ASRock ION3D 152D Intel Atom D525 (1.8GHz, dual-core) NVIDIA GT218-ION 1 x HDMI Remote Control Barebone

Pros: Good quality unit and rather speedy for an Atom CPU when running Win7 64bit. Very nice looking, blends in well with my other home theater hardware. All internal PC hardware components are name brand hardware rather than the generic components you usually get with an econo-box computer. Many other good points as this is a quality piece of hardware built by a widely respected manufacturer. MSRP is very reasonable considering the cost of each component. I could not build a similar HTPC for ASRock's MSRP. My best effort came to well over $450.

Cons: Despite all of its good points and all of the wonderful reviews I've read, I cannot stream HD content from Netflix through a wireless connection or a hardwired connection. I haven't been able to find the cause of the problem so I cannot blame it on the computer yet. I have been researching this problem to death for the last few weeks. I am still no closer to resolving the problem than when I started. HD content slows to about one frame per second so an HD movie is like watching a slide show for about the first 10-15 minutes. After about 10 minutes or so, it seems to display the HD content as expected but it is a little pixilated. To attempt to resolve the problem, I added a bridge to my gigabit wireless N router at 2.4Ghz. No improved results, so I moved the router closer the ION to ensure a stable 100% signal. The problem still did not go away, so I bought a second bridge/AP to create a dedicated 5.0Ghz signal to the HTPC. (The 2.4 band was very crowded.) The 5.0 signal was also being

Other Thoughts: I'm out of thoughts. I used them all up since I bought the ION PC.

Pros: Good value. Quiet. Small!

Cons: Nothing really bad.

Pros: Extremely quiet, fast, small. This device is SO QUIET I don't even know it is on! Boots to a screen that advises you to place and OS disk in optical drive. Everything else takes care of itself.
Asrock Tech support are superhuman. These guys are very polite and know the specifications off the top of their heads.

Cons: Not really a con. Not all drivers come standard with Win 7 - guess what... place the support disk in the drive after Win 7 installation, install all, Windows restarts about five times and everything is done.

Another note and not really a con is that once all of the drivers are installed, the DTS sound is turned off. You have to search through the HD Audio manager to find a way to turn the optical audio back on. Once you do, the sound is INCREDIBLE.

Other Thoughts: I bought this to replace my monster full ATX, and noisy HTPC from three years ago. I have attached an external USB in 2.0 (and 3.0) ports to watch movies. There is NO PROBLEM whatsoever with transfer speed as the Asrock heroes in tech support indicated there would not be prior to the purchase. I am now purchasing a four bay USB 3.0 Sans Digital External which will be used in clean mode to access music and movies through the USB.

In short, unless you are doing some heavy lifting, there is no real need for the eSATA, this device works great. But I am still getting a Square Trade Warranty...

Pros: Newegg repace the first unit arrived DOA. The second unit has worked flawlessly. 3D video does work using Arcsoft TotalMedia 5 as the media player. Out-putting to a Panasonic 50" plasma TV.

Cons: PowerDVD hasn't worked with 3D. I purchased the software, not the trial vesion supplied with the unit.

Pros: None

Cons: Won't power up.

Pros: It's reasonably quiet.

Sturdy construction and everything seems to work.

Cons: I tried installing Ubuntu and the wireless connection did not work out of the box. I made some feeble attempts to get it working but didn't have a lot of time for it. I ended up installing Windows 7 so it wasn't an issue for me. One small annoyance in Windows 7 is that two nearly identical icons appear in the system tray for the wireless connection: one I think is the native Windows icon and the other is put there by the driver. The former cannot be hidden and does not show you any useful information, whereas the latter can be hidden but shows you the signal strength. It would be nice if the useless icon wasn't there. It was also slightly tricky to get it to connect to the wireless network automatically. You have to fiddle with the driver utility and add the network to your "profile" or some such thing.

Other Thoughts: I have not used it for playing high definition movies so I don't know how well it works for that. I'm just using it for basic computing, word processing, web surfing, youtube, etc, and it works great for those things.