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Hardware Viewsonic VOT 132 Atom+Ion Nettop Review

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Guest-16, 11 Nov 2009.

  1. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

  2. Yoy0YO

    Yoy0YO Lurky Lurker

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  3. HourBeforeDawn

    HourBeforeDawn a.k.a KazeModz

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    I might have overlooked it but Im curious as to what the internal temps are like.
     
  4. flibblesan

    flibblesan Destroyer

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    Gorgeous looking bit of hardware!
     
  5. javaman

    javaman May irritate Eyes

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    Very nice looking. Very temped by one of these. Just need to add a tv tuner card in and you have an almost perfect HTPC. Suppose you could always have a media server handle recording and storage duties.

    What are the temps like bindi? and does that fan handle them well?
     
  6. ChaosDefinesOrder

    ChaosDefinesOrder Vapourmodder

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  7. kenco_uk

    kenco_uk I unsuccessfully then tried again

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    It sounds like all that Ion is any good at is decoding HD video. I expected a lot more of it. A low-end cpu with a 9400m can handle flash and a handful of games with ease. It's all flash and no pants, without the flash.
     
  8. Andy Mc

    Andy Mc Modder

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    Looks good, but I think I'd still opt for the Asrock NetTop Ion 330 over this. For the same £ with no OS you can get a slightly larger unit that has a dvd burner and takes standard DDR2 dimms. It also has optical audio out. However you don't get wifi, or DVI with the Asrock, just gigabit ethernet, hdmi, vga, 6 usb ports. I got one for the mother-in-law and I have to say it is excelent. If you use the Asrock softwere on windows you can get the boot time down to around 10 seconds. Running Ubuntu 9.04 it boots in <30 seconds and shuts down in about the same.
     
  9. StoneyMahoney

    StoneyMahoney What's a Dremel?

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    The review doesn't actually mention any of these "older games" that didn't run on it very well. Couldn't they have given us some names and numbers to go with the assertion? Pretty useless review with any hard figures to base buying decisions on.
     
  10. Phil Rhodes

    Phil Rhodes Hypernobber

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    I'd be interested to hear more about what the video acceleration technology is technically capable of doing.

    I watch quite a lot of HD video in all kinds of wrappers - principally quicktime, and mp4 (which is effectively identical). I appreciate that this is technically difficult since various subsets of the h.264 spec are used by various different encoders, and implementing them all in hardware would probably be impractical, but that just makes it even more important to know exactly what aspects of 264 decoding Ion supports, and which it doesn't.
     
  11. LightningPete

    LightningPete Diagnosis: ARMAII-Holic

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    Sorry but you say in the article, the nvidia ion and this system cant play games...

    Who in that sort of market is looking to game, lets be honest?
    As long as they can play HD videos, HD youtube vids and so forth that the bogstandard 945express intel chip couldnt do then its pretty dam good considering its size.
    Dual core version would make opening several browsing pages a lot quicker too.
    and nice to see bigger harddrives included now too
     
  12. crayfish

    crayfish Amazing scenes!

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    My nettop (Asrock) has an optical drive, so they are available with them.

    Totally agree about Flash though. Any webpage with it on performs poorly.
     
  13. [USRF]Obiwan

    [USRF]Obiwan What's a Dremel?

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    No optical out = Fail HTPC
     
  14. kenco_uk

    kenco_uk I unsuccessfully then tried again

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    Is it the Ion LE chipset that's used? Reading a review of a different unit, but with the afore mentioned chipset, they say in 1024x768 on all lowest detail that Crysis runs at 17fps and a version of Trackmania at 1366x768 (iirc) runs at 27fps. In retrospect, that sounds pretty good to me, for a low power gfx chipset.
     
  15. GreatOldOne

    GreatOldOne Wannabe Martian

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    This looks great, but is there anything out there that's similar, but can also record from an external source? I'd love to be able to archive stuff from my Sky HD Box via it's component out sockets...
     
  16. jon

    jon Chief Phrenologist

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    contents are good. Fan needs improvement. Buy the thing, rip the guts out, and mod your own case to include an optical drive, TV Tuner card, and improved (quite) airflow. Now you've got a great HTPC.
     
  17. docodine

    docodine killed a guy once

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    Or just buy an Atom mobo and do the whole thing yourself..

    This thing is so small, it could literally be velcroed onto an LCD.
     
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