Ongoing Home Multiseat Setup (1 Viewer)

[Jasmeet_181]

The HP 260 G1 is quite cheap in the UK, eBuyer are selling it for £94.98, Bespoke Offers will beat that price and when you go to purchase the offer, you can go through TopCashBack or Quidco. It can cold boot from an RC6 remote and includes Windows 8.1 with Bing but it requires a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter (£3.97). The parts can be upgraded but there are a few custom bits (SATA cable and HDD screws). There's a detailed thread on the Kodi forum.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

The HP 260 G1 is by no means comparable to the Baytrail PCs:

1. It's a dual core CPU vs. Baytrail's quad core
2. Its power consumption is much higher. The HP's TDP is 15 W vs 2W for the Baytrail
3. The graphics power - we don't talk HD here - is significantly lower. The HP runs at 200 MHz vs 310 MHz for the Baytrail and has only one channel while the Baytrail has four. This difference will be noticeable when running MP1's quite demanding skins

Unless you plan to expand the PC, i.e. putting a harddisk on and use more RAM, I would not go down this path. And if you do need more power, you might be better off using a modern i3 to i7-based solution.

 

[eetaylog]

Thanks again. Both the above are similar in price so spec wise the Baytrail would still be preferable as id have no intention of adding to the spec as it is, and the other main thing as htpc_sourcer points out is that power consumption is much lower, which is a big plus for what I want.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

power consumption is much lower, which is a big plus for what I want.

This high TDP will translate into a somewhat higher consumption. To be fair this peak will not constantly be seen and if I were to put out an estimate, I would say that you will probably get 5W more but not the full +10-13W difference for the HP. Since the PC will most likely be much more time in standby than in use (say 6h/day, the average consumption of the Baytrail will be around 4W - or 35 kWh/year (approx. 10 EUR in Germany).

The other differences I forgot to mention are the in-built Wifi and Bluetooth adapter of the Baytrail hardware. While running the HTPC on Wifi is probably not a good idea, Bluetooth might be of some use.

 

[Jasmeet_181]

On basic specs it may look more powerful but that isn't the whole story, e.g. the 2957U's Haswell HD GPU has 10 Execution Units clock speeds of 200-1000 MHz, the Z3736F's is crippled with only 4 EUs and a clock speed of 313-646 MHz. The CPU benchmarks are better too. There's not much difference in power consumption either, the Asus Chromebox (like the HP + Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) uses 0w off, 0.6w standby, 5.5w idle, 7.1W YouTube in Chrome, 11.2W 100% CPU, 17.6W gaming, the Pipo X7 is 7W idle, 10W browser or media, 0.5W when off (Pipo's QA probably) and 11W peak.

I found that Bespoke generally offered just over 12% off on it (lets say £83.58), TCB are currently offering 15.15% off that (£62.56), add the adapter and it comes too £66.53. There's a short pro's and con's here.

 

[eetaylog]

Some very good posts here, very interesting reading.


There are a few issues still with some of the suggestions though, I noticed that the HP 260 isn't passive, and noise is going to be a big no-no for my client builds. The chromebox is also a non-windows based os, so im assuming this wouldn't be compatible with running any sort or MePo setup?

 

[Jasmeet_181]

The Chromebox was just an example of power consumption because it it has the same chipset and near identical spec, the HP comes with Windows 8.1 with Bing and users have been getting the Windows 10 reservation prompts. Noise levels are mentioned here and here.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

Hi @Jasmeet_181 ,

Could you please post a link where to buy your recommendation at 67 GBP? In Germany the cheapest vendor has it at 156 EUR = 112 GBP - and it comes without Windows at this price but has a useless FreeDOS instead.

 

[eetaylog]

Just ordered a Justop G. Thanks for the inputs everyone, i'll let you know how i get on!

 

[HTPCSourcer]

Please take a look at my most recent findings regarding the thermal design and throttling: https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...core-windows-8-1-mini-pc.131388/#post-1145011