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You are welcome and if you are in the states sign up for the Tiger and Newegg emails. they often will get into little "price wars" with each other over the emails so you can score some REALLY good deals. just today i got one from newegg with a $109 2Tb internal and $99 for a 2Tb external so it looks like by the end of summer prices will be back down.
If you get one just remember that since the APU uses system RAM for video not to get the really slow RAM as it'll hurt GPU performance. I'd look at the 1333MHz RAM, it seems to be the best bang for the buck ATM. I can tell you though that those E350 chips are just great, low power and heat but better performance than an Atom+ION combo, just perfect for a nice cheap HTPC.
Anyway if you decide to get one be sure to download the latest AMD drivers AND the latest XCode codec pack from AMD if you are using windows, that will give you hardware acceleration for all the major formats including flash and DivX and offloading decode to the GPU really makes the E series chips snappy.




Member since:
2007-11-11
$200 for a hard drive? What are you planning on putting in the thing, a 200gb SSD? if you get the micro minis they take 2.5in drives so you can find a good 500Gb one of those for around $70 if you want the sales, personally I prefer the slightly larger models that will take a 3.5in which you can find a 1Tb for less than $90 if you look around.
The nice thing about doing it with either is you can totally upgrade once the price of drives plummet again (man I can't wait until i can grab 2Tb drives for $70 a piece like i did right before the flood) by either sticking the new drive in an external case or simply copy the old drive to the new and use the old drive in an external. you can find nice external cases on Amazon for less than $10 that work great, its pretty much my SOP now when a customer comes in for a HDD upgrade that I put the old in an external, makes a great movie or backup drive.
But I can tell you these E350 and E450 units are great, they sip power, are easy to silently cool, the new AMD codecs give you hardware acceleration for all the major formats, and it'll even do some gaming if you are so inclined, especially great with Steam and the new Indie games. and believe me once you have a full blown HTPC connected to your widescreen you won't want to go back to consoles, they are just too restricted. With the E series units you can do anything you can do with a regular PC, no hassles, from internet TV to chat to streaming media, it does any task you want it to do VERY well, heck I've even built them for use as basic office PCs and running most office programs they do great, just a wonderful little cheap chip.