Currently have a abit fatal1ty f190-hd board in my htpc which has given up on me. So need a upgrade, budget is for these 2 parts £100 and I will quite happly buy second hand I have put a thread up for a motherboard in the for sale section but could do with some recommendations Basicly requirements of the motherboard Core 2 duo support (E6400) 4x DDR2 slots (DDR2 800) Onboard HD audio (with support to output to graphics hdmi) Gigabit lan! Silent Graphics requirements Blu ray playback 5.1 HDMI audio Its not playing games, but I would like a fairly reasonable board as I encode/decode movies on this pc Someone mentioned this in another thread http://www.mvktech.net/content/view/3800/39/ But no hdmi audio, if there is one similar where you can get a suitable graphics card for £20 i will be more than happy
I think Custom PC found the nvidia 9800GSO to be a little faster than the 4670 for a similar price, but there's really nothing in it. Go with the above post, can't really add anything else.
if 9800 is same price get that but you get avivo with ati.....not sure if you have to still pay for the nvidia equivalent and last time I read about it avivo was superioir lol can't even remember what the nvidia equivalent is called
Badaboom. And it's actually a third-party converter that nVidia's licensed. From what Anandtech tells the world, the current situation is that Badaboom is a huge cut above Avivo (especially in 64-bit). It's not like getting a card from either camp would keep you from running it on the CPU - but really, if you're not playing games either, running a transcoder on the CPU would entirely defeat the purpose of getting a standalone GPU. So I'd say to shoot for nVidia. The card is pretty dependent on your budget, but if you're doing any real transcoding, green team is the way to go. - Diosjenin -
sweet, thats total news to me, they had a inhouse version before but i'm talking like a year ago last time I looked and you had to buy the codec for like 20dollars and it used way more cpu time and didn't perform near as well as avivo badaboom is dvd/bluray decoding on the gpu right? edit my bad: totally off topic, wil look into it
Interesting stuff, will keep reading into various stuff. My main concern is playback of mkv files using the x264 codec with dxva support. As what I would like is the graphics card to take some of the load off the CPU (mainly for smooth playback when encoding blu rays at the same time) Looking at the gigabyte board above ^ http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148802 Looks ideal, but future upgrades to a possible quad core would this board be ok or should I look at the P35 chipset
P30-series? Oof... you know, if your budget is low enough that you're looking into the P30-series, it might not be a bad idea to look at some AMD stuff... Here's the thing. P30-series motherboards, especially compared with P40-series, are death to your graphics card bandwidth. While I understand games don't matter much to you, here's a basic indicator: a P30-series motherboard with otherwise identical components will consistently get 10-15% lower game framerates than a P40-series. Whereas an AMD-based board, whether with an AMD 770- or 780-series chipset or a GeForce 8000- or 9000-series chipset, will not have this bandwidth problem. If playback is really a concern for you, though, rest easy: I'm still using a laptop that has a (discrete) Mobility Radeon HD 2600, and with the proper multithreaded HD codecs (K-Lite Codec Pack works wonders, and it's free), I have no lag whatsoever playing 1080p, even with more intense clips like the lobby scene in the Matrix. Admittedly I'm not trying to encode/decode while watching that, but you get the idea. - Diosjenin -
Think the P40 series is a bit out of my price range looking at how much some of them are, they seem to be more overclocking/gaming anyway. I already have a Intel E6400 and don't really want to change from that at the moment. I pretty much managed to get smooth playback on my abit board with the matrix scene before it broke on me and when I wasn't encoding. Im researching into the dxva support at the moment and dosen't seem possible in VMC only im the media player classic HC edition
Hmm... have you tried looking into any micro-ATX boards of the Q40- or G40-series variety? Foxconn and ASRock (and even Gigabyte) make decent-quality boards in that size (with the uATX version of the P40 chipset) that might be a bit more in your price range. - Diosjenin -
Haven't really looked at matx, just been looking at full size as I thought they would be slightly cheaper. Plus ones I looked at have the pci express slot in the wrong place so wouldn't be able to use my riser card with my case. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512M...GDDR3-GPU-600MHz-80-Cores-D-Sub-DL-DVI-I-HDMI Think I might get this graphics card although I can't find any decent reviews on it. Have been looking at this board Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L But have been offered a ABIT AW9D-MAX which are quite old now but its cheap. don't really know what to do! Leaning more towards the p35 gigabyte board mainly due to it being newer and after my experience with my abit fatal1ty board I don't think I want another
abit stopped motherboard bussiness from this year so i think it's definitely much better to choose gigabyte
