Having network (wired + wireless) up & running.Installing a suiteable OS on the AsRock.So I ended up with the following additional parts to complete the build : I still had a 2.5inch external hard drive that I wasn’t using anymore, so I stripped it down, and used it in my ASRock. I bought the barebone version, excluding the hard drive and the RAM. On the hardware front, things were looking good.
What I thought would be a breeze turned out to be a bit more difficult. Luckily, in the meantime, AsRock have provided drivers for the latest Ubuntu 10.04, providing full support for the IR receiver through lirc, so I dediced to go ahead with it. As I wanted to use it as an HTCP, and could only get the Nvidia Ion GPU acceleration when using Linux, I didn’t really bother with it anymore. When I initially bought it there were issues with the infra-red remote when using Linux. As such, the GPU takes over all the work, and we’re not really bothered with the fact that the Intel Atom is slow. The Ion chip basically offloads whatever CPU processing would be required to decode the video content.
#Asrock ion 330 ubuntu 16.04 1080p
Although the Atom CPU is considered slow, the Nvidia Ion chipset more then makes up for that when watching high definition, 1080p video content.
For those of you who don’t know the AsRock ION, it’s a tiny desktop PC driven by an Intel Atom CPU, and featuring an Nvidia Ion graphical chip. Today I installed my AsRock ION box (after it sitting in some desk for 6 months).