Anyone running an E350-based HTPC?

Headcase_Fargone

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2010
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I've been enjoying the I3-based HTPC that I built a few months ago in the living room so much that I'm considering building a second one. I'd like to keep the cost of this second box down as much as possible so I've been looking into the AMD E-350 (Zacate) kits.

Is anyone currently running an HTPC on one of these APUs? Are you running Windows 7 or Linux? WMC, Media Browser, XBMC?

I'm really curious to hear what kind of real-world performance can be squeezed out of these since the price is so reasonable. Everything that I've read has (mostly) stated that 1080p MKVs run fine and that the only playback issues are with Netflix and are related to Silverlight not taking advantage of the hardware. That should be changing later this year from what I gather.

How is GUI performance in your chosen front-end though? Snappy? Sluggish?
 
i am. windows 7, xbmc. i don't use netflix so i can't comment on that but it doesn't have any trouble with 1080 video files or 720p youtube videos via the xbmc youtube plugin. the gui is instantaneous except when first waking the machine up after it's been idle for a while. i think that's the hard drive more than anything else, though.
 
i am. windows 7, xbmc. i don't use netflix so i can't comment on that but it doesn't have any trouble with 1080 video files or 720p youtube videos via the xbmc youtube plugin. the gui is instantaneous except when first waking the machine up after it's been idle for a while. i think that's the hard drive more than anything else, though.

I'm planning to put an inexpensive SSD in so hopefully that won't even be an issue.
 
i am. windows 7, xbmc. i don't use netflix so i can't comment on that but it doesn't have any trouble with 1080 video files or 720p youtube videos via the xbmc youtube plugin. the gui is instantaneous except when first waking the machine up after it's been idle for a while. i think that's the hard drive more than anything else, though.

Does this mean it does 1080p youtube videos in a browser?
 
That was a problem with the version of flash that was out when the chip was new. It's since been resolved.

Well, I wish I had read that. I was considering a build with the chip but decided to get something else because of the flash issue. Oh well.....
 
I have one. Win7 with XBMC and a few emulators (NES, SNES, Genesis, N64) and it works just fine for my purposes. I don't use Netflix so no problem for me, I don't know about flash since I don't use that either. It's mostly snappy in XBMC, sometimes it slows down from time to time navigating the menus (usually switching between Movies or TV Shows) but I think might be it trying to retrieve the weather or something.
 
Here is a thread about mine.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1594091

I'm quite happy with it. I also chose to go with an SSD since all of my media is stored on the network. YouTube works great for me in a browser. I don't use NetFlix so any issues related to that don't really maTter to me.

I hope this helps.
 
I enjoy my E-350 htpc, its plenty fast, and to be honest, I have found no real need for an SSD in my system. The faster resume from sleep is not really necessary when I spend most of the time waiting for my harmony remote to switch inputs on the receiver, the TV to warm up after it powers on.
 
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