What is the current king of HTPC motherboards?

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skipsargent

Limp Gawd
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I have considered building a HTPC for quite some time but other home projects pushed it aside all summer long. Now that Fall is here I am thinking I might like to give it a go. Budget wise I would like to stay around $500 but that is not set in stone.

I am of the opinion that a solid foundation is required for any good system. So the question is, who are the current feature kings in the HTPC motherboard realm these days? Intel or AMD either is just fine by me.

I will not be doing any ripping on the machine, playback only. I am also not planning on blueray or using a tuner card, simply using the setup as a video jukebox for my movie collection.
 
For AMD chips i'd get a Nvidia 8200/8300 chipset, for Intel a 9300/9400 chipset.

Though I'd consider a popcorn hour for $300. Less hassle for most people. The hardest part of a HTPC is configuring all the software. Most people have a hard time with this though Windows 7 makes it much easier.
 
Ones like this. Really just any motherboard that has the new Realtek ALC889A for audio - because it supports the new audio formats for Blu-Ray.
 
I was thinking maybe something in a micro-atx form factor. Something from Asus or Zotac maybe?
 
Hamish Campbell said:
Anyone know of any Intel boards with this audio chip? I've got a spare E8400 sitting here just collecting dust.
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I'm not entirely sure that onboard on that board can bitstream HD audio formats digitally. I'm inclined to think it's analog only for that.

Besides you are just playing videos and not blu-rays so this does not matter to you. Either you are downloading mkv's in which case they are all DD or DTS or you are making your own rips and then you'll rip the HD audio formats to lossless flac and send it to the receiver as PCM.

A sound/video card capable of bitstreaming HD audio really is only necessary for playing BD discs.
 
visionviper said:
Ones like this. Really just any motherboard that has the new Realtek ALC889A for audio - because it supports the new audio formats for Blu-Ray.
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Unfortunately the 780/785/790gx does not qualify for the latest greatest htpc motherboard, ever since the 8200/8300 and 9200/9300 based boards have been released that is. It's been so long that the differences are no longer even being discussed here ;)

For 2.0 audio over hdmi it's fine of course and perhaps downsampled analog 5.1, but if you want multichannel digital 5.1 or 7.1 over the hdmi cable then you'd need one of the nvidia boards mentioned.


Hamish Campbell said:
Anyone know of any Intel boards with this audio chip? I've got a spare E8400 sitting here just collecting dust.
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It's the Nvidia 9200 or 9300 based motherboard you're looking for, but not because of a specific realtek chip, but simply because it has the most htpc + blu-ray related features onboard (including audio).
 
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So are there any Micro-Atx boards sporting the Nvidia 9200 or 9300 chipsets owners that would care to share their experiences? There are simply tons of boards out there so I take personal experience with a product a bit more seriously than the "hey look at what I found on Newegg when I did a search" responses.
 
I personally used the Asus P5N7A-VM 9300 and Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H and both boards were great, however, I noticed the Asus northbridge get extremely hot in smaller cases with less cooling. Never really caused any issues, but that worried me so I put my Gigabyte in my SFF HTPC case, Moneaul 301b and my Gigabyte in my Zalman X160XT.

I've had both boards paried with an e5200, an Allendale 2180, and a Q6600. They both gave me no problems and the LCPM Audio via HDMI worked perfectly.

For the heat reason alone for the Asus, I would go with the Gigabyte board.. also i've built several systems with this board with no issues,
 
Seems that the availability of that Gigabyte board is limited. I had been eying that Asus board already. So I am thinking the Asus P5N7A-VM and a Lian Li PC-C37B.
 
skipsargent said:
Well I was thinking of something with a bit more horsepower than an Atom really.
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Do is need to do anything other then be a HTPC? I say that because the ION powered Mini-ITX boxes like the one he linked to make great HTPC's. All the video decoding (1080p included) is offloaded to the 9400M.
 
criccio said:
Do is need to do anything other then be a HTPC? I say that because the ION powered Mini-ITX boxes like the one he linked to make great HTPC's. All the video decoding (1080p included) is offloaded to the 9400M.
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Some people like flash or the headroom an e5200 provides or expansion on an m-atx board; we'll have to see how much changes with the new flash next week with regards to the first point.
 
an htpc with an atom chip is not a home theater personal computer. its a DIY dvd player. i find it funny that some people still hang on to the notion that "my htpc just plays movies, thats what theyre made to do". because really, if thats all your htpc does then you just made yourself an expensive divx player.
 
novadude said:
Some people like flash or the headroom an e5200 provides or expansion on an m-atx board; we'll have to see how much changes with the new flash next week with regards to the first point.
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Adobe is just around the corner from releasing a Flash player with full hardware acceleration so that argument is short lived.

krupted said:
an htpc with an atom chip is not a home theater personal computer. its a DIY dvd player. i find it funny that some people still hang on to the notion that "my htpc just plays movies, thats what theyre made to do". because really, if thats all your htpc does then you just made yourself an expensive divx player.
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Um.. a HTPC IS supposed to play movies, that IS what it is designed to do. Mine (Atom/ION powered no less) sits in my home theater and pumps gorgeous 1080p video to my plasma all day.... what else exactly is it "supposed" to be doing in your opinion?

It has absolutely no trouble with the 7MC GUI and animations and with the afformentioned full hardware accelerated Flash player due to be out very soon, even HD Flash will be no sweat.

An, as you called it, "expensive divx player" (whatever that is...) is hardly a proper description.
 
criccio said:
Adobe is just around the corner from releasing a Flash player with full hardware acceleration so that argument is short lived.
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I posted as much after the semicolon in that quote.

I also have very little faith in adobe getting this right in one go, even with nvidia's help.
 
criccio said:
Um.. a HTPC IS supposed to play movies, that IS what it is designed to do. Mine (Atom/ION powered no less) sits in my home theater and pumps gorgeous 1080p video to my plasma all day.... what else exactly is it "supposed" to be doing in your opinion?

It has absolutely no trouble with the 7MC GUI and animations and with the afformentioned full hardware accelerated Flash player due to be out very soon, even HD Flash will be no sweat.

An, as you called it, "expensive divx player" (whatever that is...) is hardly a proper description.
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An HTPC may just play movies for you, but light gaming, Hulu, Netflix, and WMC are important, too!

Netflix is now silverlight (or at least were, at one point?), so...

People like headroom, so when anything new comes out, our computers can actually run it?

And expensive DIVX player is a totally appropriate description for the ION system in it's current state. ION is actually, just a desktop Atom combined with a laptop 9400m. The Atom gets slaughtered in any CPU intensive (or just somewhat CPU based) task, while the 9400m needs special codecs to get it working...

A Zotac 9300gs (not mobile...), combined with a E3300 celeron will draw about as much power ( a little more, due to the 12W higher power usage of the E3300 then the Atom) as the Atom system, while able to be somewhat futureproofed against different video codecs.

For the ION, what if a new (yet again...) video codec comes out? The 9400m cannot accelerate much more then what it has hardware support for! The E3300 stands a chance of handling the fragfest of media that is out there.

'snappy' reponse times for you might not be 'snappy' for others. I has a Sony SuperSlim Pro (old... 64mb ram, 1.5mb vram, 4.6gb hard drive, pentium 2 266mhz) that I thought was fast...
 
Just read that nvidia won't be making any boards with IGP's for 1156 CPU's so hopefully they get ION able to work with silverlight and flash flawlessly, otherwise we'll have to use discreet GPU's :(
 
novadude said:
Just read that nvidia won't be making any boards with IGP's for 1156 CPU's so hopefully they get ION able to work with silverlight and flash flawlessly, otherwise we'll have to use discreet GPU's :(
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ach... the HD 4350 isn't that bad, especially since it's passive, 22W, and can do light gaming, too. They are pretty ridiculous, coming with 1GB of ram! (real ram... then there is that annoying Hypermemory).
 
jeremyshaw said:
An HTPC may just play movies for you, but light gaming, Hulu, Netflix, and WMC are important, too!

Netflix is now silverlight (or at least were, at one point?), so...

People like headroom, so when anything new comes out, our computers can actually run it?

And expensive DIVX player is a totally appropriate description for the ION system in it's current state. ION is actually, just a desktop Atom combined with a laptop 9400m. The Atom gets slaughtered in any CPU intensive (or just somewhat CPU based) task, while the 9400m needs special codecs to get it working...

A Zotac 9300gs (not mobile...), combined with a E3300 celeron will draw about as much power ( a little more, due to the 12W higher power usage of the E3300 then the Atom) as the Atom system, while able to be somewhat futureproofed against different video codecs.

For the ION, what if a new (yet again...) video codec comes out? The 9400m cannot accelerate much more then what it has hardware support for! The E3300 stands a chance of handling the fragfest of media that is out there.

'snappy' reponse times for you might not be 'snappy' for others. I has a Sony SuperSlim Pro (old... 64mb ram, 1.5mb vram, 4.6gb hard drive, pentium 2 266mhz) that I thought was fast...
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Expensive divx player? i prefer to think of it as a moderatly priced .mkv .m2ts player. Who uses divx anymore.

The atom may get slaughtered comparatively speaking but why does that matter if what you compare it too is unnecessary for what a htpc needs to do? Apart from flash of course (Update pending)! You dont really expect it to be a gaming machine for 300bucks?

Its a bit misleading to suggest a barrage of new video codecs will be coming out anytime soon. H.264 is extremely future proof and is the enthusiast choice so to speak, the 9400m paired with coreavc easily deals with extreme bitrates.

Really depends what you use your htpc for. Personally, i use my home theatre personal computer as a home theatre personal computer.
 
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Songok said:
Expensive divx player? i prefer to think of it as a moderatly priced .mkv .m2ts player. Who uses divx anymore.

The atom may get slaughtered comparatively speaking but why does that matter if what you compare it too is unnecessary for what a htpc needs to do? Apart from flash of course (Update pending)! You dont really expect it to be a gaming machine for 300bucks?

Its a bit misleading to suggest a barrage of new video codecs will be coming out anytime soon. H.264 is extremely future proof and is the enthusiast choice so to speak, the 9400m paired with coreavc easily deals with extreme bitrates.

Really depends what you use your htpc for. Personally, i use my home theatre personal computer as a home theatre personal computer.
Click to expand...

yeah... we really use our HTPC's differently!
I think our personal defination of one is a little different, too.
I mean the main server of media files, for two extenders. (xbox 360/ buffalo media)
 
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