Dell Zino as HTPC?

[FudgeNuggets]

I'm considering selling my Mac Mini and trading up/down for a Dell Zino to hook up to my new 50" Plasma.

A couple of concerns

Is the ATI Radeon HD3200 enough to handle 1080p DTS MKV files?

How important is the CPU? It comes with an AMD 2650e which is barely better than an Atom or for $110 more I could go with an Athlon Neo 6850e which is barely worse than my Mini's Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz T7200.

[Cheator]

I don't think it will like 1080p too much. I don't think you'll find that the CPU is enough to compensate for the lack of acceleration.

[FudgeNuggets]

I don't think it will like 1080p too much. I don't think you'll find that the CPU is enough to compensate for the lack of acceleration.

Are you referring to the 2650e? I think that the 6850e will do fine because it will nearly handle 1080p on my Mac Mini with it's crappy GMA 950 GPU. It handles 720p just fine.

[Old Thrashbarg]

Is the ATI Radeon HD3200 enough to handle 1080p DTS MKV files?

It really depends how the video is encoded. ATi chips are pretty limited in what they can decode with DXVA... if the video doesn't exactly follow the BluRay guidelines, it probably won't work.

And if you end up having to fall back to software decoding, 1080P would be pushing it even on the 6850e. I ran into occasional stutters in software mode even on my BE-2400, which was 500mhz faster than the 6850e. I'm assuming it's the same K8-based architecture. Some videos may work fine, but most times, videos that won't work with DXVA also happen to be more CPU-intensive to decode in software.

You may want to take a look at an ION-based system. The Atom sucks, but with the Nvidia graphics, you're not likely to run into CPU limitations anyway... the tolerances are a lot looser for what will work natively with DXVA, plus you'd have the option of things like CoreAVC with CUDA acceleration.

[Cheator]

Are you referring to the 2650e? I think that the 6850e will do fine because it will nearly handle 1080p on my Mac Mini with it's crappy GMA 950 GPU. It handles 720p just fine.

720p won't be an issue for this machine. As a reference, I've used a 3800+ for 1080p with an ATI 3450 with no luck. The cpu is probably better than my 3800+ x2, but the GPU won't be able to handle the 1080p without a video accelerator like VDPAU.

[Wicked Klown]

If the video is don't right it should. With my x2 3600 brisbane and a Ati HD2600XT, I have no issues with 1080p. Even Black Hawk Down which for some reason doesn't use DXVA it plays at 60% CPU usage. I'd go with the 6850e.