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On 16/04/11 18:14, zleap@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Just wondered what people thought to this as a budget system, PaulYeah seems okay, 1.8GHz dual core so not too bad, AFAIK the Atom is about on par with a similar spec P4 but the advantage of this is that it has the Nvidia ION chipset which gives better 3D performance and off-loading of video decoding to the graphocs chip (so in theory it would play high definition video without breaking a sweat). The ION chipsets are supported by the proprietory NVidia driver, not sure about the FLOSS drivers, I gather NVidia support is improving all the time. There is the added advantage that it's low power and quiet too and it doesn't take up much space so yeah I'd say it's worth it for the money. There are similar machines available from Asus (the Eeebox I believe) which I can't seem to find available now (but reviews suggest it's priced around £230) and the Foxconn Net top which I did find but was more expensive and not as good spec. So I think for what you want it's a good price and a reasonable spec (although maybe do a bit of googling just to double check, should probably be fine though). Robok on par with a p4, is / was the p4 eqivelent to a amd duron, i am asking as both the p4 and duron are pretty dated as chips,. even though the p4's at the lighthouse work quite well with newer nvidia hardware in. (well they are newer nvidia than my current geforce 4 which i have at home)
Well the Athlon was more compariable to a P4, but yeah they're not too far off. The difference you'll find between your Duron and this is the power saving. The Atom will use a few watts maximum and has dual cores which will make multi-threaded capable software run quicker, and possible even single threaded stuff (for instance I find that I can run two ZIP operations on my Core 2 Duo and the machine doesn't seem to slow down).
i am guessing as its dual core that has its own advantages too, it seems odd that i will be using a processor at pretty much the same speed as my current PC in terms of clock speed, which i do know is not exactly indicative of actual speed as its the way things internally work too, such as the fsb, and other bits are faster, 1600 chip 8 years ago is not the same as a 1600 mhz chip to day, the frequency is the same but it runs faster, if that makes sense,
Yeah pretty much. Intel have made improvements in the Atom chip used in this machine, according to this page... http://tinyurl.com/4kyt5zn
...the Atom D525 used in this machine is faster than a Pentium D 2.66GHz machine (dual core P4 2.66 basically).
So I'm sure for what you want it'll be fine, and also use a whole lot less power than a Pentium D.
I'd say go for it based on what you want, it's a nice little machine, if I had some spare cash I'd get one to run MythTV on :-)
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq