Foxconn NT-330I-A-B-NA-A NVIDIA ION Black Barebone Systems - Mini / Booksize

Pros: Extremely small form factor - it's smaller than the Wii. Very low-noise profile. I have to "listen" for it to hear the fan; both in idle and HD-playback states. On-board wireless & Gigabit ethernet connectivity. HDMI and DVI on box; standard VGA supported with included DVI to VGA adapter. Rear speaker jack supports optical SPDIF audio; requires 3.5mm adapter for TOS-link users. VESA monitor mount also included. FOXOS (custom linux OS) & WinXP/Win7 drivers included.

Cons: No on-board bluetooth. Cooling solution at first glance appears to be insufficient for long-term use; only time will tell. Single RAM slot. With the prohibitive cost for 4GB 200-pin sticks, you might be better off with just 2GB of RAM for this.

Overall Review: To quote a famous comedian voicing a large, blue djinn; "Phenomenal cosmic power; itty-bitty living space." While this most likely won't satisfy any high-level gaming needs *cough*Crysis*cough* - it will easily handle standard web-surfing, documentation apps and just about any video format you throw at it. My specific purpose for this machine was to replace a rather large HTPC that I had in my den. From installation; this thing has been a breeze. Opening the case is easy, and adding your parts (RAM, HDD) is made quite easy. Both locations are very accessible and quick to install. The OS installation went very smoothly for me (Win7 32-bit) with nary a hitch even though I was on HDMI. The included drivers disc was straight-forward and simple for driver installation. Playback of 1080p content was surprisingly smooth; even for various formats (WMV, MKV, M4V, etc.). I consider this a great choice for a personal PC or HTPC focused on media playback and casual gaming.

Pros: Easy to add harddrive & RAM Quick configuration once connected to LCD Size + ION + HULU == great wife acceptance factor!

Cons: It is such a lightweight box that the HDMI cable knocks it over - it comes w/a stand that is just plastic, so it doesn't help - This is REALLY minor

Overall Review: I've been pricing ION machines for some time now & this one is meeting every expectation.

Pros: Very small, comes with VESA mount, has HDMI out. Ran 1080p videos with minimal GUI lag under Ubuntu 10.04 and XBMC/VDPAU.

Cons: Unit stopped booting after 4 months of light usage. Memory and hard drive tests fine in another system. Power supply works on another device that has the same power requirements and plug. Fan would ramp to full speed whenever opening more than one tab in Firefox under Ubuntu 10.04. Wireless signal was very weak. My cell phone wifi had two bars sitting next to this desktop while the it was still searching for a network signal.

Overall Review: Contacted manufacturer and they want me to give them a credit card number on their RMA form just in case it didn't die under a manufacturer defect. This would be fine normally but there was no troubleshooting on their tech support line, they just asked for my email and sent me a PDF that I had to fill out for this RMA request. I'm not putting any more money into this piece of junk. I'm just going to build my own mini-itx box instead, avoiding Foxconn products like the plague.

Pros: very small and quiet. easy to install the hard drive and memory. Wife Acceptance Factor very high. inexpensive onsale for blackfriday This replaced my appletv as a bedroom frontend, wife doesnt like the bright LEDs and noisy fans in the bedroom but always wants to watch the latest shows in the bedroom tv. I had an appletv modifed because it was fanless and small but could only do standard def shows. I have tested this with bluray movies, and xvid files, and files 1080i and 720p files captured from hdhomerun, no studdering or problems, top only reports 5% system usage when playing a 720p mkv file.

Cons: Luckily from reading other reviews I was clued into the nomsi issue, and the need to enable VDPAU. It didnt take to long to do so, but did experience freezes and crashes until it did. Would like a bios option to turn off the media card reader thats built in. it only has 1 slot, but registers 4-6 devices with the system for access mounting cards. which makes finding usb drives in use in linux a bit if a pain, you expect it to be /dev/sdb it shows available drives from sda-sdg

Overall Review: MythTV .24 (MythDora 12.23 upgraded to .24) -(Frontend only with Dedicated backend and NFS Storage) DDR2 800 1GB 5400RPM Fujitsu 120gb drive Hooked up via HDMI to Vizio Eco HD TV @ 720p

Pros: It is small! It looks really good. It was easy to take apart and pop a hard drive and memory in it. Installed XP on it with no problems. Works great. Very impressive little unit.

Cons: The sound through the HDMI port is very staticy. It's not the HDMI cable, because it works fine on another device and it also doesn't seem to be a software issue. It sounds like electrical interference. I had to switch to VGA and use the Audio output instead, which was not a big deal.

Overall Review: The fan is quiet enough for me, but it's not whisper quiet. It seems to always run at a constant speed, even when the CPU is at idle for long periods of time, the fan never idles down. This isn't a con for me, but it's definitely worth noting.

Pros: HDMI Output & Nice 1080 HD playback.

Cons: Doesn't run hot enough to cook eggs. ;)

Overall Review: I'll write a longer review of this little box later on, but I wanted to respond to those who say it doesn't play 1080 video smoothly. Yes it does! Remember that this is an Atom CPU! You cannot expect the video decoding to take place in the CPU! This box also has an NVIDIA ION Graphics chip (GPU) which is where the bulk of the decoding should be happening. If you're using VLC, go to Tools -> Preferences -> Input & Codecs. Once there, select the option to "Use GPU acceleration." This should greatly improve your video playback because you're telling the computer to use the ION GPU to decode the video... That's what it's for! :) If you're using XBMC or another player, I'm sure you can find the settings to optimize your GPU utilization. Good luck!

Pros: Small, light, cheap, does HDMI, built-in wireless, 64-bit CPU

Cons: not much documentation

Overall Review: Bought it as a shell-shocker deal, basically got the 2G mem for free. Put in the mem and HD in less than 5 minutes. Installed Windows 7 and connected to my HDTV via HDMI in about an hour. Everything works as advertised. The documentation is not very useful, but then if you know what you are doing you don't really need it anyway. Didn't use the driver CD, downloaded all of them from FoxConn and NVidia directly.

Pros: Very small footprint, exactly what I was looking for. No, its not ultra quiet but it is not too loud for me. Win7 Media Center works fantastic after loading codecs, streams 720p video through wireless-g in adjacent room from WD Sharespace 4TB with minimal bumps. With 2GB DDR2 800 and 3GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD it boots to desktop in about 20 seconds. Easy load of OS from bootable 4GB flash drive. Overall I am very impressed.

Cons: Definitely a fingerprint magnet. Case is a challenge to open, keep protective film on until you are finished to avoid scratching. BIOS lacks many options including AHCI for best SSD performance. No cons that would cause me to knock off any eggs. This is a great product.

Overall Review: This little box so far has exceeded my expectations. I have been researching options for and HTPC and leaned towards this one mainly for size reasons and truthfully I expected less performance than what I got. My Win7 Windows Experience Index was 3.3, the lowest being the Atom CPU. Even so, it performs well since I am single tasking with WMC and not surfing the web while streaming audio or anything. Foxconn NT-330I-0H0W-B-NA Barebones System OCZ Vertex Turbo 2.5" 30GB SSD G.Skill 2GB DDR2 800 Windows 7 Home Premium Will be adding soon: AVerMedia AVerTV Hybrid Volar Max USB Adesso Vista MCE Infrared Remote Asus Slim External BD Combo USB