can call this new APU series to be a “super” low-cost and powerful range of chipsets as the combination of some really amazing technologies have been provided in a single chipset.

Micro PC player with AMD Fusion APU!

KreCi — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:30:25 +0000

IBASE technology has introduced a “super” signage player that is powered by the G-Series Fusion APU (by AMD) and has excellent HD6310 graphics. The exact model of the device is SI-18. According to IBASE up till now, it is the world’s smallest x86 digital signage player.

Now, this recently launched product is just amazing. The dimensions are 4.9 x 4.9 x 1.3 inches and the case is completely made from metal giving it a high-quality look and feel. The Hybrid-DVI connector (supporting DVI, HDMI and VGA interfaces) gives it “universal display compatibility”. A G-Series y56N processor, 2GB (DDR3) memory, WiFi and Bluetooth support (optional) and 160GB of hard drive storage makes the device great choice for your mini HTPC Media Center player. The efficient power system has a maximum consumption of 25 Watts only.

SI-18 has 2 CPU, 80 GPU cores on a single silicon chip and is also compatible with DirectX 11, Direct Compute 11, Open GL 4.0 and Open CL 1.2. The UVD3 hardware decoder can play full HD video in various formats like MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9, VC-1 and H.264 without using CPU or GPU! Overall, due to all these amazing qualities and “super small pc” size is considered to be among the top digital signage players ever made.

We would love to get this little baby into our hands to make a full performance tests but like for now we need to believe the specification given by the producer (that looks really amazing!). You may read the full specification on the product page.

Wesena ITX7 HTPC case review

KreCi — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:08:58 +0000

If you ever want to create a home theatre PC (also known as HTPC) then one of the hardest thing to choose is its case. This case should look like an A/V unit so that your PC actually shows that it is a small home theatre unit. There were various problems with finding these cases, either they are too much in weight, or doesn’t suit a persons likes and needs, so finding and purchasing a case is probably the toughest part.

In previous days, one had a very limited choice of mini-ITX cases and something like OrigenAE M10 or the “CubeCase” very the only choices. But recently, “WESENA” has created a very nice and slim form factor, HTPC case that looks like an A/V stack as well as works perfectly as a computer case. There are two versions of this case, one has the logo in comparatively bigger size, around 1-inch wide and the other has it in little smaller size.

On the front side, support for two USB ports, Card-reader slot, power button, a CD-ROM slot and an infrared (IR) receiver is available. On the left side of the CD-slot, a button is present which allows the user to press the “eject” button of the drive. The amount of light emitted by the power LED is also very “controlled”, that is, neither too bright nor too dim, it is made just perfect.

The ITX7 case is made of very thick sheet of aluminum that gives the case a great and solid look and feel. As the size of this case is comparatively smaller than other cases, so you will not be able to use the traditional ATX power supply unit (also known as PSU) so a smaller alternative needs to be put there. A nice mounting bracket and a good-sized GlacialTech is there as an exhaust fan. But this is true that this fan make noticeable noise, so we changed it with Artic Cooling 80mm (PWM).

There is a bracket for the optical drive and one hard drive of 2.5” (mounted at bottom) and another 3.5” is also provided. The 3.5” mount also has vibration insulators and this hard drive also requires a low profile CPU heat sink and fan (HSF). The dimensions of the product are 240x250x100mm and the approximate weight is around 2.3Kg. Overall, it is going to be a great choice and will solve a number of problems faced in previously available cases.

You may read the full review of this great htpc case at MissingRemote blog.

New Mini-ITX Zotac motherboard…

KreCi — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:29:03 +0000

Zotac NM10-E-E is the new mini motherboard based on Intel NM10 chipset and is compatible with the newest CPUs like Intel Atom dual-core units. Motherboard seems a good choice for users that are going to upgrade their mini pc systems with a little more powerful motherboard.

Motherboard looks good not only for average users but it may satisfy gamers as well because of its DirectX 9.0, OpenGL 1.5 and 3D API capabilities. Moreover this mini motherboard has an integrated onboard 802.11n WiFi and a Clear Video! It may support up to 4GB DDR2 memory (unfortunately not DDR3 support) at 800MHz thanks to two 240-pin DIMM slots.

To make sure that you can connect it to your home media center it included a digital coaxial and S/PDIF. It has been certified for both Microsoft systems – Windows Vista and Seven.

Anyway this motherboard is not special in any way and I would suggest to look for something with new Fusion APU and DDR3 support like Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3.

AMD Fusion Mini-ITX motherboards reviews…

KreCi — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:04:03 +0000

It looks that Mini-ITX format is getting more popular with every day. As there are a lot of new reviews popping up in the net I have decided to inform about them in accumulated posts. This time I have for you two reviews of Mini-ITX motherboards: MSI E350IA-E45 and Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 (that is already available on Amazon).

Both mini motherboards are based on lastly released AMD Fusion chipset so those are really interesting and worth to consider. According to the reviews both motherboards are very powerful and are good choices for making a HTPC Media Center or even basic gaming. If you would like to learn more about them here are the links to the reviews:

MSI E350IA-E45 on MaximumPC
Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 on The Tech Report (You can already buy it on Amazon!)

MSI joins the AMD Fusion rumor…

KreCi — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:46:38 +0000

It looks that soon we may expect a lot of great mini motherboards designed mostly to work as the HTPC base. MSI want to join the others and is going to release their ne E350IA-E45 mini-ITX motherboard soon. If anyone do not know the new AMD APU yet – it is ideal for building the mini htpc media center. E350 APU that will be on this board has 1.6Ghz dual-core processor that has a DirectX11 GPU. Such motherboard will allow for smooth Full HD video playback with low power consumption.

This mini motherboard is still not available and there is no any info about the price yet. But as we already know it will have four SATA 6Gbps ports and two USB 3.0 ports. Moreover there are two DDR3 slots that will support up to 1333Mhz plus PCI-e x16 slot.

On the back you will find HDMI and D-Sub ports, 8 channel on-board audio connectors and Gigabit Ethernet port. Is there anything more you may need in your HTPC…?

More Sandy Bridge Mini Motherboard Reviews…

KreCi — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:25:36 +0000

It looks that there is more and more great Intel Sandy Bridge powered Mini-ITX motherboards on the market. Moreover there are still more and more great and complete reviews about those mini motherboard on the net. And as most of my loyal readers already know I would not miss any great review and would not leave such one without my comment. So are you still looking for mini-itx motherboard that would be enough good for your HTPC Media Center setup? Thanks to tbreak technology blog you may learn a lot more about two of them – Zotac H67-ITX and ECS H67H2-I!

As usual I always recommend good reviews and this one is one of them. Thanks to article on tbreak you will learn not only basic specification of those nice mini-ITX boards. You will have a chance to learn about real performance of both of them thanks of test made in 3dmark, 7-zip, cinebench, PC Mark, winrar and X264 2nd pass codec. So if you have some spare time and interest in Sandy Bridge powered mini-itx boards – you really should read it.

Moreover if you will like ECS mini motherboard – you may still learn more about it in this one review posted on “Hardware Secrets”. Who knows if it is not your future Mini-ITX HTCP powered core…?