My New PC - Not suitable for video editing.

[Chris B]

I'd thought I share some information about my new PC. As the title mentions this isn't for video editing it's an HTPC being used as a media centre.

I brought a Foxcon NT-A3500
(review here: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Foxc ... _NT-A3500/) which is a tiny black thing and put 2GB of ram in it (single SODIMM stick) and a 750GB 2.5" HDD. Windows 7 (32 bit) is installed and I've got a small remote keyboard.

If you tweak the BIOS so that the video only gets 128MB then you have about 1.75GB free at the desktop which is plenty for internet browsing, Windows media centre (which is very usable) and flash based games. The Graphics card offloads most of the video decode work so it looks great at 1080p. The card itself is quite advanced and fully DX11 so the Heaven benchmark will run (but only at 5 fps!) I've added a couple of small patches to Windows Media Centre so the ISOs of DVDs and (nearly) BluRays I've made play right from within Media Centre.

Overall I'm very pleased with the box which is nice an small and does the job well. I now have all my video at full DVD/BluRay quality and entire my CD collection compressed losslesly in one location. The only real problem is iPlayer in HD which doesn't use the hardware decode. The whole system draws under 25 watts at load and around 12 at idle. Standby uses 1-2 Watts. I can't hear the fan from 6 feet away unless it's really working hard and the drive is as good as silent. If there were one complaint it's that the processor is a bit under powered - if it were 25%-50% faster it would be unbeatable.

The whole thing cost around £325 - or £218 without the OS and keyboard. (including VAT at 20%)

[Paul LS]

Interesting reading Chris. I am thinking of upgrading my HTPC (an old AMD Athlon X2 dual core 1.8G processor). I have been looking for something smaller and quieter than my current setup. Why did you use a 2GB ram stick instead of a 4GB one... the spec says it supports a 4GB stick?

Also, how about playback of AVCHD video, any issues due to the speed of the processor? What "player" do you use for video playback? And finally a question on the graphics chip set, you say for video decode the graphics chip set takes the load... so for example, currently I use PowerDVD for movie playback which takes advantage of my AMD's Avivo GPU for acceleration reducing the CPU usage to 10 to 20%... do you know if the graphics chip set has this type of GPU support.

[Chris B]

Why did you use a 2GB ram stick instead of a 4GB one... the spec says it supports a 4GB stick?

I ran a test on windows 7 on 1.5GB of ram and it went just fine. Looking at memory usage I'm usually hovering at around 50% or so. Extra ram might speed some operations up - but I've not noticed any of the operations that I do day to day significantly slowing the device down. Win7 32 would only see 3.25GB anyhow - You could run Win64 but the base memory load probably offsets the gain to 4GB (which wouldn't be because the graphics takes some) and then the (mostly) 32 bit programs I run would be slightly slower. Given the processor performance is the weakest part I wanted to avoid that. Currently at the desktop there is ~475 of 1899 allocated.

Also, how about playback of AVCHD video, any issues due to the speed of the processor? What "player" do you use for video playback? And finally a question on the graphics chip set, you say for video decode the graphics chip set takes the load... so for example, currently I use PowerDVD for movie playback which takes advantage of my AMD's Avivo GPU for acceleration reducing the CPU usage to 10 to 20%... do you know if the graphics chip set has this type of GPU support.

Playing a 16Mbit BluRay image burned from DVDAS whilst running Windows Media Centre and PowerDVD9 shows memory usage at around 800MB and processor usage around 20% with the occasional spike to 35%. The graphics chip is a real DX11 part with video decode acceleration - so should work with your software.

[Paul LS]

Thanks Chris. Where did you buy it from ny the way?

[Chris B]

Nettop, Ram and Windows from CCL Online (http://www.cclonline.com/) Kingston ValueRam
Hard Drive from Dabs (http://www.dabs.com) 750GB Samsung
Keyboard from Ebuyer (http://www.ebuyer.co.uk)
HDMI cable from Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk) £3.50 2 meter one.

If you're going to flash the BIOS you need to flash NVRAM, Bootblock and the BIOS - or the system won't boot!

Chris.

[Paul LS]

Thanks Chris for the list of suppliers, very useful.