Definitely better than the biostar one :D

10W through that heatsink, no wonder it has to have a 105C rating.


I get the purpose, but its about 2 years late to this party and drunk. RaspberryPi, and many other companies are embracing much smaller thin form clients that offer decent performance, for much less. RBPi + 32GB card, case, and accessories only cost as much as this board combo, that still needs a case, PSU, drive, memory, and accessories.

Would be a good upgrade for my Atom330 file server / nas.

Raspberry pi would be great with 2 or more sata ports but finding an arm based board with sata is like finding hens teeth.

Raspberry Pi is cool and cheap but the connection options are too slow even for home file server. Couple that with a painfully slow processor and I'm hard pressed to see its usefulness in a house.

pr0n InspectorRaspberry Pi is cool and cheap but the connection options are too slow even for home file server. Couple that with a painfully slow processor and I'm hard pressed to see its usefulness in a house.

lot of use in a house when you know what you want to do, if you don't : then you don' need it, obviously :D

Steevo10W through that heatsink, no wonder it has to have a 105C rating.


I get the purpose, but its about 2 years late to this party and drunk. RaspberryPi, and many other companies are embracing much smaller thin form clients that offer decent performance, for much less. RBPi + 32GB card, case, and accessories only cost as much as this board combo, that still needs a case, PSU, drive, memory, and accessories.

i prefer my beaglebone black a bit more expensive but a bit more powerful CPU wise (gpu the Rpi is not bad at all) no need for a SD (embeded storage is enough for Angstrom and others ) i still need ot figure out if there is a use for the µSD port as a reader :oops:, a bit less output (USB just 1 but a hub and: no problemo) can be powered by mini USB (via the TV, for instance) or via a 5v 500mA 1A brick.

i use mine to make a smart tv with my 32" toshiba, well its rather usable and fun to toy with

Do not really like both Biostar, Gigabyte models because of the video outputs which do not support resolutions over Full HD. In addition to this we cannot install a low-performance x16 PCI-E video card in order to help our cause. If one of them would have included DisplayPort outputs, it would have been super great.

Full spec www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4881#sp

pr0n InspectorRaspberry Pi is cool and cheap but the connection options are too slow even for home file server. Couple that with a painfully slow processor and I'm hard pressed to see its usefulness in a house.

Wifi is as fast as most hard drives can sustain. 1080 video. USB attachments.

So what can a low speed celeron do that either a better performance desktop that cost marginally more or the raspberry pi cannot for less?

All connections are limited by the slow USB 2.0 on Rasp Pi. That's a single half-duplex 480Mbps connection shared by all USB devices(multiple ports com from an onboard hub).
Hard drives these days are at least 100MiB/s sequential read which is 800Mbps not counting any overhead. Gigabit ethernet is where it's at. Once you go gigabit you never go back.

pr0n InspectorAll connections are limited by the slow USB 2.0 on Rasp Pi. That's a single half-duplex 480Mbps connection shared by all USB devices(multiple ports com from an onboard hub).
Hard drives these days are at least 100MiB/s sequential read which is 800Mbps not counting any overhead. Gigabit ethernet is where it's at. Once you go gigabit you never go back.

you actually never used a Pi or a BBB with a USB drive hooked on it for media playback, do you?

Magic does not exist. You will never be faster than USB 2.0. That is a fact. It's fast enough for watching 1080p rips but when you copy that movie you're stuck at 30-ish MiB/s at the very best. On a gigabit network you would top at more than 100MiB/s, usually maxing out the hard drives.

ok so using it in real condition and having a good result is magic for you ... m'kay

pr0n InspectorAll connections are limited by the slow USB 2.0 on Rasp Pi. That's a single half-duplex 480Mbps connection shared by all USB devices(multiple ports com from an onboard hub).
Hard drives these days are at least 100MiB/s sequential read which is 800Mbps not counting any overhead. Gigabit ethernet is where it's at. Once you go gigabit you never go back.

Considering how many people here use wifi USB dongles it doesn't seem to cause any issues, and really, if you are using this to copy a movie instead of creating a NAS or filesharing from somewhere else you are doing it wrong.

The whole point of these smaller thin clients is more transparency between you and your media, its a lot easier to velcro a Pi behind your TV and use it to stream your media at a few Mb per second than it is to copy to watch, copy, copy, copy.....

I can MLC my phone to my TV and play GTA3, GTA:SA on it, stream music, my videos, internet videos (although netflix still looks bad and they should feel bad), and it works fine. My point is this device/idea is and was obsolete when the idea sprang to life. They may sell some to people for toys, and if some company IT guy has a hard on for them the unlucky workers may get a underpowered cubicle warmer. Phones and pads are already as powerful and fast, and are significantly more versatile, other devices that are more powerful don't cost so much more to make this a reasonable option, so I am not sure where and what its for unless a very, very, very niche market.

Less than $100 to get a mobo/Richland FM2 setup with way more features, all the same components will still be required.

I have an always-on mini-pc running Arch for getting and sharing files locally and "internationally", it eats less power than my router. Things like these are great for home use without sacrificing connectivity options and speed. Plus you can decode videos on CPU, so you can watch Hi10P H.264 and any video encoded with advanced options, along with decoded surround sound and fancy ssa/ass subtitles.

nanoITX please, or picoITX. Seriously, where are the modern nano boards?

pr0n InspectorI have an always-on mini-pc running Arch for getting and sharing files locally and "internationally", it eats less power than my router. Things like these are great for home use without sacrificing connectivity options and speed. Plus you can decode videos on CPU, so you can watch Hi10P H.264 and any video encoded with advanced options, along with decoded surround sound and fancy ssa/ass subtitles.

Perhaps you would be interested in buying my WD router then, 2TB of storage/streaming/backup that is upgradeable with USB or by changing the internal drive, supports DLNA, Air Play and most other options including nice software to access the device for remote upload and download from devices?

Gig connection plus dual band wifi, print server, and more?


Any video with advanced options? Comparing image quality between real time CPU enabled filters and GPU hardware acceleration and filters the CPU loses. But again, here we are at the dividing line for price/features/performance of the device where you get to choose one with it, VS perhaps $20 more for two, or even all three.

I doubt your router will ever offer the same freedom and power of a full linux distro such as Arch, like support running serveral different file sharing programs as daemons and control them from your pc or even phone with a gui client as if it's being run locally. Samba, nfs and cups for sharing things. And it can be used as a full featured pc if you plug a display and kbm to it. You can even open it up to the outside world and ssh into it while away to do whatever you want. Not to mention easy and simple capacity expansion(personally I'm hitting 4TiB soon and if I'm buying today it would need to be at least double that) without goigng through any sata-usb2 bottleneck.

About the videos I was talking about H.264 files on the Internet that are encoded with options(for example high ref frames) that don't play well with hardware decoders as they're less flexible than even dxva or cuvid. Pair that up with audio that can't be bitstreamed like dts-hd ma or flac and stylized subtitles and you would be looking at a slide show without a decent cpu.

pr0n InspectorI doubt your router will ever offer the same freedom and power of a full linux distro such as Arch, like support running serveral different file sharing programs as daemons and control them from your pc or even phone with a gui client as if it's being run locally. Samba, nfs and cups for sharing things. And it can be used as a full featured pc if you plug a display and kbm to it. You can even open it up to the outside world and ssh into it while away to do whatever you want. Not to mention easy and simple capacity expansion(personally I'm hitting 4TiB soon and if I'm buying today it would need to be at least double that) without goigng through any sata-usb2 bottleneck.

About the videos I was talking about H.264 files on the Internet that are encoded with options(for example high ref frames) that don't play well with hardware decoders as they're less flexible than even dxva or cuvid. Pair that up with audio that can't be bitstreamed like dts-hd ma or flac and stylized subtitles and you would be looking at a slide show without a decent cpu.

www.avsforum.com/t/1438867/looking-at-a-new-cheap-htpc-build-a4-3400-3d-playback-questions

Second post, so again, AMD A4 plus cheap board for the same price, with more hardware features including DTS-HD and multiple rendering with hardware acceleration and filters........

And again, what then is the point of this setup other than Intel stuffing it on companies as a way to get rid of otherwise useless chips.

Are you comparing a 65W sku with a 10W one? WTF?