Fanless, Intel Atom 330 PC with DVI, 12V DC Input
The Aleutia team has been working on a fascinating project recently for a client in the hotel industry. Any PC that goes ito a five star room is going to have be small and silent but this one has to offer MPEG4 decoding, HDCP, and 1080p playback as well as DVI/HDMI output and ideally optical output.
We've actually achieved this (see my next post) though with the Achilles caveat of a fan, albeit a 13dB fan and we ultimately want to go fanless.
The "H1" system pictured is a powered by two Intel Atom 1.6GHz processors. Though Intel brands this as Dual Core, the chips are actually on a seperate die and feature individual hyper threading - on Ubuntu this shows ups as 4 cores (a quad core Atom?). (Similarly the Intel Atom is just a rebranded Centrino, albeit at a great price).
It features Gigabit Lan, 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, and a coral reef of heatsinks to dissipate CPU heat, Northbridge heat, and more heat coming from an Ati 2400 GPU which provides DVI output and should shortly offer 1080p playback.
2.5" Drive slot means you can go up 500GB at 5400RPM (about £90 these days) or 250GB at 7200RPM (about £60).
Completely silent, fanless, wall-mountable, and great as a Boxee box, HTPC, or just a powerful home/office workstation.
We'll be selling it shortly without the PCI slot populated for customers who can get by with VGA output.
Measures: 190 x 205 x 83mm.
Author's Note: In the end we decided the PCI interface was too mediocre for decent graphics and the onboard GMA 950 cannot drive HD. The H1 standard (single core Atom, onboard Nvidia 9400) can do 1080p playback but little else so we're working on an Aleutia H3 which will combine a fanless AMD Sempron 140 2.8GHz (45W) with Geforce 8200 chipset. (This is a completely new Sempron - much faster with 1MB L2 Cache.)
February 4th, 2009 - 20:16
Nice try but the new nVidia ION with its GeForce 9400GM chipset does THE LOT, eg. gigabit ethernet, DVI and HDMI ports, 1080p HD video capable, digital audio output, etc.
All without breaking a sweat and with NO huge heatsinks either.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNgvJUxlMmo&fmt=18
http://www.mini-itx.com/2009/02/04/nvidias-ion-reference-platform-reviewed-benchmarked
February 7th, 2009 - 18:23
We are very keen to release our own Ion box but sadly nothing will be on the market til July.
This PC is available today.
February 12th, 2009 - 20:13
Very interesting little box, what will the power consumption and the estimated price be?
February 14th, 2009 - 11:59
Hi Patrick,
Thanks.
The PCI throughput is just not enough for 1080p. We are going to release a fanless Atom 330 without DVI for use as a low end server (i.e. print server) and corporate desktop.
For customers who need DVI, we’ll have a fanless VESA-mount system (720p capable).
For customers who need 1080p, we’ll have the more powerful B1. Same box but Ati 3200, HDMI, DVI, SP/DIF audio, and 2×2.5GHz CPU though not fanless (yet).
Obviously three boxes more confusing than one box but best option for now.
Should all be online in next week or two.
March 2nd, 2009 - 01:09
Still waiting on these and it is march now. What is up fellas?
July 18th, 2009 - 17:37
Ever thought about making a 12-volt, fanless, low/no-electrical noise audiophile board with I2S, SPDIF, Digital Coax, HDMI audio and USB outputs and gigabit ethernet that would pass through digital content from the network and pass it through to the stereo hardware stacks (e.g. to external DACs or pre/pro with speaker and room correction software)?
Video requirements would be minimal.
OS support should include Windoze and Linux. Support wake on lan. Be bootable by lan and able to run OS and memory player out of memory. Both eSATA and PCIexpress support would be nice if it could be deflatable in the BIOS to further reduce noise and power consumption.
I2S outputs handles new high resolution audio content and is the native interface without having to translate to SPDIF and/or digital coax. Having the latter would support legacy devices but the I2S output would be cutting edge for this type of application.
Thanks,
Tim
October 17th, 2009 - 02:44
This news release was 31 January 2009 it is now oct 16 2009 where is the product?
October 17th, 2009 - 11:37
Well we decided the PCI interface was too mediocre for decent graphics and we’d stick with onboard. The Deluxe H1 is Atom 330 with Nvidia 9400 GPU but has a fan so we’re releasing the H3 with fanless AMD 2.8GHz CPU and Geforce 8200.
February 19th, 2010 - 18:27
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now. Keep it up!
And according to this article, I totally agree with your opinion, but only this time!
May 28th, 2010 - 19:56
These Atom processors are great. The new “Z600″ is a very interesting “system on chip” processor. Looks like intel can now try to dominate the Smart Phone market now too, although the competition is tough.
I would note one thing in your article. The question of Ubuntu showing four cores as apposed to two is down to Intels hyper threading technology which duplicates parts of the processors functions, and creates four “logical” cores, yet in reality only two.
I recent read about the differences in performance between a dual core hyperthreaded processor compared with a quad core. Appeared to be no more than 25% performance increase from the dual core+hyper threaded processor as opposed to the real quad core.
Jon