Looking for advice on living room pc purchase?

[jakobjkraft]

I just returned the Acer Aspire Revo -- (http://www.jr.com/acer-computer/pe/ACE_AR3610U9022/) -- which despite being advertised as able to handle HD video, proved that while it handled locally stored HD video just fine, it choked on streaming anything online, even though it was hard-wired to the same fast 27 Mbps internet line that my other PC's in the house use. None of them have any problem streaming HD video (but none of them are in my living room🙁)
I found out that a lot of online video sources (Hulu, Netflix) don't utilize the GPU, only CPU. So the Acer's craptastic Atom processor ended up not being enough (and its Nvidia ION chip pretty much useless).

So now I'm looking at this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Dell+-+I...zino&cp=1&lp=5

No doubt the AMD processor is a step up, but will it be enough to comfortably stream online HD video? Because I already have the Roku box for Netflix and an Asus OPLAY media player networked to my PC to play downloaded media directly to my TV. If this Dell Zino can't stream Netflix content as well as the Roku box does, then there's no point...

I'm getting old and want to simplify things (but I don't want to get cable, I'm not THAT old). I'm looking to get rid of my Roku box and my Asus Oplay box, and replace them with a single pc for the living room.Will this Dell Zino cut it or should I look at something else? Not wanting to spend more than $450 and need small form-factor.
Maybe I should just keep my current setup? It's just all those remotes irritate me...

Any advice would be appreciated -- thanks!

 

[somethingsketchy]

Unfortunately, I don't think this particular Dell Zino will do much better. Since it is a single core processor, everything that needs to be handled by the processor will only be processed by that single core. At least the Acer Aspire Revo processor was hyper-threaded (can handle two processing threads simultaneously).

Another caveat to consider is if the website is "established" to use the GPU. Some websites (such as Netflix I believe) will send data to the processor and there is a "flag" that will utilize the GPU, instead of the processor. The catch of course is whetever the website has this flag within the website code or not.

With those in mind, I'd recommend (especially if it is unknown which websites are GPU-enabled for HD video) would be to pick up a dual core Core2Duo or Athlon II X2 processor and go from there. Of course it may be expensive (depending on where you look to buy) for this jump up, but you'll have plenty of processing power to handle everything you would want out of your HTPC.

 

[mfenn]

Did you try the Flash 10.1 RC and the newest ION drivers?

 

[jakobjkraft]

Did you try the Flash 10.1 RC and the newest ION drivers?

I did, didn't make any difference unfortunately...