April 28, 201115 yr This combo was there before, but the Price on the ZBox just dropped from $249 to $219 making the combo deal cheaper than the ZBox itself was yesterday. Combo available until 5/4.
April 28, 201115 yr Anyone experience stuttering with these devices? I hear the Intel chip can't handle 1080p very well (also was discussed on Popcorn Hour forums, which uses Sigma chips). But I guess the Sigma chips are better for video playback, but fail in other areas of HTPCs (like widgets, plugins, UI "smoothness")
April 28, 201115 yr No stutter on mine. The CPU isn't really involved in the video decoding, it is all offloaded to the ION GPU, which handles it perfectly.
April 28, 201115 yr Author May or may not be the root cause, but it might be worth checking temperatures. I picked up two of these a month ago (one for a LP Win7 desktop and one for an XBMC frontend). I noticed the Win 7 unit had some stability issues so I put a temperature monitor on my desktop. It would start out fine, but after a few days of idling temps were up around 70°C. I swapped systems and confirmed the BIOS version/settings were identical. The second system idles in the 40-45°C range. My assumption is the heatsink wasn't seated properly, so I RMA'd the unit. Should have the replacement tomorrow. The good news is that the extra hot system helped to bring in a memory fail that 24hrs of memtest didn't uncover, so I got that replaced as well. Gotta love Newegg!
April 29, 201115 yr Anyone experience stuttering with these devices? I hear the Intel chip can't handle 1080p very well (also was discussed on Popcorn Hour forums, which uses Sigma chips). But I guess the Sigma chips are better for video playback, but fail in other areas of HTPCs (like widgets, plugins, UI "smoothness") An ION system will play pretty much any 1080p you can throw at it.
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