Hardware Home Theatre PC Motherboard Shootout

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/02/05/home_theatre_pc_motherboards_feb_08/1

We have a look at three mATX motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI based on three of the latest integrated graphics chipsets from Intel, AMD and Nvidia to see which is the best solution for a Home Theatre PC.

 

So basically all boards designed for media centers STILL fall short on the graphics front but sadly it's kind of as I suspected.
Will you possibly be doing a sort of low end graphics cards for media centers article to compliment this at all? It would be pretty handy to have imo

 

yes, there's something in the plan

 

790g is due out shortly for those interested and should contain all AVIVo functions of the 2600 /38** series as far as i'm aware which would mean hardware bluray support

correct me if im wrong.

however im going to use a 3850 as my GPU of choice primarily to play the odd game on a large TV.

 

Well new IGPs are arriving soon - this is also meant as a base article for us to work from

 

I just replaced an Abit I90-HD with the Gigabyte & am really pleased. Oddly my impression was that video quality of the 7100 was better than the ATi X1250 on the Abit.

Then again I won't add a bluray reader till they drop below around £80. If it's an issue then, I'll drop in a £40 passively cooled card.

The I90HD wasn't Vista certified & I'd get pretty regular bluescreens, none with the Gigabyte... yet.

The only oddity I've found is that the front panel header on the Gigabyte dosen't seem to drive the HD activity light on my Antec Fusion. Anyone else found this?

 

Good review... Suprising to see the Asus on there. I thought it was more of a Lan Gamer board to be honest..

 

This might sound blindingly obvious (so apologies if it comes across as patronising) but have you tried connecting the plug the other way round on the header? HDD activity lights genrally only work one way round.

 

Nice Tim/Bindi, can't wait

 

Hmm, what's the ETA for that mATX AM2+ board?

 

Yeah, first thing I tried. D for Diode

 

So if I'm reading those results correctly, h264 content coming from either a BD or HD-DVD disk will use ~75% of the CPU at best, and yet streaming from the harddrive uses at most 50% of the CPU, what's going on here?
What's the difference between the video coming off a shiny disk and that coming off a harddrive? HDCP?

 

So, basically, they aren't quite up the job for HD movies with such low spec cpu's? or Have I missed something here?

 

The disks provide much higher bitrates - you're talking 25-50GB for a movie, compared to much-much less.

And also like you say: encryption takes up a ton of processing power. In effect - the movie studios are killing the planet.

Yea you need a killer CPU to decode it, negating the point of an inexpensive system and video processing offloading. The next gen parts should allow low power CPU use.

 

Just curious when are the new chipsets due out? I'm looking at moving down to a sff and the Asus has been my motherboard of choice for a small gaming rig. However, I wasn't aware of the release dates for G/P45 so if they're going to be better supported delaying my build is no big deal.

 

1/2/3/4 months depending on what you're after.

 

P45/G45 are probably not coming out until later in the year (maybe as late as June/July/August). Timeframe is pretty vague at the moment for the new Intel chipsets - Nvidia/AMD are pretty close with AMD-based IGP solutions though.

We've got very early RS780 boards in house already but are waiting for driver development to catch up with the hardware. GeForce 8200 is probably around the same timeframe too, but we don't have hardware yet.

 

ya I plan on picking up that ASUS board, cant wait to get my hands on that.

 

There's a typo on the audio's review table "24-bit / 96KHz", Gigabyte has an ADI1988B instead of the RTL 889a.

 

my hcpc is an msi 690g and amd be-2350 cpu at the moment and i have to say im really happy with it. I managed to get the cpu, mobo, and a gig of ram for just over £100 delivered and its really cost effective both in terms of power consumption and that it handles gbpvr very well as well as the odd non graphically intensive game i throw at it.

To get hd-dvd to work glitch free i ended up plumping for a sapphire 2600xt ultimate (fanless job) which runs at pretty low power also ~60W i think.

Im a big fan of the 690G boards tho, it is amazing how feature rich they are for under £40!

my real gripe with a hcpcs at the moment is the lack of an effective solution to get dolby true hd, dts hd etc into the setup. There is some hope with an up coming auzentech add on board for their prelude card which should be released fairly soon but by then it will probably be cheaper to buy a stand alone bd or hd player.

And you cant even use their full bitrate when you use analogue outs as powerdvd downmixes them for drm reasons. GRR!