Gigabyte Intros Bay Trail J1800 Based Mini-ITX Board
Gigabyte's new motherboard with the J1800 CPU is cheap!
Gigabyte has announced its new GA-J1800-D2H motherboard, which is a Mini-ITX board that carries a Celeron J1800 CPU.
The Celeron J1800 CPU is a dual-core Bay Trail processor that has a base frequency of 2.41 GHz and a Turbo frequency of 2.58 GHz. It has 1 MB of L2 cache. The GPU aboard has a frequency of 688 MHz, with a maximum dynamic frequency of 792 MHz. In its entirety it has a TDP of only 10 Watts.
Other features on the motherboard include two SO-DIMM memory slots for up to 8 GB of DDR3 memory, a single Mini-PCIe slot, a single PCIe x1 slot, two SATA2 connectors, a single USB 3.0 port, four USB 2.0 ports, as well as a single HDMI port, a VGA port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a pair of old-school PS/2 ports.
Cooling of the processor is achieved by a passive heatsink.
The board should be available for pre-order for roughly $60.

But this would probably meet most people's everyday computing requirements.
Bay Trail should be more than powerful enough to handle decoding 1080p h264. Even my stock C2D-E8400 can simultaneously decode 4-5 1080p streams in full-software decode. The GPU in it is a Radeon HD3670 so the only hardware assist the CPU gets is video overlay re-scaling.
So, even if Bay Trail is half as efficient as C2D, it should still have enough grunt to handle two 1080p streams even if its IGP does not do hardware decode.
CPU+Mobo = $60 |
4GB RAM = $30 |
PSU = $30 |
HDD (500GB) = $50 |
Cooler Master Elite 120 = $35 |
Operating System = Linux Mint 16 (Mate is preffered) |
There you have it, a nice web surfing and media streaming machine for about $200.This is a great value.