I just got a Zotac ZBOX AD02 (AMD E-350 APU w/ Radeon HD 6310) and in general it's working great. However, I have a problem with Flash video on HBO GO. For the first minute or so of steaming video, everything seems perfect. Video is high quality and smooth, CPU is around 50%. Then after a minute or two there will always be some visible video glitch and CPU utilization will jump up to 90-100% and playback becomes extremely choppy. So I'm guessing Flash hardware acceleration is working initially, then something happens that kills the hardware acceleration, and of course the E-350 CPU is not up the task by itself.
The really strange thing is that it seems to be specific to HBO GO. I can stream HD all day long from Amazon Instant Video and Youtube (at least when Youtube is able to dish it out fast enough). And it's definitely not a bandwidth problem. I have Comcast cable (20Mb down), and a bigger computer I have hooked up to another TV has no problem with HBO GO. I think the same problem happens on the bigger computer, but it's faster CPU can overcome the lack of hardware acceleration.
I've got the latest drivers from AMD and the latest Flash player (even tried the 11 beta) and have tried all the main browsers (FF, IE, Chrome), but it's always the same: 1-2 minutes of perfect playback and moderate CPU utilization, then jacked up CPU and choppy playback.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to contact HBO GO directly about this problem (support links just refer you to your cable provider), so I thought I'd give it a shot here. Is anyone else out there having this problem with HBO GO or any other Flash video sites? Any thoughts on what else I could do to track down the root cause?