[philthomas]

Just thought I'd share this .... I have just purchased an ASRock ION 330 Nettop PC.
Review and specs here . The model I purchased doesn't have the Bluray drive and cost £249.99 in the UK from Amazon.

I have hooked this up via HDMI to my Sony Bravia 40" TV, connected to my wired LAN, plugged in a Keysonic USB wireless keyboard and installed Windows 7 x64, took approx 28 mins and all drivers were found automatically, except one (co processor), so a quick look on the supplied disk fixed that.

I then installed Media Player Classic/ffdshow and accessed my 1080p .mkv files on my main PC, via the Network. I'm pleased to say that all of them played like a dream, as well as some 720p files, no stuttering or problems of any kind. The Nvidia ION certainly handles things nicely. It does exactly what it says on the tin and is very quiet.

I've added AVG, SuperAntiSpyware & SpywareBlaster and M$ Office, plus a few other bits and the performance is quite decent. Probably not ideal for video converting etc., but very adequate for most things.

So far I'm very impressed and haven't found any negatives. I haven't been able to test any BluRay disks yet, as I haven't got a BD Drive to plug in, although I doubt this will be an issue, if PowerDVD Ultra is installed.

This is a very cheap alternative to a dedicated HTPC and does the job very well.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to fire away

[Hybr!d]

Nice review there phill, I just built my bro a HTPC for 3x the price, that said it will pay games dam well too, but for a dedicated HTPC this looks like a pretty good deal.

[philthomas]

Yep .... for the money it's pretty hard to match. Add a LiteOn External BD Drive for around £68 and Power DVD Ultra and you have BluRay playback as well.

I am still playing with it at present, but I'll add more, when I've had a chance to put it through its paces

[ThaDraGun]

I've been thinking on getting one of these but still havent decided yet.

You said it plays 1080p mkvs great, but how about HD youtube or HD flash? I've heard ion has a hard time with them.

I want to use this as a HTPC. Is there any way to turn it on wirelessly? So I can sit on my couch and just start a movie without having to get up. (The motherboard supports power on via USB?) Then I just use a wireless keyboard to turn it on. Or is there any way a pc remote can be used?

[philthomas]

Unfortunately, at present, Adobe Flashplayer doesn't support hardware accelerated HD-video playback yet, therefore they are unsuitable for playing Flash based Internet HD video streams (Hulu, BBC IPlayer, etc).
I believe this is simply a limitation with the browser plugin, but until Adobe sort this out, there will be a problem with Flash based HD Video, on websites.

Not sure about power on via USB ... I havent tried it, but I use the Keysonic wireless keyboard with touchpad listed here which works nicely.

HTH

[philthomas]

Update :

Today Adobe announced Flash Player 10.1, which should be available by the end of the year ..... se here
This will address the issue of web based HD Flash.