SPCR

Fanless - yay! Finally starting to see some decent small form factor, cheap and silent PCs that would be a nice TV accessory. I wonder how well it'd work as a Steam streaming front end

Impressive HTPC, specially for the price, even adding 4gb ddr3 sodim would be like $180 + hdd.... wondering how low can something like this idle, i bet puts to shame my download station =(

Someone put up a video review on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3SQHTITP5 ... HTITP5WQV8

nice.

I just set one of these up.

AWESOME box for streaming local content. I simply put in a small SSD, 4 GB RAM, and installed Openelec. I now have a silent, no moving parts media player that absolutely destroys my old Boxee Box in every way.

I am really surprised at what a 'puny' Celeron can do for HD playback - the navigation is snappy, even with my 4TB video collection to sift through - and TV Shows/Movies start playing immediately - no more buffering or waiting for stuff to load.

My absolute only complaint is that I can't get it to power on or wake from suspend using my remote - but I am still working on it, and with this tiny power envelope, I probably shouldn't even bother.

Nice. Do you have access to any temp monitoring?

The only temperature monitoring I have really done with it lies within the Openelec OS. Sitting in my office under a shelf (only a couple inches of top clearance) and building the XBMC database (using the dual core CPU about 75% consistently for a couple of hours, multiple rebuilds) I watched the temps creep up just over 95 Celsius...Intel rates the chip to 105 Celsius. Quite warm to touch, but no ill effects and well within the acceptable range. Mine is almost always between 67 and 90 unless I am really pushing it for a long time - definitely not during media duty.

Hmm...a tad warmer than I'd like. Thanks for the feedback.

I suppose heat is the main concern with this. Is this CPU also being used in fanless laptops?

I have since set up an Intel DN2820FYKH NUC in a similar fashion...running Openelec over wireless this time, for my bedroom. This unit is a bit faster (N2820 vs N2807), but lacks quicksync technology. Performance wise, I see no real difference between the two, as I personally expected.

In testing, even with the included fan set at 'auto', I couldn't really hear the thing over my external hard drive sitting on my desk, and temperatures were better than my BRIX experience. In practice, I have set the fan to 15% in BIOS, so if things do get hot, it can protect itself, but otherwise runs nearly silent. I suppose I could run essentially passive at 1%, and have that same peace of mind.

I have to say both of the Bay Trail Celerons have impressed me with their performance - granted, even these low powered Celerons with 4GB RAM and SSD are probably overkill for such a simple, low demand task as streaming local video content. But having 2 devices that use less than 15W from the wall when streaming full bore and use next to nothing when powered down, and effectively silent to boot, essentially ends my HTPC hobby. Now I'm relegated to finding the perfect remote and increasing my storage situation!