Was just wondering if anyone had any particular htpc card to recommend, going to be building one soon here, and I've basically decide on everything I need/want except for the card to put everything onto mah tv going to be doing some high def movies and such, and thats about it. this is going to be my htpc/server. going to put 5 1tb drives into it. then in a year or so when those get filled up I'll build a real server also.... any recommendations on 64 bit vista sound cards would be nice....... since I keep hearing nothing but bad things about everything I see lol
I'm guessing you mean graphics card? Since you're not doing any gaming on it, go for a 780G motherboard and use the onboard graphics. It has enough juice for 1080p h264, its low power and its 'free'. With sound cards the same goes - the onboard on the 780G boards is usually pretty good. Unless you have some specific requirement that it doesn't have, its a good solution.
Renethx over at avsforum recommends the ASUS EAH3650 SILENT/HTDI/512M Radeon HD for their medium price HTPC build.
Also consider where it will be, if it's in a lounge then you'll want something fairly quiet. I use onboard gpu as mentioned above, partly because I hate noise from my htpc and the onboard is passive. If you're putting it in to a cupboard or another room then a discrete card is better - in my experience the drivers support discrete cards more fully. I had to try loads of nvidia drivers to find something I was happy with on my htpc (geforce 6150 based) for s-video out to a widescreen CRT TV. The latest doesn't work properly for me it flickers at the bottom but an earlier one works fine.
