Can you recommend a mini PC you would use as an HTPC currently?
A while ago I looked at the acers with the intel Atom processors. I liked how small and bare bones they seemed.
I doubt the Atoms have enough oomph to work well as an HTPC.
Do they have enough oompf for anything other than being a door stop?
Well I'll go by what I have and what I have tested. There is a definite difference between the omph of a CPU and that of a graphics card. Don't mix the requirement of the two with each other.
i have two different Zbox machines. an AMD E350 that is pretty old and a slightly newer Intel Atom D2700. Both of these machines come with a pretty respectable graphics card (ATI 6330 & Nvidia GT520M)
I have run these with Windows 7 running full 1080p video out with 7.1 Dolby HD or DTS MA with zero dropout.
I have also had fantastic luck with OpenELEC with their linux on a USB running a turnkey XBMC/Kodi as well doing full blu-ray output with 7.1 audio. ZERO issues.
Now, I did try and run a PVR off one of these boxes and it choked. All to video cards take care of the x.264 decoding in hardware so your output is a piece of cake, but try to Encode and that is a CPU process and these were not up to the task.
Digital sound from a movie is a simple pass through and needs next to zero processing.
Your video is decoded on the video card chipset and I don;t know of any that even the cheepest $30 video cards of today doesn't have it built in. So that is of no worry.
What are you looking for the HTPC to do? if you are just looking for a kick ass player, then any of the small atom/amd mini boxes will more than cover you.
If you are looking to do conversions and encoding, then you need processing power and will need to pay more.
Personally, I have a big computer that takes care of the processing part of the equation. The files are written to my NAS that stores all my media. then there is the little box that makes no noise, uses virtually no power and gives me the user interface that is easy to master. has the WAF, and fits into my lifestyle and decore. (small)
