Zacate E350 vs. SB i3 (no dedicated GPU) for HTPC/NAS?

[holzmann]

Lots of questions here...

If you wanted to build a small-form-factor HTPC+NAS, what hardware and OS would you choose?

For hardware, I am debating between a Zacate E350 versus a Sandy Bridge Core i3 with no dedicated GPU card. There would be a SSD boot drive along with a RAID 1 array most likely, consisting of two 1.5 or 2TB HDDs. The purpose of the machine would be 1) Backup & Storage of other network PCs (documents, pictures, mp3s, videos, etc.) and 2) Media streamer of online content, preferably of 1080P content where available.

The system would not be intended for any sort of gaming.

The system would output to a 50" Panasonic Plasma HDTV.

Being able to remotely access the HTPC (to access photos for example) would be a plus, and I would prefer to do this by more secure means (WinSCP).

For software: WHS 2008 R2? Win7 Pro/Ultimate/Something Linux or BSD based?

Right now I just have an old PC running FreeNAS with a 3ware Raid controller with two 500GB HDDs in RAID 1. Instead of upgrading this server AND building an HTPC, my thought is, why not just combine the two?

Thanks.

 

[af22]

i have found at least with windows 7 and WMC, when i'm using WMC watching tv, windows 7 takes away from the performance of my network file serving. There is plenty of processing power available, i think it has to do with the OS stack and how it prioritizes. Maybe it's better on a server class OS.

 

[rhansen5_99]

Well my vote would be for the i3 solution. You could then run win 7 and mediacenter and maybe if you really wanted a virtual machine to serve up you stuff if you really wanted to. Its not like your processor wont idle when not in use so you would be within the same power profile. Maybe if you wanted the fancy ATI decoding stuff throw a 5570 or 5450 in there for good measure?

 

[Snufykat]

No real world experience but i would think if you wanted to be streaming to the tv and other network traffic that you would be better off with server class software.

 

[bastage]

Those options aren't even comparable. if it's just streaming then the zocate would be better due to lower voltage. But the i3 will have greater performance in raw processing power.