NVIDIA ION Board with PCI slot?

C

cphillips

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Mar 23, 2010
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Hi all

I'll be building a new media centre PC and am looking at a low power solution in the form of a Mini ITX board that has the ION chipset integrated so I can play HD/bluray movies,

I have a Hauppauge WINTV-Nova-HD-S2 PCI card that I use for viewing/recording TV.
(http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novahds2.html)

I'm having trouble finding a board that will accomodate this card! Anyone have any links to suitable boards?

Thanks in advance.

Colin
 
Dont bother with MiniITX. In your instance you are forced to use a PCI slot and I am not finding anything cheap MiniITX wise for that. (Have to buy an Intel board for 130 then CPU so on and so forth)

Mise well go for a nice MicroATX board and a slim case. If you underclock say this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103908 by about half you ought to easily be able to take the fan literally off the CPU cooler and rely on the case fan to circulate air reducing noise greatly.

You will need a CPU cooler for that. I like Rosewill because I like their preapplied paste which saves a bunch of time http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835200017 looks easy to pull the fan off it as well.

As you can see there is no reason to go Mini ITX these days.
 
Zachstar said:
As you can see there is no reason to go Mini ITX these days.
Click to expand...

...

You're serious? With Atoms and Ion, there is no reason to get anything larger than Mini ITX these day (for an HTPC). Anything more, and you're wasting money on extra parts and extra power. That AMD you recommended would just sit unused because everything is hardware decoded and encoded with the graphics and Hauppauge card

The only reason to go MicroATX, is if you want a regular desktop with more than one expansion slot, but want to save a few inches. The footprint really isn't much smaller than standard ATX. Though none of that matters here, as this is the HTPC section. No one here is looking for something to take up MORE space in their living room
 
Yes I am perfectly serious. Right now there there is little on the market that is worth the high price. Ion 1 works ok but quickly chokes once the Atom part gets saturated which is very often. Ion 2 is a joke. One board has to use a dedicated PCI express router chip (Which of course jacks up the price) Because of the greatly limited PCI express lanes.

You failed to notice that I said to underclock it and remove the fan from the heatsink making it passive. Even without that modern 45nm AMD parts have Cool n Quiet with multiple profiles so it automatically is underclocked anyway most of the time (Do underclock even on 45W tho because some loads might cause CnQ to go into full which will max out that heatsink without a fan) Yes it will still need more power than an Atom but not by an extreme amount. AMD Northbridges are renowned for energy efficency.

It is his only hope anyway. No Ion boards with Pci are on newegg. Only PCI express.

Edit: I know you are going to mention Bobcat IF it happens to match or be better than Ion 1 and 2 prices for Mini ITX form factor I would say HECK YES to that in a heartbeat. However I HIGHLY doubt it.

Edit2: If someone thinks this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147098 is too big for their living room then ya go ahead and blow a bunch of money like I did for an Ion.
 
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Zachstar said:
Ion 1 works ok but quickly chokes once the Atom part gets saturated which is very often
Click to expand...

You are doing it wrong then. With proper setup, the Atom should barely be getting touched

Zachstar said:
It is his only hope anyway. No Ion boards with Pci are on newegg. Only PCI express.
Click to expand...

Hauppauge makes comparable PCIe cards as well, which I would recommend over spending twice as much for MicroATX
 
What? First of all no they don't as I am at their site and all the Novas are PCI or USB.

Second he HAS the card. So why go out and spend another £119 (Whatever that is converted to US) on a USB solution on top of the cost of a new Ion build? That's crazy!
 
Its not move I said buy If he already had the Ion I of course would recommend the WinTV-HVR-3300 however that is not the case he has a perfectly good PCI card and just needs the good MicroATX board to go with it.

Otherwise wait and see on bobcat. We ought to know if a board will come this year within a few weeks or so.
 
This is a stupid argument. There are lots of cases where an atom/ION combo would be "enough" but there are also a lot of cases where it just isn't. Likewise, there are plenty of times where mini ITX is enough, but others where you need a bit more expandability found in mATX. If you plan on doing almost no local storage, and using onboard graphics, you'll be fine with mini ITX. But if you want to add a tuner, a discrete GPU and a bunch of HDD's, you'd best be lookin at a mATX board. Theres pros and cons to both and it depends on the situation. To generalize and say that either one is irrelevant "nowadays" is BS

also: the idea that mATX costs twice as much as mini ITX is laughable. In almost all phases of the build you can match price very closely but get a much more powerful machine.
 
wow... Last time I checked there wasnt enough FTA satellite to care.. that is unless your not using FTA & your instead doing something shady
 
bastage said:
wow... Last time I checked there wasnt enough FTA satellite to care.. that is unless your not using FTA & your instead doing something shady
Click to expand...
Depending on where you are there can be more FTA sat available than someone in the US would see on clearQAM.
for example:
wikipedia said:
European countries have a tradition of most television services being free to air. Germany, in particular, receives in excess of 100 digital TV channels free to air, including MTV (which remains encrypted for much of Europe). Approximately half of the television channels on Astra's 19.2° east and 28.2° east satellite positions, and Eutelsat's Hot Bird (13°E) are free-to-air.
Click to expand...

Since OP linked to the UK Hauppaugue page, I'm assuming they aren't in the US. In the UK the BBC does FTA too, so theres a lot of quality content out there for Europeans
 
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