ASUS E35M1-M PRO AMD Zacate

[robothunter]

I am thinking of upgrading my Ion N330 board with the ASUS E35M1-M PRO. My Ion is slow in XBMC. Cycling through my movies I am experiencing lag and waiting a couple seconds for the fan art to pop up in the background is my primary reason. Does anyone have any experience with this board and XMBC?

 

[mattchapman]

I read Zacate is not bad but ultimately Zacate is (originally intended as) a low-cost, low-power solution for mobile devices/entry-level desktop systems.
Perhaps wait for AMD A-Series Fusion APU (i.e. Llano) for a more functional, low-power HTPC.
Zacate CPU is just barely better than an Intel Atom. Those who hate Atom may hate E-350 too.

 

[|Tch0rT|]

I my friend's Ion 330 Atom isn't slow with XBMC on Windows 7. He said if you change the art to BMP instead of JPG stuff loads way quicker.

 

[Activate: AMD]

I read Zacate is not bad but ultimately Zacate is (originally intended as) a low-cost, low-power solution for mobile devices/entry-level desktop systems.
Perhaps wait for AMD A-Series Fusion APU (i.e. Llano) for a more functional, low-power HTPC.
Zacate CPU is just barely better than an Intel Atom. Those who hate Atom may hate E-350 too.

agreed in principle, but the thing about HTPC's is that there is a pretty hard distinction between "not cutting it" and "good enough." For the vast majority of people, "good enough" simply is "good enough" and any additional horsepower is wasting electricity. It either plays your codecs at 1080p or it doesnt, and AFAIK, Zacate can do most of it. In this case, it sounds like the GUI is the issue, and the performance boost of the zacate CPU core might be enough of a boost to make the difference. It could also be a slow disk subsystem (i.e. slow reads from cached metadata or gui images)

I am excited about the Llano cores though

 

[robothunter]

Thanks for the feedback. I have Windows 7 and all the fan art on a SSD. I have a hardware RAID 5 card with all my movies on it. I am trying to keep it low power because it is doubling as a media server for my entire house. I will try switching to BMP fan art and see if that helps. I was kind of hoping that switching to a Zacate would add the extra oomph the GUI needs to run smoothly.

 

[danman]

agreed in principle, but the thing about HTPC's is that there is a pretty hard distinction between "not cutting it" and "good enough." For the vast majority of people, "good enough" simply is "good enough" and any additional horsepower is wasting electricity. It either plays your codecs at 1080p or it doesnt, and AFAIK, Zacate can do most of it. In this case, it sounds like the GUI is the issue, and the performance boost of the zacate CPU core might be enough of a boost to make the difference. It could also be a slow disk subsystem (i.e. slow reads from cached metadata or gui images)

I am excited about the Llano cores though

+1 to this post. Zacate works great with MCE and any 1080P content.