I put this post here, because I think that overall the experts in this forum will have the best imput, and experience with the m-itx setups. I am building a new pc for my mother-in-law. Her current single core celeron is all but shot. Seeing how it is a dell, its all but totally worthless. She does not need all the bells and whistles, but she does play alot of popcap games...bejewelled, etc. I just gave her a 1080 monitor (cause I hated LCD).. I am dead set on the ATOM 330, because of the size and how quiet it can be. Having dual cores with "hyper threading" may have benefits, as she will occasionally run different audio conversion (From Record to Mp3...No lie) My question is based on cost. I would walk 10 miles just to save 3 dollars, and I am not getting paid for this. Its totally a gift. She watches my kids while I work. It seems more cost effective to purchase a PCI 8400gs and a ATOM330 board without the ION chipset, or would spending a few more dollars save me in the long run? There was not much in the way of useful PCI or PCIEX 1x graphic cards to compare with the 9400 of the ATOM. The only thing that the boards I looked at ABSOLUTLEY need is IDE/PATA. Thanks for any imput guys J
id go for the ION the Atom cpu's arent powerful enough to mess around with Audio and do conversions and such. The Ion has Cuda which takes all the flack off the cpus and is rapid at converting, encoding, and decoding even HD 1080p. Without, you/she isnt going to get anything done.
"id go for the ION the Atom cpu's arent powerful enough to mess around with Audio and do conversions and such." its certainly more than fine for audio anyway, if you want ide/pata, im not sure any motherboards with the 330 have that, so you'll likely need to make sure it has a pci slot, which would rule out an external gpu have you looked at the difference in cost in a 330 board with and without an ion chip?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...3121383&cm_re=atom_330-_-13-121-383-_-Product $80ish without the ION and I briefly looked over newegg for an ION 330, and didn't find one with the PATA. However the cheapest ION atom 330 is $150ish to start... I myself have GTX260 in sli, and never yet used any CUDA application, and only enable physx because it makes sense to do so....not that I play any physx games. Basically for casual gaming at 1080 would an Atom 330 + 8400gs work well?
