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VIA offers $89 processor and motherboard combo for custom HTPCs
If you're looking to craft a small form factor HTPC to an equally small budget, then VIA's own-brand internals deserve some serious consideration. The company's 1.4GHz dual-core Nano X2 CPU was recently put to good effect in Zotac's ZBOX Nano VD01 and is now available as part of a DIY combo called the VE-900, which puts the processor on a compact mini-ITX motherboard alongside a VX900 dedicated media accelerator for smooth video handling up to 1080p. The board has a single PCI slot, room for up to 8GB of DDR3, two SATA pin headers and four USB 2.0 ports. The rear panel adds to this with HDMI and VGA video outs, three analog audio jacks, Gigabit LAN, four more USB 2.0 ports and other standard fare -- but alas, it seems that the $89 price tag won't fetch you digital audio outs or USB 3.0. You'll find a full PR and promo video after the break, plus some Nano X2 benchmarks at the More Coverage link.
VIA introduces VX900 media processor, sets sights on Broadcom's Crystal HD (video)
We like little computers, but we also like big-bitrate video content, and thanks to media accelerators like Broadcom's Crystal HD we can have our proverbial cake and proverbially eat it, too -- at least up to 720p. We've had issues with 1080p on that chip and, while that may be due to troublesome Flash betas, VIA is saying its upcoming VX900 media system processor suffers from no such limitation. A back-to-back video captured by Netbooknews seems to back that up, embedded below and showing a VX900 running the 1080p Avatar trailer at a higher frame rate with lower CPU utilization than Broadcom's option could manage the 720p version. It then goes on to play a massive 80Mb/s bitrate 1080p file with nary a stutter. This wasn't on perfectly equivalent hardware so it's a bit early to draw too many conclusions, but we're eager to see what this chip has to offer when it starts hitting VIA-powered laptops and nettops, supposedly at Computex later this summer.
