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Seriously?!? Building a HTPC

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Spiffy577

New Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2010
Ok, this cannot be this complicated. I have looked everywhere and get a 1000 different answers by a 1000 different people. Please help...

This is things I need my htpc to do.

Capable of 1080p for a bluray drive (I have a vga on the flat panel already, don't need hdmi or anything, it just needs to be able to process it.)
An onboard graphics card (to keep down noise and psu) would be nice. (this seems to be the most controversial.)
Optical onboard audio out.
Some medium gaming.
Be extremely quiet (second thing most controversial.)
1000Mbps lan.
Be as small as possible to fit in current cabinet (looking at the nMEDIAPC 5000B case) with a remote to boot the machine (hate to get off the couch to turn the thing on.)
Be able to fit 2 3.5" drives (internal).
Oh... almost forgot... a card reader and usb on the front would be nice.

And all on a budget. < $500 hopefully.

Is this too difficult? lol... Or is it even possible? I THINK I am leaning towards the Asus M3N78-VM board with a 2.6 or 2.8 ghz Athlon X2. Right now my current htpc sounds like a jet engine booting up and that really kills the mood.

Please (PLEASE!!) give me any recommendations....

Thank you,

Josh
 
^ Only if the content has HDCP protection as VGA is not digital. Anything else should not make a difference.
 
^ Only if the content has HDCP protection as VGA is not digital. Anything else should not make a difference.

Or just get a dvi dummy plug and clone the display.

Edit: Not sure if you can do this with on board, but it works with some vid. cards.
 
i have the hd3200 (780 chipset) it won't do vga at 1080p. I think it's a driver thing, don't think ati will support it. its stupid because (1280x1024 is extremely close to 1920x1080p, height wise anyway). It will do 720 resolutions but my (big) screen(tv) doesn't have full screen for it's vga port.

hdmi is cheap if you have connections or since it's digital get any crappy cable.

most 780g variants have the 1000 mb lan or is it usually gigabyte that puts those on the boards.

as for the optical no clue. no clue but if you have hdmi, sound goes through that and you can use your tv's outs for optical possibly.

you are going to want a decent cpu since not all video will have hardware acceleration support. anything in the 2 ghz range should do you good(I think that speed will just get you by unless you are running windows 7 with h264 hardware acceleration in windows media player.) you might want to look up reviews to see the minimum speed acceptable for cpu video decoding.
 
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I have read that while the Ion would be ok for playing the videos, if you ran Windows on the HTPC, you would feel like you were slogging through molasses with a P4 trying to open Media Center or any Encoding software. Additionally, not all DVD players support the Ion Processor yet. I am sure its just a matter of time until we see HTPCs being sold in the stores, and it wouldn't surprise me if they come out with Dual Processor Boards specifically for this application.

What would draw me is that they are quiet. I use my main computer as my HTPC and while in general it works fine for me, when its quiet at night I do wish it was a little quieter.
 
i have the hd3200 (780 chipset) it won't do vga at 1080p. I think it's a driver thing, don't think ati will support it. its stupid because (1280x1024 is extremely close to 1920x1080p, height wise anyway). It will do 720 resolutions but my (big) screen(tv) doesn't have full screen for it's vga port.

hdmi is cheap if you have connections or since it's digital get any crappy cable.

most 780g variants have the 1000 mb lan or is it usually gigabyte that puts those on the boards.

as for the optical no clue. no clue but if you have hdmi, sound goes through that and you can use your tv's outs for optical possibly.

you are going to want a decent cpu since not all video will have hardware acceleration support. anything in the 2 ghz range should do you good(I think that speed will just get you by unless you are running windows 7 with h264 hardware acceleration in windows media player.) you might want to look up reviews to see the minimum speed acceptable for cpu video decoding.

I can run 1080p perfectly fine on the onboard 780G chipset (my 2nd rig) with a 1.9GHz X2 3600+. Try using MPC-HC. I found it runs all movies much better than VLC.
 
I can run 1080p perfectly fine on the onboard 780G chipset (my 2nd rig) with a 1.9GHz X2 3600+. Try using MPC-HC. I found it runs all movies much better than VLC.

I mentioned vga as in through the vga cable. I'm sure it can handle 1080p video, just vga vs hdmi and ati's drivers is a bit of problem.

There's another thread about dxva that mentions ati drivers changing the way dxva works in catalyst 8.5 to 8.6 I'm not sure how the issue is at the moment since they are at 9.12

What's this I hear about profile L5.1?( encoding profiles), From what i understand, higher quality encoding profiles have to be driver supported by either nvidia or ati for higher profile encoded files to decode with dxva. As to what L5.1 includes is a mystery to me.

i'll link to another thread about dxva. there is a linked guide in the thread that provides more info (post 5)

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=629725
 
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