An Ion Based PC for $299 ?!

**bmoura** · April 7th, 2009, 10:47 PM

Hmm, this sure sounds like a very interesting Windows PC to run Boxee on.

The Acer AspireRevo has the Nvidia Ion Graphics chip, an Atom 230 CPU, 250GB Hard Disk and up to 4GB of RAM. The entry price is $299.

See http://hothardware.com/News/First-NV...er-AspireRevo/ for a look.

**cato2010** · April 8th, 2009, 11:57 AM

you think this will support 1080 and 720p "MKV" files

**fritzbrown** · April 8th, 2009, 01:18 PM

The Ion platform was built to allow the playback of HD video up to 1080p, it shouldn't be a problem.

**AlexNC** · April 8th, 2009, 02:18 PM

I really hope this PC works out well. It is on my short list ... it is either this one or the EeeBox 208. I have money burning a whole in my pocket waiting for one of these HD capable set top box PC's. I can't wait to be able to have Hulu, Boxee, XBMC, etc on my HDTV.

**DPK** · April 8th, 2009, 07:05 PM

I'm totally up for buying one of these when it's on the market. It's small and would work great for a set top boxee client that will connect back via the network to pull my media off the main pc.

I'm excited.

**astronot** · April 8th, 2009, 07:34 PM

Except that Boxee doesn't currently support DXVA, which is what this platform is designed around. Therefore, it's highly unlikely that you will get stable 1080p out of this device with Boxee (for now).

**foghorn2** · April 8th, 2009, 08:44 PM

Boxee needs to remain small and simple, no bloating. Also Boxee needs to do hardware video playback, then its perfect!

**AlexNC** · April 9th, 2009, 08:54 AM

From what I understand, this Achilles heel with this system is the fact that Flash/Silverlite does not currently support GPU's. And the GPU is what give this little computer all it's power. So, until flash/silverlight start supporting GPU's, this ION setup is no better than a standard low cost netbook. Meaning sites like Hulu will be choppy during playback since all the horsepower will be coming from a little Atom processor. Though, there is talk that Nvidia is pushing GPU support pretty hard with Adobe/Microsoft, so hopefully it will be implemented before the ION's release.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

**CmdBash** · April 9th, 2009, 10:55 AM

There saying close to $400 on alot of other news sites. But regardless im buying/pre-ordering it ASAP they say it plays blu-ray flawlessly.

**AJerman** · April 9th, 2009, 05:13 PM

Originally Posted by AlexNC

From what I understand, this Achilles heel with this system is the fact that Flash/Silverlite does not currently support GPU's. And the GPU is what give this little computer all it's power. So, until flash/silverlight start supporting GPU's, this ION setup is no better than a standard low cost netbook. Meaning sites like Hulu will be choppy during playback since all the horsepower will be coming from a little Atom processor. Though, there is talk that Nvidia is pushing GPU support pretty hard with Adobe/Microsoft, so hopefully it will be implemented before the ION's release.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Actually, I believe BOTH support GPU acceleration. I don't know how optimized it is and if it's any good, but I believe they both do. But I think that Boxee may not support GPU acceleration in playing other video types (I was told this, not verified, I'm not sure), so that would be the issue for me. But yes, I would LOVE to have one of these boxes for a media center. I bet they'd run Win 7 and Boxee amazingly. Just gotta hook it into a bigger HDD.