Help me replace a Revo R3610

[rich_hodgetts]

Hello,

I have a Acer Revo R3610 Atom/Ion box that has served well as a HTPC for a good while. Its now no longer fit for purpose, Netflix will runs very poorly due to the ION graphics core being incompatible with Silverlight and even streaming from iPlayer/ 4OD has issues with smooth playback.

I would like to replace it with something similar but I am really struggling to choose. I have a budget of around £200 (not including operating system) and I already have a suitable 2.5" SSD. It needs to surf the web, playback downloaded HD content and run Netflix/ Iplayer in HD and thats about it.

Would anyone be prepared to suggest something suitable. I am currently thinking of a NUC (whilst trying to avoid one that will only take an mSATA SSD), one of the ZOTAC ZBOX machines, or perhaps the Gigabyte BRIX Celeron 2955U. I am really struggling to make head or tail of which processor to go for.

Any help very much appreciated!

Rich

 

[EndlessWaves]

You might like to keep an eye on this thread to see how that machine goes.

The sucessors to the desktop dual core Atoms that were commonly used in Nettops like the Revo are the System on a Chip (SoC) processors like the Intel Silvermont/Bay Trail and AMD Jaguar/Kabini.

The branding is a bit of a mess though, Intel are sharing the Celeron/Pentium labels between their SoC range and their conventional higher power Haswell chips with only the model code to distinguish them (Anything starting J is desktop bay trail, anything starting N is notebook bay trail, anything with letters at the end instead is probably some form of haswell. AMD are even worse with essentially no way to tell which is which without looking it up.

What are your priorities? Generally if you want the fastest machine possible then the standard chips are the way to go. Haswell on the Intel side has a bit more CPU power, Kaveri (different from Kabini) on the AMD side often has better integrated graphics. If you want something as cheap or as low power as possible than the SoC chips are worth looking at. A quick search for the AMD 5350 (kabini) reveals there are a couple of reports of it handling Netflix ok.

Also, are you prepared to do a bit of plugging stuff together yourself? There aren't that many available pre-built machines.

And finally, any size restrictions?