I'm about to replace the motherboard in my HTPC in order to get onboard optical spdif as well as HW HD acceleration amongst other things. I play all sorts of media files and HD video. Currently my HTPC is connected to my amp via spdif on an Audiotrak Prodigy HiFi card which has always had buggy drivers and I have to reboot every 5 hours to avoid audio stutter (I've gone through all driver solutions along with XP and Vista. The card just sucks). So I'm looking to replace my mobo with one that has a proper working optical SPDIF that will let me pass-through to my surround reciever. The reason pass-through means a lot to me is I want my reciever to handle surround decoding as well as stereo D/A conversion. I'm thinking I might as well replace the mobo as buying another sound card with optical out and a CUDA capable VGA card will cost me just the same and I'd rather keep the spare PCI slot for a second TV tuner card and save watts on not having to plug in a vga card. I primarily use XBMC and might switch back to MediaPortal when I get a DVB-C card. The specs I'm looking for are: - microATX Core 2 Duo mobo with - Gigabit ethernet - Onboard IGP with HW acceleration for HD movies in mkv containers (?) - Optical and preferably Coaxial as well SPDIF output that works with pass-through so my audio isn't messed up by Windows. - 2 PCI slots (1 might be enough) - DDR2 RAM Currently I'm looking at the Zotac geforce 9300 as well as the Zotac geforce 9300 ITX. The ITX version of the 9300 means I'd have to sacrifice PCI and go with USB TV-tuners which I'm a bit hesitant to use as I remember reading that these aren't as fast/good as PCI ones. I've also looked at the Zotac ION Geforce 9400 mini-ITX with an Atom 330 CPU but I'm not sure whether it would be able to run all my video needs properly. Any alternative or better solutions would be very much welcomed! Thank you My current setup is: Antec Fusion (HTPC case) Asrock Conroe945G-DVI motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU w. Zalman CNPS7700 cooler 4 GB RAM AudioTrak Prodigy HiFi 7.1 (Don't buy this for a HTPC) 1 TB HDD DVD-RW Corsair PSU (Some high qual stuff that just works can't remember details on it) Windows Vista
Hi Bindibadgi. Thanks for the advice but I've been searching and am yet to find some good articles or forum posts about it... The more I've looked at the options though the more I'm being drawn towards the ION board which never draws more than 40W even with CUDA accelerated HD decoding. My only worry with the mini-itx thing is I'd have to rely on USB tuner-cards which I really have no idea of how well work. If anyone here can recommend using a USB DVB tuner then I reckon the question of choosing motherboard is a lot easier My initial thought is that USB or PCI DVB-tuner is same same since all it has to do is feed MPEG2/4 signals to windows for decoding by the installed codec? Hence USB2 is more than sufficient.
