Currently, the computer attached to my television is huge, loud, and power-hungry. It’s a full-tower computer with 3 or 4 fans in it and a Core 2 Duo processor with a 450W power supply. I’m getting pretty tired of it sitting all the way to the side of my HT setup and blowing so much hot air. I’ve convinced myself that the way to go is a Mini-ITX setup.
If you’ve never seen a Mini-ITX computer, let me tell you - they’re small. Really small. The motherboard is 6.7 inches square.
Some newer Mini-ITX motherboards have Nvidia GeForce graphics chipsets on them that can natively decode 1080p video without having to tax the processor. That means that you can have a slower, lower-power processor and still be able to watch full-screen, high definition video. This is very important to me, since being a Blu-Ray player is the primary function of my HTPC.
So, I have two choices. I can get a Mini-ITX motherboard with an Nvidia chipset that supports the processor I have now, a 65W Core 2 Duo. I’d have to also buy a smaller fan for the CPU, since Mini-ITX cases get pretty cramped.
I could instead get this, a Mini-ITX motherboard with a built-in Intel Atom processor, the same one in Netbooks like the Dell Mini 9 or the EeePC. It’s super-low power, and the Nvidia Ion chipset makes sure that I can still use the computer as a Blu-Ray player.
The biggest problem with using the Atom-powered board is that not all video is accelerated by the Nvidia chipset…specifically, Flash video, like that found on Hulu.com. I’m not at all confident that a computer like that could stream video from Hulu smoothly when made fullscreen on a 1080p monitor.
