I don't know about Atoms, but I can tell you a Core Solo 1.5MHz (T1200) has waaay too much processing power. Unless you're transcoding many streams at the same time, I guess; I do not.
Those Intel board seem really nice, however I'd carefully check the power states the CPU accepts. I think there is a model that -unbelievably- does not support ACPI S3 (suspend to ram). Given power consumption is the Atoms achille's heel (the CPU uses like 4W, but the prev-generation chipset gobbles a ridiculous 20W or so) you might want to use a power saving scheme. S3 coupled with wake on lan should give you a 5 secs delay between pressing the power button on the SB3 remote, screen goind blank and back again with menu operational. I believe this is quite acceptable. If you only have 1 drive, the computer may come around under 5 secs. Sorry: I am speaking Linux, here. I don't know how it goes under windows. You should search for posts by syburgh on this sub-forum, or the DIY forum. He has carefully studied a handful of boards of this class, including Intel/Atom boards. Besides CPU power, the quality of the network chip is paramount. I'd go for Intel over any realtek chip. Bad network chips/drivers kill the CPU with interrupts when there is a lot of traffic. Good ones handle packet processing themselves and minimize CPU interrupts. RAM also helps increasing network throughput. I'd consider 256 MB Ram a strict minimum and 512MB well enough (linux, no graphical user interface). With a GUI I'd add another 256MB, or so. -- epoch1970 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ epoch1970's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16711 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=56092 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/unix
