I used an 8200 board with a 4850e in my main HTPC for nearly a year (Asus) and replaced it with an Asus P5N7A-VM 9300 board and scavenged the e5200 dual core from my gaming rig and the 9300 definitely does a better job with video decoding quality than the 8200.
I was going to get an Ion dual-core for another room in my house, but I just purchased a Gateway 1435u, SU2300 based CULV laptop for myself instead because I felt it was a higher priority. Just got it today. Great timing as they released the Flash beta this week and my new laptop has a 4500MHD gpu... We'll see how it does. I may still get the Ion, just to have a full blown netbox type machine for use by guests or in a pinch, but it's now more likely that I'll use one of the cheaper Atom or Ion boards as a file server/torrent box on my home network for now and possibly just use the sub-$100 media servers for the smaller rooms in my house in the future instead.
Liliputing has a nice video comparison of before and after the 10.1 beta playing HD Hulu and 1080p Youtube videos on a dual-core Asrock Atom 330/Ion machine here:
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/11/adobe-flash-player-10-1-beta-with-gpu-acceleration-arrives.html
The results are dramatically better with the beta--especially for the Youtube 1080p clip.
I was going to get an Ion dual-core for another room in my house, but I just purchased a Gateway 1435u, SU2300 based CULV laptop for myself instead because I felt it was a higher priority. Just got it today. Great timing as they released the Flash beta this week and my new laptop has a 4500MHD gpu... We'll see how it does. I may still get the Ion, just to have a full blown netbox type machine for use by guests or in a pinch, but it's now more likely that I'll use one of the cheaper Atom or Ion boards as a file server/torrent box on my home network for now and possibly just use the sub-$100 media servers for the smaller rooms in my house in the future instead.
Liliputing has a nice video comparison of before and after the 10.1 beta playing HD Hulu and 1080p Youtube videos on a dual-core Asrock Atom 330/Ion machine here:
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/11/adobe-flash-player-10-1-beta-with-gpu-acceleration-arrives.html
The results are dramatically better with the beta--especially for the Youtube 1080p clip.
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