[Discuss] Returned to the NVIDIA fold

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

"Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> writes:

> After last month's Intel CedarView driver debacle, and at Tom's suggestion to
> dig through the MythTV forum for comments about graphic cards, I chose a new
> system.  The MythTV forums are relatively quiet on this topic, so I had to
> make an educated guess.
>
> The product I chose is the Zotac Zbox ID80, which is based on the same
> processor (Intel's discontiued Atom D2700 2.13GHz); $234 or so at any of the
> major online vendors.  It's got all the expected ports (including optical
> S/PDIF which was missing from the Shuttle product) and includes an NVIDIA
> GeForce GT 520M which is supported properly by the NVIDIA proprietary Linux
> driver.  I got the system up and running (on my usual OpenSUSE 12.2 distro, no
> fiddling with Ubuntu/Fedora/everything else like I had to last time) in about
> 30-40 minutes of effort; HD video playback uses about 6% CPU.
>
> The one tiny downside with this product is that the extra GPU chip costs extra
> electric power: I'm measuring 29 watts idle, 33 watts during TV playback.  If
> only one could make the Shuttle product work (with the D2700's internal GPU),
> then one could get power usage down to 13-14 watts.  My future 10-watt video
> front-end solution will just have to wait for the future to arrive.

Yeah, I bought a bunch of Zotac machines for frontends as well,
installed F17 w/ the NVidia drivers and it hums along quite nicely!

> -rich

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available