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Eric B.

Eric B.

Joined on 03/22/11

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 13
Most Favorable Review

Great little computer

Foxconn Brazos AT-5570 AMD A45 (Hudson D1) Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System
Foxconn Brazos AT-5570 AMD A45 (Hudson D1) Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System

Pros: Fanless, can play high bit rate 1080p h264, linux friendly and all the hardware execpt VAAPI worked out of the box. See other thoughts for that

Cons: wifi card is a bit weak, can freeze for a moment when the cpu max's out.

Overall Review: I installed xubuntu 12.04 on this computer with XBMC to use it as a HTPC for my father. At first I was abit disappoint that with the playback of the video but after playing around with the box for abit I discovered that VAAPI (hardware video decoding) was not enabled by default in ubuntu. If you run vainfo from the command line and VAAPI is working you should get VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD else you need to run the following command to get VAAPI working sudo apt-get install libva1 vainfo xvba-va-driver after that the video playback worked great and playing 1080p high bit rate h264 videos in XBMC worked great with a cpu usage of 35-40%

Most Critical Review

mostly usable but it takes some work

Foxconn nt-A3700-0H0WBANA AMD A45 (Hudson D1) Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System
Foxconn nt-A3700-0H0WBANA AMD A45 (Hudson D1) Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System

Pros: small form factor low power usage low noise

Cons: GPU sucks low GPU memory built in N wifi is too slow to stream HD content it's a pain to get video playback working well with linux

Overall Review: I bought this computer to use as a mythtv frontend and installed ubuntu 12.04. The default drivers in the ubnuntu repo caused all sorts of lock ups and visual error when running so I ended up using the newest AMD drivers which seemed to fix most of that up, however when running at 1080i res you still get visual errors and you pretty much have to disable any opengl content else it will lock up sooner of later. The built in wifi N is really too slow to stream any HD content so I plugged in a USB wifi N doogle and that seemed to fix that problem I read in the reviews that people can play 1080 HD content on this computer which is true, however that will only work if the video codec is a TS or PS stearm (normal OTA video with low compression), if the video codec is H264 (high compression) the computer will not be able to play any hd content (1080i/p or 720p) I also read in some of the reviews that people have been removing the internal wifi card and replacing it with a crystal hd card to improve the video play back so I purchased one. Hopefully that will get H264 content to play well. one last thing, if you are going to install linux on this computer you really need to add the following lines to your xorg.conf file to make the video playback usable Option "VideoOverlay" "off" Option "TexturedVideo" "on" Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off" Option "TexturedVideoSync" "on"

great laptopru

ASUS C300MA-EDU Chromebook Intel Celeron Dual-Core N2830 (2.16GHz) 4GB Memory 32GB eMMC SSD 13.3" Chrome OS
ASUS C300MA-EDU Chromebook Intel Celeron Dual-Core N2830 (2.16GHz) 4GB Memory 32GB eMMC SSD 13.3" Chrome OS

Pros: Great little laptop computer. Long battery life can run linux with cutron

Cons: can't wipe chromeos to install linux.

Overall Review: It runs ubuntu linux runs really well with curton. everything in ubuntu function like you expect. You just have to run chromeos and ubuntu side by side but as it turns out that really isn't a bad thing. Its using the same kernel so there isn't any performance hits. Battery life is about 13 hours and it is very light. The only thing if you install curton and ubuntu is the default install is very bare bones so you will have to install alot of packages to get everything going. For example for printing you will need to install cups.

does not work

AVerMedia AVerTV Volar Hybrid Q, USB TV Tuner Supports Windows & Android TV 7.0+ (H837)
AVerMedia AVerTV Volar Hybrid Q, USB TV Tuner Supports Windows & Android TV 7.0+ (H837)

Pros: can be used as paper weight

Cons: unit is doa. Tried on XP and couldn't get it to work... $10 in shipping to return it..... never buying avermedia again

Great Box!

GIGABYTE GB-BXA8-5545 Mini-PC Barebone
GIGABYTE GB-BXA8-5545 Mini-PC Barebone

Pros: -everything works with linux out of the box (wifi, hdmi audio, video, bluetooth, etc...) -foss AMD driver and VDPAU hardware decoding works for great video play back -quad core -quiet -low power usage, uses 19 watts :) -usb 3 ports

Cons: -only msata drives, unless you use external usb drives -uses 1.35 volt memory -no spif port -no esata port

Overall Review: I am using this as a combo mythtv frontend and backend with ubuntu 14.04 as the os. It has more then enough power to do these jobs without any problems. The video play back with VDPAU and mythtv 0.27.1 works great for mpeg-2 and h264 content 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. The only thing right now is the foss drivers only allow for 2x temperoal hardware deinterlacing for 1080i content. However all video is shape and smooth as silk. Just remember you need to install vdpau to hardware decoding, you can check to see if it working my running vdpauinfo in the command line

works great

Gear Head CR6900 USB 2.0 USB 2.0 Flash Card Reader
Gear Head CR6900 USB 2.0 USB 2.0 Flash Card Reader

Pros: Low cost, high preformance, works with linux,

Cons: none

Overall Review: Reads and writes to my SD cards are the rated speed of the card with no issues at all. I am getting around ~17 mb/s of read speed from my SD cards. The read speeds vary from card to card but thats a pretty good average