ECS KBN-I + AMD E1-2100 "Kabini" APU

[kinggofg]

I bought and installed this. Some notes from my installation:

1. At ~$30 AR for an HTPC you really cannot beat this thing. I highly recommend you snatch it up if you can next time it goes on sale.
2. I bought a 1GB stick off ebay for $7.
3. I paired it with a $20 AR Corsair 430W ATX power supply
4. I pxe booted openelec Gotham Beta so no storage needed. OS is hosted on a WHS 2011 using NFS file server and tftpd.
5. I threw it all in a plastic shoebox. I don't need a fancy case. They cost like $2. Make sure to drill some holes for veneration and to run the cord in. You also need a push switch to turn the thing on I had one liying around, but you may need to buy for $2. No need for an LED as the lan light will tell you its on.
6. I had an MCE USB adapter. But Kabini has CEC support. So your remote may work. Also, it has a serial port if you have an old serial remote adapter.

Results:
- Plays almost every single media file thrown at it. 1080p is great. No matter the bitrate. I really put it through its paces. I used high bitrate samples known to stress HTPCs and a Blue Ray .iso. Tried VC1 H.263 and MPEG4 and MPEG2. I tried an Hi10 sample that I know Raspberry Pi won't play. Sadly, it really couldn't handle it either. CPUs both went to 80-100% and framerates fluxuated between 15 and 24. So not perfect but I don't watch anime.
- You need the beta of Openelec with the latest Kernel. The hardware is too new for old versions of Linux.
- Silent. The PSU fan barely spins and the board is fanless.
- The ATX PSU is overkill but its efficient and cheap. Even at such low wattage it is working fine. At idle I am drawing 12-14 Watts at the wall. Yes 12 WATTS! Amazing. Playing a 1080p high bitrate blu-ray rip it draws only 17 watts.

1 GB of ram is fine for Openelec. Its single channel so no benefit for 2 sticks anyway.

Netboot is fast and using NFS on a wired network there is no artwork lag.

Highly recommend this solution.

NOTE: manual says mSATA is not supported so I don't think you can use a laptop HDD in the mini PCIe slots.

[Kivada]

Well, Raspberry Pi comes with a power adapter (which is equivalent do a power supply).

Add even if you add a case and storage to a Raspberry Pi, it will still be cheaper.

A case for the Raspberry Pi is ?10.
You can't find a mini-ITX case for that price.

A SD storage for the Raspberry Pi is going to be cheaper than storage for the ECS KBN-I too.

Actually it's spot on cheaper then the RPi if you are any kind of geek. I picked it up for $34 after MIR last week, I already had a 2Gb stick of DDR3 1333, an 80Gb HDD, a Mini-PCIe wireless card and antennas pulled from a junked laptop, a 400w PSU from an old build and a few mATX cases from HP and Dell laying around in storage.

Not a bad little board that normally retails for around $55 US. I'll probably still sell it though for around $40-50 on Craigslist to put toward one of those 2Ghz quad Kabinis that are supposed to be out by the 2nd week of April.

An overlooked fact about these boards is that there is 2 Mini PCIe slots, one that is only half height and a second that can fit full length cards so you can use a laptop wifi card and add in a mini PCIe SSD drive in the full length slot for up to 240GB of storage while still not using the SATA or desktop 16x PCIe card slot.

[gururise]

Compare noise difference with radeon driver .

Been using the radeonsi driver that comes with 14.04.... even tried going from Kernel 3.13 to 3.14 and made no difference.. I really do not want to use the proprietary gfx drivers if I can avoid it.

[dungeon]

Just installed 14.04 LTS on my E1 Kabini and noticed a terrible static noise when playing games. Youtube videos play fine, but games are accompanied by horrible static. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it?

Compare noise difference with radeon driver .

[gururise]

Just installed 14.04 LTS on my E1 Kabini and noticed a terrible static noise when playing games. Youtube videos play fine, but games are accompanied by horrible static. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it?

[caligula]

If you want to run such slow and cheap storage nothing stops you from using a USB flash drive as your main storage on that ECS board (or any PC motherboard able to boot from USB)
Or boot from the network : that's ?0 storage.

It also depends on where you live how much the RPi costs. Mine didn't come with any power supply, just the board. And there was import tax and the final price for sd card, psu, board, case was closer to $90. (includes shipping)

[grok]

Well, Raspberry Pi comes with a power adapter (which is equivalent do a power supply).

Add even if you add a case and storage to a Raspberry Pi, it will still be cheaper.

A case for the Raspberry Pi is ?10.
You can't find a mini-ITX case for that price.

A SD storage for the Raspberry Pi is going to be cheaper than storage for the ECS KBN-I too.

If you want to run such slow and cheap storage nothing stops you from using a USB flash drive as your main storage on that ECS board (or any PC motherboard able to boot from USB)
Or boot from the network : that's ?0 storage.

[caligula]

Every once in a while (very rare), there are x86 mITX boards with a power connector like you showed for the ARM boards. Last time I saw one, it only had a PCIe x1 slot for the reasons you told. But that's a niche, most mITX boards come with standard ATX P/S socket

Yes. The boards that have simpler power supplies are very scarce and don't really have much options. You might have like 1 or 2 H77 chipset boards in total with that connector. That's all. So you really have no choice. If you don't like any of the other design choices, you're left with huge ATX socket.

[Medallish]

The ITX cases don't even have room for such GPUs. My semi big ITX case only has room for 1.5 slot pci express card, not even double size. This hardly draws 75W. Those 300-450W TDP beasts need at least a micro atx case. Why would you use mini ITX mainboard in that case?

Depends really, I've managed to cram in an XFX R9-280X in my Lian Li PC-TU200B. Ok it's not a 300-450W card but at that W we're talking about Dual GPU cards.
I agree that the PSU's on PC's seem a bit overly complex, seems like 98% of what draws power in the PC uses the 12V rail so when looking at the ATX connector it looks like it could do with some trimming.

[caligula]

There are uses for tiny cpu + huge gpu. I believe Nvidia has shown several such concepts.

The ITX cases don't even have room for such GPUs. My semi big ITX case only has room for 1.5 slot pci express card, not even double size. This hardly draws 75W. Those 300-450W TDP beasts need at least a micro atx case. Why would you use mini ITX mainboard in that case?